15.1.2019 – Talk Exocène #4, Size matters, with Sylvie Boulanger (CNEAI) and François Quintin (Lafayette Anticipation)

EnsadLab Displays research group and ICCA Labex welcome Sylvie Boulanger (curator, founding director of the CNEAI in Pantin), and François Quintin (director of Lafayette Anticipations in Paris).

This is the last in a series of four meetings organised by EnsadLab Displays and the ICCA Labex, dedicated to new experimental contexts for art exhibitions. Exocène #4 will question the specific experimentation potential that large-scale institutions or projects are able to generate. How to engage critical activities in this dimension?

Tuesday January 15, 2019, from 6pm to 9pm
RSVP: facebook or displays@ensad.fr
EnsAD, 31 rue d’Ulm 75005 Paris – Room 308, 3rd floor
More information: www.displays.ensadlab.fr

Exocène

Series of meetings, EnsadLab Displays & Labex CISC research group

In the wake of counter-cultures, “do it yourself” and artist-run spaces, a large number of places and networks create exhibitions in circonstances that are exogenous to institutions. We are particularly interested here in exhibitions, rather than in production. These initiatives are part of a digital context linked to social networks and platforms such as third places. They draw an “outside era” where the investment of other spaces would reinforce the attempts to invent freedom of experimentation.

The four Exocène meetings welcome those in charge of places and facilities that create unique conditions for experimentation for exhibitions. Sometimes – but not always – conducted in precarious economies, they are often characterised by relations that are very specific to their territories. Conceived as an alternative to institutional mechanisms that have sometimes become less effective in their context, aiming to leverage the invention of public art conditions and practices, do these frameworks renew the potential of the exhibitions they host? What is the specificity of the relationships they establish with their environments and the public? What obstacles do they face? How to develop counterspaces while fighting for their necessary recognition?

Organized at Ensad, this program has been composed of 4 meetings bringing together two guests in dialogue with Displays research group and the public: Small is Powerful on October 18, with Juliette Fontaine (Capa Aubervilliers) and Julie Portier (La Salle de Bains, Lyon), Networked on November 14, with Lucie Orbie (50° North) and David Quilés Guilo (The Wrong Biennale), Playing Collective on November 29 with Clémence Agnez (Glassbox) and the &Nbsp association; (Clermont-Ferrand), and at last Size matters on January 15, with Sylvie Boulanger (CNEAI) and François Quintin of Lafayette Anticipations.

Talk #4 : Size matters

The CNEAI (Centre National Edition Art Image) is a national center for contemporary art which, for the past 20 years, has invited emerging or recognized artists who tackle social issues and seek to experience all fields of human activity. As a space that is open to the creation of communities, the CNEAI accelerates the projects of artists who develop new economic and cultural autonomies, within the framework of practices that are often collaborative and always of great variety: editorial, graphic, digital, social, writing, music, production, etc. practices. The center supports a cultural utility, and a service to the public, and invents new models of production and transmission of artistic forms that challenge disciplinary categories and involve all audiences in the artistic projects, from meeting the artist to presenting the works. Headquartered since 2017 in the “Magasins généraux” – a warehouse complex located on the Canal de l’Ourcq, in the northeastern Parisian suburb of Pantin – the CNEAI has launched a new creation-, transmission- and research program within the framework of the Greater Paris project, with some fifty national, international and local partners. It also organizes in situ and of-site exhibitions, runs a program called “inhabit the exhibition”, offers residencies, and spearheads research projects and publications.

