Dominique Pineau (@dominiquepineau) is a curator based in Paris who does not believe in school of thoughts in art and wants to believe in contemporary art outside of the white cube -but not only-. He is also a beekeeper because he believes in the future — https://www.miel-lamartiniere.com-

« I must have been 4 or 5 years old, when after returning from a weekend at cousin Simone's, my father decided on the way to make a stopover. […] »

Images courtesy of Dominique Pineau - with a special thank you to Raphael de Villers for the postcards-.

Hakka, American, and French-Polynesian artist Alexander Lee's multi-disciplinary process based practice reflects on the world through the layered lens of a pluri-cultural-nomadic-ethnic subject, taking Tahiti as a site for anthropic and futures narratives. The artist lives and works in Tahiti and New York. — alexanderleestudio.com

« When I was 9 years old, my Dad bought me a little cheap snapshot camera and took me to Seaworld. […] »

Kainoa Lee (5 yo) and Audrey Lee (10 yo) re-enact Alexander Lee’s First Sight in 2020.
Images courtesy the Artist

Arko Datto is an artist, curator and educator based in Kolkata, India. – @shunyoraja @dinosofhindostan @panopticams @captivecams

« I grew up looking at and spending time around two curio cabinets, one in each of my grandparents’ homes.. […] »

Paternal grandparents cabinet & Maternal grandparents cabinet. Courtesy of the artist.

Artist Dawn Cerny works across the disciplines including drawing, photography, publication and time-based media. She received her MFA in Sculpture at the Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College. She lives and works in Seattle. – dawncerny.com

« I have two aesthetic memories but I cannot remember which came first as my body was in the crib for both observations. The yellow gingham wallpaper and bars of my crib--- and they both did things to elicit the sensation of possibility when I was supposed to be resting. […] »

Courtesy of the artist.

« This engraving was hanging in my grandparents’ house. It was kept in a square passageway that was arranged like a sitting room -carpets, armchairs, desk and lamps- giving way to my grandparents’ bedroom and where the phone was. This was my favorite room to play in: a bit secluded from the rooms where the action took place -the dining room, living room and of course the kitchen- though close enough to feel the warmth of the people around and not feel too isolated. »

Untitled, Jean Tyboud - date unknown.

Fabienne Audéoud lives and works in Paris after a dozen years in London and Maastricht. Her solo and collaborative work involves painting, video and music. — fabienneaudeoud.com

« It was in a 1983 issue of the French Vogue magazine {Thanks ever so much}, but I can’t say for sure now... It’s the image that stayed with me though. I was 15.  Art in my family was how well you could reproduce snowy landscapes with farms... Contemporary art did not exist. My favorite music was Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson. I had the feeling I understood well what it did to me. »

Cindy Sherman. Untitled #122. 1983. Chromogenic color print. 35 1/4 X 21 1/4 inches. © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.

Based in Calcutta, Soham Gupta’s work constantly moves between the realm of documentary photography, art, and the written word. He responds to themes of loneliness and isolation, of abuse and pain, of scarred pasts and uncertain futures, sexual tensions and existential dilemmas. — soham-gupta.com

« I was a teenager when I was exposed to Sir Don McCullin’s oeuvre – there was an image of a dead soldier in Vietnam that always haunted me – photos of his loved ones and other possessions (including bullets), all scattered around him, as he lay there lifeless […] »

Don McCullin, A Young Dead North Vietnamese Soldier with His Possessions. 1968, printed 2013. Photograph. 28 x 42 cm. Courtesy of Tate / National galleries of Scotland.

Artist Julien Gardair was born in France in 1976. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
— juliengardair.com

« Reaching London from the south of France in the early 1990's was an adventure. We were a loud group of freshmen on a art school field trip. It was our first time. In a small  room of the National Gallery, a mid-size painting faces us. An angel hides behind a tree. It is the only figure to acknowledge our presence, and looks us right in the eye. In the center, stands a pensive man, hands joined over heart. »

Piero della Francesca. The Baptism of Christ. c. 1448-50. Tempera on panel. Courtesy of the National Gallery, London.

Artist Alina Bliumis was born in Minsk, Belarus. She lives and works in New York, NY.
— alinabliumis.com

« It was 1988, I was 16, a 10th grader in a boarding Art School named after Ahremchik in Minsk, capital of The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Our Art School was considered one of the best, with countless hours of drawing, painting and art history classes. At this time in our school, like in the rest of in the USSR, modern art was unwelcome and considered 'decadent bourgeois formalism’ (it was labeled this way by Stalin in 1930). »

Francis Bacon. Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge). 1961. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Collection Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague.

Negarra A. Kudumu is an independent scholar. Her intellectual interests reside at the intersections of contemporary art, curation and critical theory with a specific interest in the contemporary visual culture of the African continent, Iran, South Asia, and their respective diasporas.
— negarraakudumu.com

« Thanks to my mother, art has always been a part of my life. As a child, we regularly visited the Art Institute of Chicago. We also attended local festivals on Chicago's south side where artists unknown to the "art world" exhibited and sold their work. »

Pierre Soulages. Peinture 102 x 165 cm, 17 juillet 2013. 2013. Courtesy Dominique Lévy and Galerie Perrotin.

Artist Mary Temple was born in Arizona.She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. — marytemple.com

« Many years ago a friend and I entered a room in an art museum. As we sat on a bench, the door closed behind us. The bench abutted a wall--the other walls had benches too, so we would have been facing people, if we hadn't been alone. I noticed that the sound in the small room was strange, somehow larger and more expansive than one would expect in such a close space. The strangest thing, though, was the color of the ceiling. […] »

James Turrell. Meeting. 1986. Courtesy of Moma/PS1, New York.

Irena Popiashvili is Dean of Visual Arts & Design School of the Free University and runs an art space –Popiashvili Gvaberidze Window Project– in Tbilisi, Georgia. 

« I think my aesthetic experience, the first one I remember, started in school - in Soviet history textbook at the end of the USSR History book were bad reproductions of paintings. I used to look at those images, really bad reproductions of Russian 19th century painting, Repin's Ivan the Terribly killing his son etc. but I was so bored in that class that I really studied every detail of those paintings. […] »

Ilya Repin. Ivan The Terrible And His Son Ivan On November 16. 1581. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Artist Guillaume Leingre was born in 1971. He lives and works in Paris. — leingre.free.fr

« This is a painting by Paul Sérusier, a French painter from the 19th century, entitled Golden Cylinder (Cylindre d’Or). I saw it for the first time in 1986 or 1987 in Brittany, France, at the municipal museum where the painting is kept. I remember an empty museum with hardwood floors and seemingly inanimate guards. […] »

Paul Sérusier. Cylindre d'or, 1910. Huile sur toile. Courtesy of Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes.

Artist Mario D'souza was born in Bangalore in 1973. He lives and works between Paris and Menetou Salon. — mariodsouza.com 

« I was 6 years and playing on the street with some friends. I was a small boy and people did like me because I was a bit fat and my mom dressed me quite well! During this play time, I discovered a garden full of trees, fruits and plants filled with colored flowers. It was like walking into a private part of a well organized villa. It was in bangalore, a town also called the garden city of india. […] »

Mario D'Souza. Comfort from all sides. 2013. Courtesy of the artist.