Member of the C-E-A, French association of curators, Élodie Bernard, born in 1989, lives and works in Orléans. Graduated from the University of Picardy with a Master in plastic arts and a bachelor diploma in modern plastic arts, she has complemented her university career with a course in New medias at the Higher School of Fine Arts in Tartu, Estonia. Besides being a teacher of plastic arts, she runs a dense activity as a curator and as an art critic.

Élodie Bernard writes on a regular basis for the magazines Bon Temps, 10point15, the online media PIAO and obviously on her blog, Regard/b, which is dedicated to modern creation and that she created in 2015. As an independent, she has curated collective exhibits in various places like ChezKit in Pantin, La Chapelle, the contemporary art space in Pithiviers, the exhibit spaces La Teinturerie or Camille Claudel in Amiens, etc. In 2017, she opened new facilities: Living Cube, an art exhibit program in her apartment. In 2018, she collaborated with La Peau de l’Ours, an online community of collectors for whom she takes the artistic direction for one year and proposes curatorial selections and exhibits.

Triple-hatted as a columnist, teacher of arts and curator, Élodie Bernard’s goal is to support and value the emerging contemporary art creation, and more particularly the one of her generation. She is especially interested in the regional artistic activities, far from the big exhibition centres, in the same way she privileges strong long-term relationships with the artists. Seeing her job through the lens of human interaction, she makes a point of following the evolution of progress and work. Mobile and in permanent contact with the artists, through meetings in the workshops or at cafés, she has developed these curator desires.

Choosing to be happy and optimistic, party is in the heart of her practice. From this thematic point that gives a glimpse and determines the relation with the world of a generation, Élodie Bernard mainly queries the traces and consequences of these short-lived and intense moments, the manners to gather and how joining becomes a reality, the sharing of a multitude of points of views, thoughts and feelings that will diverge or converge for a moment, the time of an eve- ning. Selected and then organized together, taking shape in different exhibit spaces, the pieces show current scenes of parties and, as a consequence, help us to understand better how these pretextless moments connect individuals to each others, to time and to space.

Text by Laetitia Toulout