Lafayette Anticipations is a public interest foundation, which is structured around its production activities and the support it provides for contemporary creation. It acts as a catalyst that offers artists unique tailor-made means to produce, experiment, and exhibit. It marshals actions conducted by the Galerie Lafayette’s corporate foundation and by the Moulin family’s endowment fund – two public interest corporations created in 2013 by the Galeries Lafayette group and its family-owned holding – in support of contemporary creation. Since its opening on March 10th, 2018, the Foundation is the first multidisciplinary center of its kind in France. In the 19th century building that it occupies in the Marais, which has been renovated by Rem Koolhaas, an exhibition project will present new works by international creators from the fields of contemporary art, design and fashion. Between 2013 and 2017, while its spaces were being rehabilitated, Lafayette Anticipations investigated the Foundation’s budding identity, through invitations to produce pieces, workshops, partnerships, and by providing direct support to creative production. This preliminary program was revealed in events organized by Lafayette Anticipations itself (Les Prolégomènes, Venir Voir Venir, Faisons de l’inconnu un allié, Composer les mesures de son espace) and through projects conducted with partner institutions (Centre Pompidou, National Archives, Kunsthalle Basel, MoMA PS1, Performa, New Museum…). Lafayette Anticipations also supports contemporary creation through the Moulin Family Endowment Fund, which backs public interest artistic projects and has been committed, since its creation in 2013, to expanding and enhancing its collection though its acquisition policy.

Organisation

Led by Thierry Fournier and J. Emil Sennewald, Displays is a research group of EnsadLab, the first in France dedicated to practice-based research on exhibitions. It aims to question and experiment the forms and challenges of contemporary exhibitions: transformation of the objects on display (in a broader sense), roles, spaces and temporalities of exhibitions, critical positioning towards cultural powers and industries. Its activity consists of two components: a research through exhibition approach, which deploys exhibition situations as moments of research, and public exchanges with the actors in this field (conferences, meetings, publications). Public exchanges deliberately adopt very specific protocols and scales aiming at modulating the forms of interaction in order to adapt them to the topics being discussed and their related working methods.

The ICCA Laboratory of Excellence (Cultural Industries and Artistic Creation) is an interdisciplinary research laboratory focused on the practices and markets of culture, art and leisure. Created in 2011, ICCA’s main objectives are to define new economic and regulatory models, study new uses and emerging markets and transform legal frameworks, both in traditional sectors and in the digital world. ICCA brings together departments from several universities in different disciplines (sociology, economics, law, communication, educational sciences, design). ICCA is also a forum for dialogue with professional organizations and industrial actors in the cultural and arts sectors. ICCA is a research program funded by the “Future Investment” program.

17.12.2018 – Symposium : CEA-Displays-Paris 8 “Writing by exhibition ? Practice, methods, research”, Cité internationale des arts

“As soon as it entered writing, the concept is well done.” Jacques Derrida

With :
Damien Airault – Art critic and curator, doctoral student in Paris 8
Sarina Basta – Curator, Confort moderne, Poitiers
Bettina Blanc-Penther – Artist-researcher, doctoral student EnsadLab
Jagna Ciuchta – Artist, doctoral student at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, member of SACRe at the University PSL / le Laboratoire (EA 7410)
Marianne Derrien – Art critic and curator, vice-president of C-E-A, lecturer at Paris 8.
Nathalie Desmet – Teacher-researcher (Paris 8), art critic and curator
Thierry Fournier – Artist and curator, in charge of the EnsadLab Displays research group
Antony Hudek – Curator and Head of Curatorial Studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Ghent (KASK)
Inés Moreno – Artist-researcher, doctoral student EnsadLab
Céline Poulin – Art critic and director of the CAC-Brétigny,
J. Emil Sennewald – Art critic, teacher-researcher, ESACM, co-coordinator EnsadLab Displays
Fanny Terno – Artist-researcher, doctoral student EnsadLab

The series of three meetings “Writing by exhibition? Practices, methods, research” is the continuation of a research program initiated by the Ensadlab Displays research group (Thierry Fournier and J. Emil Sennewald), the AIAC laboratory – EA 4010 : Arts des images et art contemporain (Nathalie Desmet) of the University of Paris 8 and C-E-A the French association of exhibition curators (Damien Airault and Marianne Derrien). It combines scientific and curatorial research on the exhibition and a research/creation group through the exhibition.

More precisely, this cycle is based on the observation of a separation between curatorial studies conceived as a new type of academic knowledge (exhibition research), or as a theoretical practice, and artistic research-experimentation projects carried out with the exhibition. It is based on the diversity of approaches, including their training dimension, and on the impact of writing-based thinking on these practices.

