Elvan Zabunyan

Elvan Zabunyan is a contemporary art historian, art critic and professor at Rennes University, where she was the director of the Master’s Curatorial Program from 2002 to 2019. She works across issues of race, postcolonialism and feminism, as well as on the political and cultural history of the United States in relationship to artistic activism since the 1960s. She published a pioneering work on African-American visual arts, Black is a Color: A History of Contemporary African American Art (Dis Voir, 2005) and the first monograph dedicated to the Korean-American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Berkeley, 1968 (Presses du réel, 2013, to be released in English end 2020). She co-edited publications, wrote numerous articles for collections and anthologies, exhibit catalogues and periodicals, including Adrian Piper (MoMA, 2018), Ellen Gallagher (WIELS, 2019), LaToya Ruby Frazier (MUDAM, 2019), Kehinde Wiley (Templon, 2019), “The Muted Sound of Speaking Silence” (Kunsttexte.de, 2020), and “Lorna Simpson: Hearing Images” (InSITE, 2020). She recently co-edited the special issue “Pratiquer l’histoire par les arts contemporains/Experimenting History with Contemporary Arts” for the journal Esclavages et Post-esclavages/Slaveries and Post-Slaveries (CIRESC/CNRS) (May 2020). She is a regular contributor to the magazine Critique d’art and the online daily AOC media.