Join us for a talk with LA-based curator and writer Suzy Halajian. All are welcome!
Through her work organizing JOAN, an artist-centred nonprofit space in Los Angeles, Suzy Halajian considers curating as an interdisciplinary form of research that unfolds through time, relation and sustained attention.
Bringing exhibitions into dialogue with film, performance, publishing and discursive programs, she explores what can emerge when projects are allowed to echo, take new forms and accumulate across an extended line of inquiry.
Drawing on long-term collaborations, including her work with Saodat Ismailova from Other Time and the Davra Research Collective at JOAN in 2024 to Other Light, currently on view at Western Front, she asks how exhibitions might be guided by inquiry, access, and relational forms of knowledge rather than spectacle and institutional scale.
The talk will also turn to A Grammar Built with Rocks, an independently organized, collaborative curatorial and publishing project that traces racialized and gendered relationships between bodies and land, exploring how artistic research can respond to dispossession and socioecological crisis while imagining alternative ways of being together in place.
Moving across these projects, Suzy Halajian reflects on what it means to build responsive, artist-centred structures that sustain experimentation and critical exchange, as well as the possibilities and constraints of doing so.
The talk will take place in Reliance Theatre. Enter through the main entrance at 555 Great Northern Way and walk straight down the first flight of stairs to the ground floor. Elevator access is available to the right of the stairs.
About Suzy Halajian
Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles, where she serves as Executive Director and Curator at JOAN. Her practice is grounded in long-term collaborations with artists and critically engages the intersections of art, politics and social histories.
Her research considers strategies of image-making through the lenses of colonial histories and contemporary surveillance states. Suzy Halajian has curated exhibitions and public programs at LACE, ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the Hammer Museum and Human Resources Los Angeles, as well as Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (New York), Oregon Contemporary (Portland), Kunstverein (Amsterdam), UKS (Oslo), Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna) and the Sursock Museum (Beirut).
She serves on the Programming Committee at Human Resources and is coeditor of Georgia, an online journal co-founded with Anthony Carfello and Shoghig Halajian. Her writing has appeared in ArteEast, BOMB, X-TRA, Ibraaz and other publications.
She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and is currently a PhD candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
This event is presented by the Audain Faculty of Art in partnership with the Western Front and Fillip, with support from the Audain Foundation.