Curator Tarini Malik on the Venice Biennale, Fighting Imposter Syndrome and Navigating the Art World as a Woman of Colour

Words: Gina Tonic

Make it stand out

The art world is notoriously exclusive in a manner that seeks to celebrate its own elusivity. I’m not talking about the artists themselves here, but those that consume the art. Attending an exhibition has a cast of characters that have been parodied thousands of times.

The snobs, the obscenely wealthy, the people who discuss the work loudly in long words without reaching any kind of tangible point. It’s intimidating accessing these spaces as someone without the vocabulary or historical knowledge of art, primarily due to the company that the art world keeps.

Yet the gilded barriers that put many off even attending a new exhibition, a show opening or an art biennale drop once you are face to face with the actual art itself. Speaking to Tarini Malik, the British Pavillion’s curator for the Listening All Night To The Rain installation by John Akomfrah at this year’s Venice Biennale, our conversation centred on the disparities between enjoying art and wanting to work with art. Malik’s views on making the spaces she works in not only accessible, but representative of all were inspirational to anyone who has ever felt one drop of imposter syndrome when faced with a crowd at a gallery. Below, we explore her enthusiasm for Akomfrah’s new commission, her own path as a curator and the importance of enjoying your work.

Gina Tonic: Hi Tarini. It must be so exciting to see the way that the space has transformed for your show here in Venice!

Tarini Malik: I like that you said a ‘transformation’ of the space because it is a transformation. John and I have tried to be very unapologetic in looking at the complexities around this building, and what it represents. We worked with an amazing female-led architecture firm called vPPR, particularly an architect called Jessica Reynolds, who is just one of the most wonderful, wonderful architects in the world. She's amazing. It was so interesting to really think about this space and how we challenge it, you know, this sort of neoclassical 19th century facade. What does it mean to be here in the Giardini? This really prominent position?

I'm really looking forward to seeing how people resonate with the work. But it's also been amazing being part of a larger conversation. What's been so nice is that we're in this section of the Giardini, where you've got countries with really complicated colonial histories. So France, the UK, Germany, and Canada. The privilege and the elitism certainly has not been lost on us and certainly not on me and John, who are both diasporic people. 

But there is the most incredible community of female curators doing national pavilions here too. Many of us were not born in countries that were representing any artists dealing with the complexities around identity politics, histories of colonialism, histories of misogyny, racism and environmental destruction. Everyone’s really been there for each other. It's been really nice. We've been like a kind of community all the time. Yeah, we have a WhatsApp group, which is called United Nations. I started it with all the women curators. No boys allowed.

I wondered how you felt about when you first were approached with the title of this Biennale exhibition – “Foreigners Everywhere” – and how you feel about it now after the visioning process?

The idea of “foreigners everywhere” draws on, as you say, the utter discomfort of that wording of that phraseology. Especially in the context of this Biennale, of course, which is still elitist. It is for the few and not for the many. And I hope that you know with Listening All Night To The Rain, we're trying to find lots of different ways to expand the reach of it. But you are looking at a moment in which, you know, there are some efforts to look at the complexity of geopolitics, look at voices that have been marginalised, that have been excluded, but it's not fully there.

There are so many complexities of nationhood and home and belonging. What does it mean to be from somewhere? And what does it mean to be outside of somewhere? That is something that is so attuned with John's practice, he has been thinking about that for 40 years and hasn't stopped. No matter what the trends are in the art market, what curators are thinking about, he has remained so true to that idea. What does it mean to be Ghanaian British, what does it mean to be a survivor of police brutality in America or to be indigenous to Canada, and to see your natural environment and your culture be erased and destroyed? It is very fitting that it's within this context. 

I didn't have a very linear trajectory into the arts, I had a mother, who really instilled a love of literature and a love of history. But when I went around museums as a young person, as a child, I didn't understand why they weren't speaking to me and why they didn't want to speak to me. I just felt like I was only intended to ever be like a very passive viewer in my own life, in my own experience. 

But then you come across the work of people like John, and it makes you feel seen and heard in really unexpected ways, in ways which are not available in the mainstream necessarily all the time. I think that commitment to – I'm going to feel really emotional – but that commitment to saying, like, “We're here” is just the most important thing in the whole world. And so, yeah, that's what I want to do. And I know I have so much more to learn. And I have so much more to learn from different people with different experiences to mine, and I know how much privilege I also embody. And I just feel so grateful to work with artists who just teach you loads.

What kind of advice would you give to other young women in the art space, specifically women of colour? 

I tell you what, I would give the advice that I wish I heard. When I started out, I think I have that millennial angst a bit too much, which is that I apologise for being where I am a lot. I think the art world that I started in nearly two decades ago was one which really made you feel like you were so incredibly lucky, and the exception to the rule, to have a seat at any table. You took whatever you got and you just did it and laboured and laboured - and that still exists, it is a complicated industry - but the advice that I would give is just to be unapologetic.

I hate the way I always said sorry. I still say sorry, way too much. The advice I would give to young women is to, without sounding like a fortune cookie, really be yourself, and not apologise and to not always take the path that seems like the most obvious either. 

I didn't have the most obvious path into the arts, I've worked for a private gallery, I've worked for a collection, I've worked for, you know, an artist for five years. I learned more about curating from the artists than I have in the museum industry as an example. I'm so grateful for it because I feel like I've had a really a lot of insight into how artists work. So my advice would be take all opportunities, your best network is not necessarily the richest and the most powerful person in the room. It's your friends, it's your peers and it will be those people that will listen to you cry about cables at two o'clock in the morning. It will be the people that you start out with, like the people that I started out with and who are now curating in Venice. Those are the people that you champion.

Listening All Night To The Rain by John Akomfrah, a British Council Commission for the British Pavilion at the Biennale Arte Venice, runs from 20 April to 24 November 2024.