Clare Patrick will present on her recent residency as the Marie-Solanges Apollon laureate at AWARE, Paris, and her subsequent archival explorations as a British Art Network Bursary Awardee 2025-26: Tate and Paul Mellon Centre.

Her project interrogates the underacknowledged presence of Adrienne Fidelin as a key contributor and collaborator who navigated diasporic communities traversing, what Paul Gilroy has termed the ‘Black Atlantic’, and the European avant-garde in interwar Paris. By revisiting Fidelin’s relationships with contemporaries such as Lee Miller, Eileen Agar, Man Ray, and Roland Penrose, this research recontextualises Fidelin within a lineage of performers, artists, and thinkers active in Paris and the UK during the 1930s.

With a methodology of exploratory dialogue, critical archival work, and collaborative thinking, her inquiry engages the interplay of movement, influence, alliance, and necessary or impelled opacity as critical frameworks. This approach offers methodologies for understanding transitory encounters in Paris and globally, exploring how these transnational dynamics shaped cultural space and production.

Clare Patrick is an independent curator, writer, and educator focusing on installation art and transdisciplinary spatial practice. Born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, she is guided by collaborative spatial intervention as critical praxis. Her research has explored art historiography, the cultural work of transnational memory, and reparative responsibility within institutions and collections. Her practice has unfolded in exhibitions and workshops across South Africa, the UK, France, Ireland, the US, and Morocco and has been featured in publications including ArtForum, Vogue, The New York Times, Contemporary & AWARE, and the British Journal of Photography. She currently lives and works between Paris, London, and Cape Town.