The Duty invites you to take the back roads of university life. A proposal that is both scholarly and intimate, to be picked up all summer long like a postcard. Today, we offer you an incursion into the university galleries.
In the climate of uncertainty and disinformation that characterizes the current era, we can ask ourselves how to fit into the world by refusing one-sided and generic thoughts, by creating new thresholds of reflection where critical thinking could be welcomed more serenely, by placing the different forms of knowledge at the center of laboratories of adventurous hypotheses.
We understand, in various places of knowledge, that there is a need to shift our gaze away from the disciplinary markers that establish us as researchers and that we must explore, collaborate, contribute to the imperatives of research by stirring up our expertise, even if it means venturing off-piste. But how can we do this? How can we “do it differently”?
What if “doing things differently” first required undoing creases? What would be the conditions for a new impetus in research in order to identify what weakens the method, wrinkles the meaning, subordinates the facts to possible mirages?
It would not necessarily be a question, as we will have understood, of smoothing out what is hidden in the fold, what lurks in the intimacy of the visible and momentarily disappears from reality with the consequence, precisely, of motivating our desire to search, to perceive, to grasp, to question. Because what is hidden is very real. It is rather what slyly distorts a good part of reality that we would need to identify and repair.
Recognizing that there is, on the horizon of all research, a civic responsibility, the environments that embody and support it find themselves faced with the requirement to compose, to act, to search in a more open, more inclusive and more unexpected way.
So, from the position we occupy in our institutions, how do we address the issues that mobilize the artistic field and many of which echo crucial issues often shared by several sectors of scientific research (pure, social, human, political sciences, etc.)? What is the role of the university gallery when it comes to “doing things differently”? What forms can research incubators embody in the face of the objective of orienting the gaze on planetary complexity differently?
Decompartmentalization
The university gallery is precisely this place where, at the crossroads of artistic and scientific knowledge, bold initiatives shatter received ideas and bring out new forms and positions of research.
The Galerie de l’UQAM and the Galerie UQO, like many museum institutions linked to many universities around the world, actively participate in this disciplinary decompartmentalization by inviting artists and exhibiting works that offer fruitful connections with scientific content.
Art history, exhibition and museology are fields of research in themselves that can be the subject of certain projects just as they can define the methodological approach, or even determine the purpose. The positioning of our university galleries aims at diversification of points of contact and the exploration of research as an object of study, as a subject, as a method, as a hypothesis, under the impulse of practices in contemporary art.
This is the case of False folds by assumptions (FPPH), an initiative that examines precisely the false folds here considered as imposed, acquired or transmitted biases. We have identified a significant number of them in the various structures in which artists and art professionals gravitate: universities, research funds, arts council grant programs, political circles, the art world and market, etc.
False folds abound in all the layers where research, the functioning and the programming of institutions are anchored, in particular in the forms to be filled out, the boxes to be checked, the strategies to be adopted.
Reconfiguration
As part of FPPH, we have questioned our own working methodologies through a reconfiguration of processes, even procedures, both in research and in the design of the resulting exhibitions. This examination has proven 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, questions of languages and identities, terrestrial and territorial, and structures and institutions.
Several phases have nourished it, notably a colloquium under the aegis of the chief scientist of Quebec, Rémi Quirion (Do it differentlyAcfas, 2022); reflection sessions (To build a building siteGrantham Foundation and Jardins de Métis, 2023); and the exhibition of thirteen artistic bodies in five galleries active in university and research environments (To exhibitfall 2024).
The FPPH approach calls for the recognition of expertise, because it is subject to numerous weaknesses, particularly with regard to the hierarchy of knowledge and the intellectual freedom of artists or scientists who are subject to a proven bureaucratic amplitude. At the same time as fruitful alliances, intersectoral networks, new pollinations between the multiple fields of research multiply, false folds creep in and sometimes become embedded, requiring a form of tacking and possible resistance when it comes to confronting an increasingly less smooth conception of the sciences and arts in their entire tree structure.
For if in the folds what there is to glimpse is hidden, in the false folds are revealed twists, manipulations, gaps that tend to worry and mistreat reality. From creases to folds and from reflux to folds, there emanates a desire for vigilance, a state of alert, an inclination to look more closely, an obligation to keep one’s eyes open.