Karima Boudou

Karima Boudou is an art historian and a curator who lives and works in Brussels. Trained in art history (Montpellier, Rennes) and philosophy (Nanterre), she participated in the Curatorial Training Programme at De Appel, Amsterdam, in 2012–13. She has organized research projects, exhibitions, conferences, and published in Europe and Morocco.
Her work intersects theoretically and practically with postcolonial theory and the reactualization of archives and decentered histories of modern and contemporary art, considering strategically the politics of vision and visibility in art history. In 2017 she was a Research Fellow at MAC VAL Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, where she conducted research in the archive of Raoul-Jean Moulin. Her most recent work, reactivated from Morocco, is invested in new research lines on the life and oeuvre of African American Surrealist Ted Joans. This three-day public forum drew points and lines between private American and Dutch archives by reactualizing the legacies of artists and writers of African descent in the international Surrealist movement. Her most recent work focuses on the life and archive of politician and pan-Africanist Mehdi Ben Barka.
She proceeds by resonance and ricochet to question via multiple ramifications history and identity - while crossing political praxis and theoretical reflection. The first public presentation of this research took place in October 2020 at Formerly Known as Witte de With in Rotterdam. Its second public presentation is in the frame of The Color Curtain and the Promise of Bandung, a research project and series of roundtables reappraising Asian-African political imagination (organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Städelschule).

Boudou has lectured about the writers Jean Genet and Mohamed Leftah and the artists Glenn Ligon, Danh Vo, Dave McKenzie and David Hammons. She has written for exhibition catalogs (Mu.ZEE, Ostend, Belgium; Le Cube, Rabat, Morocco) and magazines (Mousse, Ibraaz, rekto:verso, Metropolis M). In April 2021, she is the recipient of a scholarship from the Collège des Bernardins in Paris. Karima Boudou's project, part of the research seminar "L'art au présent", focuses on the American painter Beauford Delaney (1901-1979) and consists of the production of a new text and conference that will introduce new scholarship on the work of this artist.