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Curated by Louise Déry and Marie-Hélène Leblanc, the new group show at Galerie de l’UQAM, Faux plis par hypothèses, proposes to look at the biases of various models of knowledge and “how a university gallery engages in crucial issues that often concern several research sectors: questions of languages and identities, terrestrials and territories, structures and institutions.”
Spread over five galleries across the province (Galerie UQO, Galerie de l’UQAM, Galerie l’Œuvre de l’Autre, Jardins de Métis, and Galerie d’art Foreman), the exhibitions collectively contain the works of more than a dozen artists: Eruoma Awashish, Geneviève Chevalier, Club de prospection figurée, Anna Binta Diallo, Caroline Fillion, Maryse Goudreau, Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, Sophie Jodoin, Emmanuelle Léonard, Mélanie Myers, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Anahita Norouzi, and Leila Zelli.
I only attended the installment at UQAM so my comments will be limited to that and the catalogue. The selected works at UQAM are a mix of new and relatively recent. As with almost any group show, the quality varies greatly. In some ways, the catalogue (which is presented as an “educational booklet”) seems more important than the exhibitions themselves. Set in what amounts to a set of parodies of scientific discourse, it operates through biographies (as institutional signatures of “expertise”) and through “questionnaires” which are effectively a tool for regurgitating artist statements and slotting the works in under various keywords.
Placing the stamp of “scientific rigour” on the proceedings, the catalogue contains a preface by Rémi Quirion, the Chief Scientist of the province. Opening with the usual statements about flux, change, and perspectives, he uses the example of the agricultural fair as an instance of innovative research. [As a sidenote, I wonder how aware Quirion is of the extent to which “the arts” in Canada were a part of agriculture a century ago before they were siloed into something else. I also wonder why “ecological” artists do not bring this up more.] In this context, and leaving aside the extent to which he is reiterating things the curators told him (they use almost identical phrasing for many things), the university gallery appears to the Chief Scientist of the state as something that is:
Renowned for its rigour and innovative methods, the university gallery is a testing ground, a living laboratory for thought embodied in the work and its discourse. The university gallery is a place where the experience of criticism and debate is invited, a place where social issues linked to history, languages, images, identities and discrimination, among others, are raised, exposed and debated. By supporting bold and promising initiatives at the crossroads of the arts and sciences, the university gallery provides access to, visibility for and communication of the work of researchers from a variety of disciplines, with the common goal of encountering contemporary art.
The more important part of the text, however, is the one that follows, and which merits some parsing.
Today, democracy, technology, culture, art and science are in the process of questioning identities, genders, religions, ideologies and the writing of their history. This questioning is destabilizing the relationship between knowledge and the university's role in the development of disciplines, the transmission of knowledge and its influence on research communities and the general public. To examine the issues raised by this transformation, a change of framework comes at just the right moment.
You could subject this paragraph to rigorous “scientific” analysis, largely by examining the careers and networks of academics and other bureaucrats. There’s no space for that here and the exhibition does not really do this either. So what is relevant is something that is mostly rhetorical and not very rigorous at all. It is the creation of an image that relies on two of the primary clichés of Contemporary Art (or culture industry) discourse in the province: transformation and urgency, both ways of signifying “dynamism.”
Why are “democracy, technology, culture, art, and science” being lumped together here? Do they have a particularly meaningful connection? Yes. Hasn’t this been the standard framework for the state’s managing of the arts since the 1960s? It has. Is this “questioning” unique to today? No. Isn’t this what these things have always done? It is. Isn’t the more relevant issue what limits are being placed on the questions being asked and expected? Yes. How is this “destablization” working? Is it happening at all? No. Isn’t this par for the course and an endemic tool in the bureaucratic expansion of the university system itself? Yes. Is there actually a change of framework being brought in here? No. Why are “identities, genders, religions, ideologies and…history” given the status of real objects while the former are cast as methods of inquiry? Partially for “ideological” reasons and partially for the sake of obfuscation to treat the university as a place of “knowledge” or “expertise” rather than ideology.
In light of this, it will be fruitful to read the curatorial justification. But before that, let’s take a tour of what is in the exhibition.
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The exhibition opens on the humorous side of things with the video What Birds Talk About When They Talk (2021) by Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens. It is shown in the side gallery upon entrance and sets up a series of juxtapositions of bird calls with a duo-tone flag-like image and a comic “translation” of the call in subtitle form. As a set-up, it mocks the idea of scientific knowledge, but more specifically the capacity for a mediation between different forms of life or “cultures.” If it does this in a way that seems like a simple gag from a sketch comedy show that has been stretched well beyond the point that the humour is retained, the durational ruination of the affect and the retention of an ever-increasing quantity of idiocy seems to be at least one of the points being made.
Once you leave this room, you can go down the ramp or stairs to another little room. This one features Ibghy & Lemmens’ Anthology of Performance Pieces for Animals (2018). The two artists have put together a series of attractive, colourful, miniatures. They are sort of minimalist dioramas or maquettes which have been inspired by various experiments conducted by scientists on animals. These forms of scientific investigation are both rendered in a style that stresses them as formal models and highlights the perverse overlap between performance art and experimentation on living subjects. This has been addressed in an impressively succinct way that involves something bordering on macabre, if clinical, humour.
