Aïcha Mehrez

Aïcha Mehrez is a curator, writer and researcher based in Folkestone. She graduated from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2011 and from 2016 – 2021, was Assistant Curator of Contemporary British Art at Tate. The most recent exhibition she curated was Sixty Years: The Unfinished Conversation which explored diasporic identity through works from the Tate collection from the past 60 years. Since 2021, Aïcha has been undertaking an AHRC funded PhD with Tate and the University of Leicester titled ‘How might curatorial methodologies centred in care and prevention of harm, help museums to ethically surface and address their colonial and imperial connections?’. Aïcha’s research considers how the work of writers and thinkers such as Stuart Hall, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter and Édouard Glissant might be applied to a radical reimagining of the ways in which we curate. As part of her fieldwork, she has been holding a series of conversations with artists, curators and cultural workers exploring the ways in which we might be able to think about ecologies of knowledges as opposed to the accumulation of cultural property as well as how we might embed reflective practices and embrace pedagogies of listening rather than telling. Aïcha is also a lecturer on the MA Curating Apprenticeship at University of Teesside/MIMA, an editor for the University of Leicester’s Museological Review and a freelance curator, writer and researcher. Her most recent published texts have been on Lewis Hammond for his exhibition This Glass House at Kunstpalais, Erlangen and Rene Matić for their exhibition Idols Lovers Mothers Friends at Arcadia Missa, London.