AICA-UK Annual Lecture 2025: Élisabeth Lebovici, ‘I Didn’t See Anything. Miscomprehension as Working Method

AICA-UK’s Annual Lecture will be presented this year by French art critic and historian Élisabeth Lebovici. Reflecting on her current practice, Lebovici will talk about how her engagement with art criticism has been shattered by what she calls ‘total social facts’, notably the AIDS epidemic and the #MeToo movement. As she will discuss, these have led her to use miscomprehension as a critical concept, a shift in her approach reflected in her acclaimed 2017 book Ce que le sida m’a fait / What AIDS Has Done to Me and the related exhibition Exposé-es (2023), as well as in her move away from teaching to being taught by art practitioners. In her view, forcing oneself to re-examine received ideas and one’s own assumptions – or ‘not seeing anything’, to quote art historian Daniel Arasse – can be a powerful principle and guide for the art critic.

AICA-UK aims to foster critical writing and thinking about art and to support a new generation of critics. With over three hundred members, it invites prominent writers from around the world to talk about their practice and the issues they face in an annual lecture, which this year is organised in partnership with the Institute of Contemporary Arts and in collaboration with the Institut français du Royaume-Uni.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.

Tickets for this event need to be purchased through the ICA website. Full price tickets cost £13 while AICA-UK members can book their tickets for the reduced price of £7 (proof of membership will be needed when picking up the tickets).

Biography:

Élisabeth Lebovici is an art worker and critic living in Paris. A culture editor at Libération from 1991 to 2006, she was involved in ACT UP-Paris and was a founding member of the LIG/Lesbiennes d’intérêt general fund, which supports lesbian-led public interest initiatives. From 2006 to 2024 she co-curated (with Patricia Falguières and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez) a seminar called Something You Should Know: Artists and Producers at the École des Haute Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Since the 1990s she has contributed to numerous books, monographs, workshops and conferences on contemporary art, gender and queer studies. Lebovici is the author, with Catherine Gonnard, of a history of women artists in France between 1880 and the 2000s, Femmes/artistes, Artistes/femmes, Paris de 1880 à nos jours (2007). Her book Ce que le sida m’a fait: Art et Activisme à la fin du 20è siècle / What AIDS Has Done to Me: Art and Activism at the End of the 20^th Century was awarded the Prix Pierre Daix in 2017 and led to the exhibition Exposé-es at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2023.

A recording of Lebovici’s talk can be found here.

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