For our purposes here, it also invites us to think about something else, less the artist-as-scientist and the performer-as-lab-animal than the viewer (or spectator) of an exhibition as a kind of lab rat. Historically, this has hovered in the background of performance art and participatory art fairly explicitly (if not often in such an avowed away), either as something to attack to exploit. Its value in this instance is that this work sets the stage -- and it is openly theatrical -- of the space of Contemporary Art as something that conducts its performer/viewer through its peculiar, more or less architectonic contraption.
This highlights how exhibition operates both as the skeletal apparatus for the experiment that it conducts on the nervous systems of those who pass through it and as a residual tracing of its implied conceptual logic.
Next to this is the installation by Club de prospection figurée (Magali Baribeau-Marchand and Mariane Tremblay). They are responsible for the elaborate étagère (I don’t know what else to call it) that includes small works by all the solo and duo artists involved, sitting together like the gewgaws assembled to gather in the corner of a room that barely gets any sunlight. Flatly lit here, they are assembled in the rhetoric of the most basic type of kitsch. Among these items is a book presented as the object of a little theatre, a “butterfly” that looks like a Rorschach test, and so on. Most of these pieces follow this logic of the ambiguousness of presentation and highlight the problem of projecting meaning onto artworks, and the space of Contemporary Art as an industrially produced structure for preciously treated kitsch.
Across from this étagère is another work that pushes this problematic nearly to the point of absurdity. Kosisochukwu Nnebe’s Is a language a flag?/What is a flag on stolen land? (2022-2024) uses a set of “flags” to pose a series of questions in stark black and white while being topical (clichéd or using keywords) while not very clear. The texts in turn might beg all kinds of questions: what does “stealing” mean? Can anyone really “own” land? Is it possible to steal a language? Is language itself stealing? etc. It is a text that -- strictly speaking -- means nothing but implies the possibility of asking what something might mean. Is that different from the kind of symbolic language generally used on flags? (It is. It’s a fantasy that is even more ahistorical than those commonly used on flags). What does this imply in the context of the opening piece which clearly derided the sort of “translation” exercise (also using the visual language of flags and text) that this seems to be calling one to make?
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Moving along, next up is Caroline Fillion’s various Bang works. There are three videos. One takes up the better part of a wall and slowly unfolds in time, quietly erupting in the explosions of various things that soon vanish from view. To the sides, there are videos of installations that include droning sounds that you can strap to your ears. At the centre is a pile of rubble. The videos are records of the display of videos. This provides an introverted dimension to the work which seems to be far less about “cosmic” themes of creation than about quite localized issues of the display of creations. The whole thing has the effect of a seashell placed to the ear; apparently an echo of some space or event but just a whirring that goes nowhere, just the mechanism that becomes increasingly present with each iteration.
Directly across from this, Maryse Goudreau’s Archives du béluga (2012-now) draws from her lengthy project documenting the whale. Including photos, video, and several vitrines filled with different types of documentation, it aims toward a form of “poetic fiction” of the “social history” of marine life. While it seems designed on one level to attract anthropomorphic projection, the eyes of the whale staring out and documented to be given a history, the aesthetic dimension of the work operates as much against this. The eye is both an alien aspect that distances the viewer and one that brings them in, highlighting the function of empathetic fantasy in viewing. The large photo on the wall has been printed to be heavily textured to the point that this overrides its content and the visual substance of it becomes its strange industrialized medium. This element is also stressed in the awkward little video that is housed in a wooden theatre that also stresses its severe mediation, something that also comes across in the aesthetic of the vitrines which combine flat Scandinavian style “woodiness” with what resembles an elementary school science fair project from the 1980s.
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In the further corner of the exhibition space is Leila Zelli’s Pourquoi devrais-je m’arrêter? (2020), which relies on the most keywords in its accompanying wall text of all the artworks. There is a multilingual text on the wall, a small “reading room” type space that one frequently encounters in edutainment anti-spectacles like this, and two video screens facing one another. On one, a figure walks around in circles and the supplement tells us this is a gesture of “resistance.” On the other is a cluttering of videos into the same space. On their own, and minus the kind of textual “translating” that the first work we encountered mocked and another effectively placed in quotation marks, the installation conveys basically nothing, is mostly visually illiterate, unimaginative, and performatively “poor” in its poetic fictionalization of “engagement.” It is the “poverty” of its moral puritanism that comes across the most clearly with the viewer trapped between screens and prodded by keywords and supplementation to react.
