Rizvana Bradley

Biography
Rizvana Bradley (b. 1982) is a writer, scholar, and art critic based in Berkeley. She is Associate Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with the History of Art, Critical Theory, and the Center for Race and Gender. She is the author of Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), shortlisted for the 2024 MLA Prize for a First Book and named one of FRIEZE’s Top Books of 2023. Her art criticism has appeared in Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, and The Yale Review, among others. Bradley has presented her research at institutions including Tate Britain, Jeu de Paume in Paris, Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac in Paris.

Residency project
At La Becque, Rizvana Bradley will develop Infinity of Traces, a research project examining how contemporary artistic practices challenge the securitized border regime commonly described as “Fortress Europe” by unearthing submerged histories of racial and colonial entanglement. Foregrounding what Bradley terms the “counter-cartographic impulse” in contemporary art, the project draws on scholar Lisa Lowe’s concept of the “intimacies of four continents” to reconsider migration beyond abstract geopolitical flows and the perspective of the state. Building on research undertaken during a fellowship at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Bradley will explore how these artistic practices might contribute to remapping the “global” in global art history.