LUCIENNE BESTALL

Dates of residency:  November till December  2015  
Born: 1992
Nationality: South African
Lives and works: Capetown, South Africa
Education: 
2019 MA Creative Writing, University of Cape Town
2014 BA Fine Art, University of Cape Town
Selected shows:
2016 In Bed with Series/Friends 2:3, Wordart Gallery, Cape Town
2016 Bad Habitus, Mullers Gallery, Cape Town
2016 Falling Into One Another, Ruth Prowse School of Art, Cape Town
2015  Proposal, JRN, Cape Town

THE ARTIST
Lucienne Pallas Bestall works as an arts writer and editor, and regularly contributes reviews to ArtThrob, an online magazine. Distrustful of ‘artspeak’, Bestall favours clarity over jargon, lyricism over intellectualism, and feeling over theory. She is drawn to those places in art and life that stand at the limits of the expressible; those places where experience eludes simple description and turns instead to metaphor, gesture, and image. Bestall has written catalogue essays, press releases and features for local galleries, including WHATIFTHEWORLD, Smith Studio, Stevenson, and several independent artists. Her writing appears in print in THE JOURNEY: New Positions in African Photography, edited by Simon Njami and Sean O’Toole, and published by Kerber in 2020. 

THE RESIDENCY
Bestall's preoccupation with mundane, everyday objects and archival processes guide her project at BAR: a series of conversations with contemporary Lebanese artists, and the creation of an obscure object index. Sequentially exchanging an object with each artist she encounters, but with no full record of their individual conversations, the objects become mnemonic devices for these encounters; accidental markers in an entangled map of exchanges.