Marie Hélène Pereira

Portrait of Marie Helene Pereira. Photo by Kerry Etola Viderot.

Marie Hélène Pereira, Curatorial Advisor, RAW Material Company, Senior Curator (Performative Practices), Haus der Kulturen der Welt

Marie Hélène Pereira (Dakar, 1986) is a curator and cultural practitioner from Dakar, Senegal. She is Senior Curator for Performative Practices at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, Germany. Pereira has been a member of RAW Material Company since its inception in 2011 and was previously its Director of Programmes (2019–2022). She has organized exhibitions and related discursive programmes, including: RAW’s participation in We Face Forward: Art from West Africa Today at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; the Independent Curators International (ICI) Curatorial Hub at TEMP, New York; the 9th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai (2013). She co-curated Scattered Seeds in Cali, Colombia (2015–2017), and curated Battling to Normalize Freedom at Clark House Initiative in Mumbai, India (2017). Pereira was co-curator of a section of the 13th edition of Dak’Art, the Dakar Biennale of Contemporary African Art (2018), part of the artistic team of Still Present!, the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2022), was the recipient of an ICI Curatorial Research Fellowship (2021): the Marian Goodman Gallery initiative in honour of the late Okwui Enwezor, conceived by artist Steve McQueen.

Pereira is profoundly interested in the politics of identity as well as histories of migration.