Victorine Grataloup

Victorine Grataloup (b. 1988, France) has been the director of the Triangle-Astérides art center in Marseille since 2022 and works as a curator. She is co-president of the DCA network and a member of the Qalqalah editorial collective. She grew up in Drancy, studied art theory at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris), Humboldt University (Berlin), and the University of Paris I, where she later taught art economics. Previously she worked at the Palais de Tokyo, KADIST, Bétonsalon, and the Cneai. Currently pursuing a Ph.D. with research on whiteness and institutions, her work is transdisciplinary, situated at the intersection of artistic and social issues and across languages.

Her research draws on eight years of reflection on endocoloniality, power relations and concernment within the Qalqalah collective. It is grounded in two premises: the injunction addressed by writer Léonora Miano to white people to “self-examine”, to critically interrogate whiteness; and the expression “white institution” which offers an evocative way of describing what literary scholar Sarah Burnautzki calls the racialisation of institutions, in which “practices and discourses of racialisation have become sedimented”. What impact can critical approaches to whiteness have within such institutions? What implications might they have for the forthcoming evolution of the institutions?