The day of December 17 will be the occasion for a transversal questioning around the exhibition and curatorial research as writing operations. We will ask ourselves if the exhibition or curatorial project can be a place of research, and in what ways it can be assimilated to a form of writing or speech.

Program

9:30 am – Welcome of participants

Morning: What is curatorial research?
10:00 – 10:30 – Introduction of the day
10:30 – 11:30 – Discussion – Round table with all participants and the public
11:30 – 11:45 – Break
11:45 – 12:30 – Bettina Blanc-Penther, Inés Moreno and Fanny Terno – Writing and research-creation through the exhibition
12:30 – 13:15 – Damien Airault and Sarina Basta – Transdisciplinarity and exhibition – which writings?
13:15 – 14:45 – Lunch

Afternoon: How to write with, for, by the exhibition?
15:00 – 15:15 – Summary of the morning discussions
15:15 – 16:00 – Céline Poulin and Jagna Ciuchta – The co-constructed exhibition?
16:00 – 16:15 – Break
16:15 – 17:00 – Antony Hudek and Nathalie Desmet – What is curatorial research, how to transmit it?
17:00 – 17:30 – Conclusion

About us

The Exhibition-Writing-Research-cycle is the result of an association between scientific and curatorial research on the exhibition (C-E-A, Paris 8) and a research-creation group through the exhibition (EnsadLab Displays). It aims to question the exhibition and its research as a writing operation, by raising the situations of transition and transgression that it can generate.

Form: conferences-workshops and exhibition experiments

Calendar and organization: winter 2018 to spring 2019. Three semi-public days on registration with speakers, experimenters and discussants

Teams : C-E-A (Damien Airault, Marianne Derrien), EnsadLab Displays (Thierry Fournier, J. Emil Sennewald, Inès Moreno, Bettina Blanc-Penther, Fanny Terno), Paris 8 (AIAC Laboratory – Nathalie Desmet)

Partner place: Cité internationale des arts – Paris

4.12.2018 – Lecture : J. Emil Sennewald « Exposition / Aussetzen » Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe – EnsadLab Displays

By translating the term exposition in the broader sense of interruption, attention, overexposure, as argumentation or endangering, the practice of exposition is presented as more than the simple presentation of works on a wall. Starting from the Café au lit project room he created with the writer Andrea Weisbrod for 13 years in his Parisian apartment, J. Emil Sennewald developed his research through exhibition by presenting Displays and the Overexpositions-project for which he is responsible at the ESACM School of Fine Arts where he teaches as a philosophy teacher. The conference was made possible thanks to an ERASMUS partnership between ESACM and the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe.

Photography : Benjamin Hochart during a performance in the framework of Roven’s soirée at Café au lit, November 28, 2011

29.11.2018 Talk Exocène #3 Playing Collective, with Clémence Agnez (Glassbox) & Non-Breaking Space collective

EnsadLab Displays research group and ICCA Labex welcome Clémence Agnez (curator and philosopher, co-coordinator of Glassbox, Paris) and members of the NON-BREAKING SPACE collective (Hervé Bréhier, Sébastien Maloberti, Marion Robin and Marjolaine Turpin) in Clermont-Ferrand.

Exocene is a series of four meetings organised by EnsadLab Displays and the ICCA Labex, dedicated to new experimental contexts for art exhibitions. This third meeting focused on the experiences carried out by two collective structures, seeking to discuss their specific potentialities and problems.

Thursday 29 November 2018, from 6pm to 9pm
RSVP: facebook or displays@ensad.fr
EnsAD, 31 rue d’Ulm 75005 Paris – Room 308, 3rd floor
More information: www.displays.ensadlab.fr

Exocène

Series of meetings, EnsadLab Displays & Labex CISC research group

In the wake of counter-cultures, “do it yourself” and artist-run spaces, a large number of places and networks create exhibitions in circonstances that are exogenous to institutions. We are particularly interested here in exhibitions, rather than in production. These initiatives are part of a digital context linked to social networks and platforms such as third places. They draw an “outside era” where the investment of other spaces would reinforce the attempts to invent freedom of experimentation.

