Mélanie Boucher

École multidisciplinaire de l’image, Université du Québec en Outaouais

melanie.boucher@uqo.ca

Mélanie Boucher is a professor of museum studies at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, Québec. As an art history specialist in her department, she is regularly required to comment on issues involving art museum practices. From 2003 to 2013, she held various positions in conservation and research, in addition to working as an independent curator with museological institutions large and small and in between. She has extensive knowledge of the intrusive strategies that museums use to occasionally slot works of contemporary art into their historical collections. One major focus of her thinking concerns the reinvention of contiguous spaces to undercut the predictable associations of art history and engage viewers in new ways. This idea, in fact, informed Intrus/Intruders, an exhibition she curated for the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in 2008-2009. She has been responsible for contextualizing some of the novel spatial relationships fostered by the event-oriented aspects of collections. In 2014, she published a book on food in performance art entitled La nourriture en art performatif : Son usage, de la première moitié du 20^e siècle à aujourd’hui. Her interest in performance art, which led her to write a Ph.D. thesis on its use of food, and her current work on the tableau vivant in contemporary art, have steered her toward performative reenactment of collections for event-related purposes.