P R A X I S M A T T E R S
Investigating contemporary forms of artistic practice.
Anne Davidian is a curator and editor drawn to alternate imaginaries that inflect the dominant order — political, sensory, epistemic. She initiated and co-edited What Makes an Assembly? (Sternberg Press, 2022), a cross-disciplinary publication on forms and politics of gathering across histories and geographies, and curated Gharīb, the Armenian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Art Biennale. Her recent projects include How To Hold Your Breath, the 9th Asian Art Biennial at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; the Opening Live Programme for the inauguration of the Almaty Museum of Arts, and solo shows of Andrius Arutiunian, Stephanie Saadé, and Mirna Bamieh.
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Anne Davidian is a curator and editor drawn to alternate imaginaries that inflect the dominant order — political, sensory, epistemic. Her practice moves between exhibition-making, live arts, spatial commissions, editorial projects, and institutional experimentation.
Her recent curatorial projects include How To Hold Your Breath, the 9th Asian Art Biennial at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2024–2025), featuring works by Marwa Arsanios, Saodat Ismailova, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, and Yoshinori Niwa, among others; the Opening Live Programme for the inauguration of the Almaty Museum of Arts, the largest museum of contemporary art in Central Asia (2025), with Tomoko Sauvage, Nefeli Papadimilou, Basma Al-Sharif, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Jace Clayton / DJ Rupture, and Kokonja, among others; the solo shows of Stéphanie Saadé at the Sursock Museum, Beirut (2025–2026) and Mirna Bamieh at Nika Project Space, Paris (2026).
Davidian's research is driven by a core question: what other, non-oppressive ways of organising life together are possible — and what resists being organised at all, the ungovernable? An inquiry into the forms and politics of gathering, across histories and geographies, led her to initiate What Makes an Assembly?, (Sternberg Press, 2022), co-edited with political scientist Laurent Jeanpierre, a crossdisciplinary anthology of commissioned texts and architectural proposals by Andreas Angelidakis, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, Frédérique Aït-Touati, Sandra Benites, Patrick Boucheron, Andrés Jaque, Catherine Malabou, and Markus Miessen, among others, accompanied by an assembly space built for Centre Pompidou, Paris by raumlabor.
Sound runs through her practice as a mode of listening against prevailing rhythms, speeds, and regimes of attention. She proposed the first major programme dedicated to Éliane Radigue at the Centre Pompidou (2021, with IRCAM), and curated Gharīb, the Armenian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Art Biennale, centred on Andrius Arutiunian's practice of sonic dissent. Together, they conceived The Midnight Practice, a format of collective, hypnotic performance inspired by a Sufi legend about musicians who play a certain kind of music only at night, the first edition of which welcomed a performance by experimental composer and musician Lucrecia Dalt. The collaboration with Arutiunian continued through numerous projects and commissions, including A Gift That Keeps on Giving (2025), his first institutional solo show in the Netherlands and a new piece mixing possessed instruments, autotune, and petroleum extraction, with a lecture performance by writer Anna Della Subin.
She served as Artistic Director for several editions of the Evens Prize for visual and performing arts, convening nominators and juries from leading European cultural institutions, with laureates including Femke Herregraven, Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Andrea Büttner, Eszter Salamon, and Sven Augustijnen. The 2023 edition, focused on critical imaginaries of AI and algorithmic politics, opened a new area of work: advising cultural institutions on navigating the AI turn, and examining what remains uncategorisable, inoperative within it.
Institutional invention has been a constant axis in her practice. She contributed to the launch of experimental art spaces: Chalet Society in Paris (2012–2015), co-directed with its founder Marc-Olivier Wahler and designed to encourage new reflection on the contemporary art institution; and Kassandras in Athens (2016–2017), a prototyping ground for artists, designers, and social practitioners, co-founded with Diplomates. She directed the Paris branch of the Evens Foundation (2010–2023), where she developed a cross-sectoral working method, bringing together practitioners from the arts, social sciences, civil society, and critical education around shared social questions. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of Tavros, an independent non-profit art space in Athens.
As a commissioning editor, she initiated En Presence des Images (2021), a literary series that invited eleven writers to respond to images of collective memory. Developed in collaboration with LE BAL and published in the French daily Libération, the project featured contributions from Arno Bertina, Kaoutar Harchi, Oliver Rohe, Maylis de Kerangal, Mathieu Larnaudie, Olivia Rosenthal, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and others, reaching 110,000 readers in its first year. She directed the publication of Jim Shaw: The Hidden World (Koenig Books, 2014), a compendium of American didactic and religious propaganda, including a commissioned text by Tristan Garcia and an interview with the artist, published on the occasion of the exhibition at Chalet Society.
An earlier line of research into social conflictuality and the mapping of controversies led her to devise numerous discursive programmes, including the Conflict Matters conference in partnership with the University of Cambridge, and debate series at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the British Academy, London. She has also spoken at forums convened by the EU, OECD, Sciences Po Paris, and the Council for European Studies.
Born in Armenia, she studied comparative literature, and holds a postgraduate degree in aesthetics and art theory from the Sorbonne. She lives and works in Paris. @annedavidian