The four Exocene meetings welcome those in charge of places and facilities that create unique conditions for experimentation for exhibitions. Sometimes – but not always – conducted in precarious economies, they are often characterised by relations that are very specific to their territories. Conceived as an alternative to institutional mechanisms that have sometimes become less effective in their context, aiming to leverage the invention of public art conditions and practices, do these frameworks renew the potential of the exhibitions they host? What is the specificity of the relationships they establish with their environments and the public? What obstacles do they face? How to develop counterspaces while fighting for their necessary recognition?

Organized at Ensad, this program is composed of 4 meetings bringing together two guests in dialogue with Displays research group and the public: Small is Powerful on October 18, with Juliette Fontaine (Capa Aubervilliers) and Julie Portier (La Salle de Bains, Lyon), Networked on November 14, with Lucie Orbie (50° North) and David Quilés Guilo (The Wrong Biennale), Playing Collective on November 29 with Clémence Agnez (Glassbox) and a member of the &Nbsp collective; (Clermont-Ferrand), The Big Scale on January 15, with Sylvie Boulanger (CNEAI) and a member of Lafayette Anticipations.

Rencontre #3 : Playing Collective

This meeting will aim to address the challenges and potentialities of collective and decentralised forms for the experimentation of exhibition, or collective experiences of imagining exhibitions.

La Tôlerie, a former garage renovated in 2003 at the initiative of the city of Clermont-Ferrand, has until now hosted curators in order to imagine and implement a contemporary art programme. Today, the city of Clermont-Ferrand has chosen to convoque three Clermont-Ferrand associations (Artistes en résidence, In Extenso and Les Ateliers) grouped into a fourth one : Non-breaking space (&nbsp). At the request of the municipality, Non-breaking space will design over the next three years a specific and original project for the contemporary art space La Tôlerie. The openings and social events will follow one another to the rhythm of the full moons. They will link invitations, collaborations, partnerships. The whole project  will be divided into three phases, three seasons that articulate and dialogue three components of this space: light, floor, walls, making the space itself the main subject. Sections of different natures will also mark another temporality, merging various registers of activities, as well as several narrative forms.

Glassbox is a non-profit association that aims to promote emerging contemporary art creation. Leading by artists who manage the parisien venue at 4 rue Moret, it allows young creators to access specific forms of visibility and propose hybrid formats for the production and dissemination of contemporary art. Committed to making emerging creation visible, the Glassbox team is itself composed of young artists. It has constantly changed throughout its fifteen years of activity, in order to remain as close as possible to the networks of young art school graduates, but also to enable its members, once they have become more experienced, to devote themselves fully to their personal endeavours. The starting office had names such as Yann Kopp or Stéphane Doré, then the association’s ranks were held by Elfie Turpin, Nicolas Tilly, Nicolas Julliard, Oriol Nogues, the 1.0.3. collective, Sabrina Issa, Stéphane Despax, Emilie Schalck, among others. The current team is composed of Clémence Agnez, Margaux Estivill, Alisson Haguenier and Adrienne Louves accompanied by guests and collaborators.

Organisation

Led by Thierry Fournier and J. Emil Sennewald, Displays is a research group of EnsadLab, the first in France dedicated to practice-based research on exhibitions. It aims to question and experiment the forms and challenges of contemporary exhibitions: transformation of the objects on display (in a broader sense), roles, spaces and temporalities of exhibitions, critical positioning towards cultural powers and industries. Its activity consists of two components: a research through exhibition approach, which deploys exhibition situations as moments of research, and public exchanges with the actors in this field (conferences, meetings, publications). Public exchanges deliberately adopt very specific protocols and scales aiming at modulating the forms of interaction in order to adapt them to the topics being discussed and their related working methods.

The ICCA Laboratory of Excellence (Cultural Industries and Artistic Creation) is an interdisciplinary research laboratory focused on the practices and markets of culture, art and leisure. Created in 2011, ICCA’s main objectives are to define new economic and regulatory models, study new uses and emerging markets and transform legal frameworks, both in traditional sectors and in the digital world. ICCA brings together departments from several universities in different disciplines (sociology, economics, law, communication, educational sciences, design). ICCA is also a forum for dialogue with professional organizations and industrial actors in the cultural and arts sectors. ICCA is a research program funded by the “Future Investment” program.

