Carole Halimi

Carole Halimi
Period: 2013-2014
Profession: Art historian Carole Halimi has been
maître de conférences in Contemporary History at the University of Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée since 2012. She previously exercised the function of associate professor in the same University and sustained her PhD thesis in history of art under the supervision of Jean-Claude Lebensztejn at the University of Paris I in 2011. The thesis, entitled
Le tableau vivant de Diderot à Artaud, et son esthétique dans les arts visuels contemporains (XX e -XXI e siècles) (The Living portrait from Diderot to Artaud, and its aesthetics in contemporary visual arts – XX th -XXI st centuries) which is presently being published, has recently received the ex-aequo Award of the d’Orsay Museum. While reconstituting the history of the tableau vivant on the frontier between theatre and visual arts, the object of her research was to study the living aesthetics of contemporary works by reformulating the idiom. She is particularly interested in the intermedial and performative dimension of images, as well as in their performance. Her project for Villa Medici consists of an in-depth analysis of the research she had undertaken for her thesis and concentrates more specifically on the topic of performance, while aspiring also to field research, based on the discourse of artists. The work entails an analysis of the problems related to performance that surface through the use of tableaux vivants and the way they can disrupt aesthetics and ideology. Central to the study, which also takes other examples into consideration, will be the performances of Italian artist Luigi Ontani, entitled precisely
Tableaux Vivants.