Residency announcement: Julie Portier
AICA-UK and AICA France Writer Residency
October 2025
Talk by Julie Portier, Saturday 4 October 2025 2.30pm
Flat Time House is pleased to announce Julie Portier will be in residence as part of international exchange for art critics who are members of AICA, the International Association of Art Critics. Julie Portier was selected following an open call for writers from AICA France, a resident from the UK branch of AICA will be based at Maison d’Art Bernard Anthonioz (MABA), Nogent-sur-Marne in the eastern suburbs of Paris.
Julie Portier (b. 1982, France) is an art critic, curator and teacher based in Lyon, where she has been running La Salle de Bains since 2016. Over the years she has cooked up more than seventy exhibitions, books and performances, turning the space into a playground for rethinking what an exhibition can be, how artists and audiences meet, and how a small independent venue can still claim freedom of expression in a cultural field under pressure. She has taught contemporary art history and theory at ESAAA (Annecy) and co-founded the Monstre MFA, a program designed to face the realities of today’s art world head-on—its economies, its ethics, and its possible alternatives.
On Saturday 4 October Julie Portier will be giving a presentation on her work with La Salle de Bains.
Julie has published hundreds of texts on artists of her generation, blending analysis with a taste for the literary and the humorous. Her interests drift toward practices that engage critically with the conditions of capitalism, and lately she has been looking at the power of the opaque, the understated, the not-so-explicit and the idea of “freedom” in arts, as this notion has been hijacked by conservative liberal rhetoric. She also contributes as an expert in the field of art and cultural policies, including as a member of the advisory board of the Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain in Geneva.
At Flat Time House she plans to press pause, flatten the clock, and dedicate her time to wandering the city, meeting artists, tuning into the local scene, and thinking through the structures that shape independent art spaces.