13.11.2018 – Talk Exocène #2 – In Network with Lucie Orbie (50° Nord) & David Quiles Guilló (The Wrong Biennale)

EnsadLab Displays research group and the Labex ICCA welcome Lucie Orbie (curator and coordinator of the 50° Nord artistic network) et David Quilés Guilló (creator and coordinator of The Wrong Biennale).

Exocène is a series of four talks organised by the EnsadLab Displays research group and Labex ICCA, dedicated to the new experimental contexts for art exhibitions. This second talk is focused on networked structures conducting experimentation.

Tuesday, November 13th, 2018, 6-9pm
Talk in French and English with simultaneous translation
On booking only at : Facebook group or displays@ensad.fr
EnsAD, 31 rue d’Ulm 75005 Paris – Salle 308, 3e étage

Exocène

Series of talks, EnsadLab Displays research group & Labex ICCA

In the wake of countercultures, ““do it yourself”” movements and artist-run spaces, a growing number of places and networks that create environments which are exogenous to existing art exhibition venues are appearing in France. Such initiatives are part of a broader digital context in which social networks and platforms constitute “third places”, which establish an ““era of the outside” ” (referred to here as “Exocene”), where, by claiming original spaces, it becomes possible to invent new forms of experimentation.

The Exocene meetings welcome curators of these venues and facilities that are creating new environments for experimentation in the realm of art exhibitions. Often (but not systematically) created in precarious economies, these structures are characterised by the innovative spaces they offer and the novel relationships they have with their surrounding communities. Conceived as alternative to institutional structures that sometimes become less effective in their particular setting, and designed to act as levers to create new conditions and public practices in the arts, do these frameworks alter the potential of the exhibitions they host? What is distinctive about the relationships they establish with their immediate surroundings and their audiences? How can we develop counter-spaces while fighting for their necessary recognition?

For each of the program’s 4 long talks, two guests will be invited to engage in a discussion with the Displays research group that will allow in-depth exchanges with the audience : Small is Powerful on October 18th with Juliette Fontaine (Capa Aubervilliers) and Julie Portier (La Salle de Bains, Lyon), In Network on November 14th with Lucie Orbie (50° Nord) and David Quilés Guilo (The Wrong Biennale), Playing collective on November 29th with Clémence Agnez (Glassbox) and a member of the &Nbsp; collective (Clermont-Ferrand), The Big Scale on January 15 with Sylvie Boulanger (CNEAI) and a representative of Lafayette Anticipation (sous réserve).

Talk #2 – November 12th, 2018 – In Network

With Lucie Orbie (curator and secretary general of 50° Nord, one of France’s first artistic networks) and David Quiles Guilló (creator and head of the international online project The Wrong Biennale). Meeting in French and English, with an interpreter.

This meeting is dedicated to two artistic and curatorial platforms, one which is web-based and relayed by numerous geographical venues (The Wrong Biennale) and another, which that covers the area along around the French-Belgian border (50° Nord). It questions explores the potentialities and the critical stakes of contemporary art exhibitions and practices that arise from networks that which go beyond concentrated institutional formats, while putting together a large number of stakeholders of widely varying scales. The relationships these networks create aim to renew curatorial practices, and reach a critical mass that affords them a particular [type of] institutional visibility, one which is usually not available to individual players; this allows the venues to experiment with specific time frames that can challenge exhibition formats. What type of experimentation and which specific critical approaches do these projects allow?

Created in 1997 by small and medium-sized associations, the 50°Nord network now connects over 30 professional production, distribution and academic structures working with contemporary art. Associative galleries, art centers, nomadic structures, artists’ associations, museums, FRAC (French Regional Contemporary Art Funds), training facilities establishments, among others, create artistic projects in very diverse contexts and carry out complementary actions. As a professional platform, which acts as a catalyser for these energies and collaborative projects, 50°Nord is committed to leveraging the influence and expanding the network of its members; it also seeks to value the regional art scene and to broadcast promote contemporary art among the general public. The 50°Northd network is one of the first regional contemporary art networks created in France. The cross-cutting activities of this structure conceived to be the expression of a particular geographic area, constitute a new way of mapping the arts and designing artistic projects.