In the context of the exhibition itself, let’s now look at how the curators defend their set-up. Within the catalogue, they claim that their purpose is
to bear witness to the way in which a university gallery engages with crucial issues, often shared by several sectors of research. The university gallery is precisely where, at the crossroads of artistic and scientific knowledge, bold and promising initiatives shatter conventional wisdom, and give rise to new forms and approaches to research based on today's artistic questions. [4]
Leaving aside whether it even makes sense to treat artistic and scientific “knowledge” on the same grounds, what “conventional wisdom” is at stake here? Astrophysics? We know from the history of the province’s art history that, insofar as there has been much of one, it has tended toward conventionalizing either semiotics or social history. Are the works in the exhibition and the ways they are being curated breaking from this? As the above descriptions suggest, several of the works can be seen as doing this to the extent that they seem to take their energy from mocking or spoofing such approaches while others still lean heavily on them. The “crossroads” metaphor is also interesting for suggesting contingent relations in a territory are mostly those of departing and moving away from other trajectories. It seems to cross out any meaningful connection.
Derision and the exit from dialogue do not seem to be what the curators have in mind, however. They seem to think the exhibition suggests a fruitful and meaningful overlap rather than an illustration of its non-existence. As they go on to claim
The Galerie de l’UQAM and the Galerie UQO play an active role in breaking down disciplinary barriers by exhibiting works and inviting artists who invent fruitful connections with scientific content. FPPH’s conceptual framework is based on the notion of false folds, here considered as biases sometimes imposed, sometimes acquired, sometimes transmitted. These false folds are inevitably present in the academic context, but not only research and creation. How can they be identified, undone and transformed? [5]
The most significant curatorial “breaking down” of barriers seems to come from the related article that the curators recently published in Le Devoir. The adaptation of catalogue essay into newspaper op-ed is also significant since it highlights the extent to which the conflation of art with “research” ends up amounting to a particularly non-rigorous and polemical kind of journalism more than anything else.
Reflecting on their desire (or mission) to break the mould, the curators ask: “What if ‘doing otherwise’ required first to undo fake folds? What would the conditions of a new impetus in research consist of in order to identify what weakens the method… subordinates the facts to possible mirages?” To this, they accord a political obligation that is roughly identical to the state’s definition of the function of the culture industry: “Recognizing that there is, on the horizon of any research, a civic responsibility, the circles that embody and support it are faced with the need to compose, act, seek in a more open, inclusive and unexpected way.”
What does this mean in practice?
In FPHP, we have questioned our own working methodologies through process reconfiguration, or even procedures, both in research and in the design of the resulting exposures. This review has proved to be a test of certain false folds and has led us to explore, with the contribution of researchers from various artistic and scientific sectors, the issues of languages and identities, earth and territory, and structures and institutions.
To return to the catalogue, the organization is given an almost cartoonishly Idealist formulation with an imposed “dialectical structure” (which is not actually one in any technical or even crude sense of the term) that attempts to detect the “false folds” within three predicable but unjustified sets: “languages and identities, lands and territories, and structures and institutions.” The curators take Contemporary Art practice and its milieu of diffusion as the perfect place to analyse what lies in these folds (the double meaning here is already implicated in the catalogue text). This prompts the viewer to ask: where is the lie?
If all that is being produced is uncertainty about content but clarification of the form of display, is this knowledge? The works show that whatever knowledge can be derived from them has little to do with their curatorial framing (and for that matter, a great deal of what the artists claim in other contexts). The more interesting question, from a curatorial perspective, is how much the exhibition works to occlude the various mechanics of production and framing by vaguely describing doing the opposite. There is a blatant exhibitionism to the works that largely clashes with the ways that they are overcoded by their curatorial framing through supplementation and (exceedingly vague) pedagogy. This is ultimately the substance of the show. It is the socio-cultural indexing or moralizing interpretation of the work that is “unfolded” as a lie manufactured by institutional discourse.
There is another way to broach this, one which most of the framing does not make evident but which is more relevant than most of the references the curators make: the role of the aesthetic in the production of knowledge and in the possibility of recognizing the referentiality that many of the works either deride or naively call upon.
Perhaps the compartmentalization is supposed to demonstrate the integrity of “diverse perspectives.” Are these “plis” supposed to be Leibnizean monads, each containing their own trajectory and not dialectically communicating with one another, existing as a series of alternative histories? The curators’ mentioning of Deleuze’s interpretation of the pli and juxtaposition of this with a “dialectical” approach would seem to suggest so, even if it makes little sense philosophically. In the end, this spatial organization seems only to justify the “distinction” of a set of professional careers each being given their due. It is not very demanding on the viewer and it is not a productive way of being monadological or dialectical. As I have observed, the overwhelming rhetorical logic of the exhibition is comedy and a kind of mechanical reductiveness that is at odds with the expansionist incorporation of dialectics.
As enjoyable as some of the work is, its value as a relay for knowledge is pretty low. You do not learn much of anything. At its best, it does not even reach the level of edutainment, a particularly bad History channel documentary, or idle gossip. Its value pedagogically is that you should come away recognizing this. If you bother to think about any of this critically, it is the institutional framing and its keywords that function as the “fake fold.” The curation is effectively a demonstration of what it is ostensibly setting out to critique. This is not to suggest that it is a failure because the exhibition effectively eviscerates the credibility of art-as-knowledge and of the university as being a “lab” for the production of such a chimera. If what most of the work reveals, deliberately or not, is that the notion of knowledge is itself a stupid joke and that, insofar as art reveals or revels in something, it is in making this obvious to the point it is painful.