Publication

Two researchers members of CIECO published an article in the latest issue of RACAR – Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review dedicated to critical curating and co-edited by Marie Fraser and Alice Ming Wai Jim.

DULGUEROVA, Elitza (2018). « Ouverture pour cause d’inventaire. Figures et significations de l’exhaustivité en expositions », in Marie Fraser and Alice Ming Wai Jim (ed.), «What Is Critical Curating/Qu’est-ce que le commissariat engagé ?», RACAR – Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review 43, n°2: 11-24.

“This article examines how exhaustiveness serves as a guiding principal for certain exhibitions, and particularly as a means of critiquing selection as the dominant method of promoting specific artworks, artists, and movements. It begins by outlining the possible genealogies of this attitude in the history of exhibition forms, as well as artists’ experiments with these forms. It then focuses on the work of curators
Michael Fehr, Véronique Souben, and Rebecca Duclos and David K. Ross, who, in different contexts, have used notions of inventory and storage to exhaustively present collections. These practices represent strategies of resistance and critique whose contemporary relevance needs to be evaluated alongside their strengths and weaknesses.”

Click here to read more (in French only).

BAWIN, Julie (2018). «L’artiste contemporain dans les musées d’ethnographie
ou la “promesse” d’un commissariat engagé», in Marie Fraser and Alice Ming Wai Jim (ed.), «What Is Critical Curating/Qu’est-ce que le commissariat engagé ?», RACAR – Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review 43, n°2: 48-56.

“For over three decades, ethnographic museums have been engaged in a process of redefining both their missions and their collections. Forced to reinvent themselves, as well as develop exhibition strategies in response to post-colonial theory, many of these museums have adopted a self-critical attitude and invited artists to intervene in their collections. What do such practices reveal? When artists turn their attention to the collecting, archiving, and exhibition practices of colonial museums, does it follow that their approach is more engaged? By considering the first exhibitions of this kind, while also tracing the evolution of this phenomenon since the 1980s, this paper seeks to respond to these questions. It also strives to understand the specific nature of critical curating as it is practiced in museums that are, more than any others, loci for identity politics.”

Click here to read more (in French only).