VAVCD Seminar Series; Margarita Osepyan (Curator & Researcher)

This session approaches images as mediating structures that shape attention, projection, distance, and embodied experience. Moving between documentary, virtual, and imagined dimensions, we will explore how images can function as tools for research. We will also do a practical hands-on exercise using images to transform and reframe social, affective, and conceptual layers.

About the speaker:

Margarita Osepyan is a curator and researcher working between London and Istanbul. Her practice uses lived experience as a critical method, translating personal and cultural histories into a framework for analysing affect, human agency, and meaning production. She is particularly interested in language as a structuring force in the production of reality, as well as in psychohistorical processes, embodiment, media, and symbolic systems.

She studied English Philology for her first degree and holds an MA in Intermedia and Performance Art from the University of Hull. Over the past fifteen years, she has developed a cross-disciplinary practice spanning independent and guerrilla art spaces as well as institutions such as SESC São Paulo, Vienna Festwochen, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and Solyanka State Gallery, where she served as Chief Curator from 2016 to 2019.

She co-founded the London-based curatorial bureau GLAZ (2009–2014), through which she curated and produced moving-image and performance-led projects, including Behind the Wall at the Barbican Centre, Severe Illnesses at Tate Modern, and Digital Stages Festival in East London.

Margarita has lectured on curatorial practice at various institutions, served for several years on the jury of EUNIC's programme for young curators, and co-authored the podcast Upside Down on Storytel, dedicated to the theory and practice of knowledge.