The Wrong is a decentralized art bienniale dedicated to digital art organised since 2013 by its founder, David Quiles Guilló. Aiming to create and promote contemporary digital art to a wider audience worldwide, bringing together young artists and curators from this scene. The Wrong operates both online and offline ; The online part of the biennale takes place in “pavilions”, curated spaces on the web, where selected works are exhibited. The offline part takes place in “embassies”: art spaces, galleries, institutions and artist-run spaces all over the world. For its third edition in 2017-18, The Wrong brought together 124 curators who selected 1.621 artists.

26.10.2018 – lecture by Inés Moreno, Nordik XII, University of Copenhaguen – Session ‘Mixed Media’ # Curating Materiality

NORDIK XII- The Nordic Association of Art Historians organise the 19 sessions scheduled for the 12th Triennial Conference, at the University of Copenhagen, 25-27 October 2018 called “No Title”.

https://nordikxii.dk

The “Mixed Media” session coordinated by Dr. Wiebke Gronemeyer and Dr. Isabel Wünsche (Jacobs University of Bremen) aims to discuss the relevance of materiality in art history and visual studies.

Mixed Media #1 — Between Matter and Materiality (26.10.18)
Mixed Media #2 — Curating Materiality (26.10.18)
Mixed Media #3 — Materiality in Individual Artistic Practices (27.10.18)
Mixed Media #4 — Materiality in Specific Media (27.10.18)

Lecture of Inés Moreno, 26.10.18, 2pm (University of Copenhaguen, Large Auditorium)
Mixed Media #2 Curating MaterialityExperiencing material knowledge in exhibition practices” :
Seeking to reflect on the role of exhibitions for enhancing awareness about materials and processes implicated in art production within a broader socioeconomical context, this paper proposes to analyse three recent exhibitions shown in European institutions in order to identify various curatorial discourses on materiality in contemporary art.

The conference is generously supported by the A.P. Møller and Chastine Mc-Kinney Møller’s Foundation for General Purposes.

Download the conference programe

23.10.2018 – Lecture, Thierry Fournier, ENSBA Lyon – The Scenographic Station

Introductory seminar offered as part of the Station Scénographique by the Master “Direction de projets artistiques et culturels internationaux” of the Université Lumière Lyon 2, the Master Design of the École supérieure des beaux-arts de Bordeaux, the Master Design-Espace-Exposition of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon and the Master of Visual Didactics of the Haute école des arts du Rhin.

October 23 & 24, 2018
October 23, École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon
October 24th, CFMI – Université Lumière Lyon 2
Coordination Camille Jutant and Patricia Welinsky

Thierry Fournier’s conference 23-10 : Curatorial and situation design

The Station Scénographique is a workshop on exhibition scenography for Master students in design, art and human sciences to question and experiment the role of design in the mediation of knowledge. The 2017-2019 programme focuses on situations and objects conducive to the discovery, knowledge and appropriation of contemporary scientific knowledge.

Download the full programme of the seminar (FR)

18.10.2018, Exocène Panel #1, Small is Powerful: CAPA, Aubervilliers / La Salle de Bains, Lyon

EXOCENE
Series of four talks, EnsadLab Displays / ICCA Labex, Paris, Autumn-winter 2018
New contexts of experimentation for the contemporary art exhibitions

TALK #1, SMALL IS POWERFUL: CAPA AUBERVILLIERS / LA SALLE DE BAINS LYON
With Juliette Fontaine (artist, curator, author and head of CAPA – Centre d’Arts Plastiques d’Aubervilliers) and Julie Portier (critic and curator, co-artistic director of La Salle de bains, Lyon). This meeting is dedicated to the experiments carried out by two “small scale” places: CAPA – Centre d’Arts Plastiques d’Aubervilliers and La Salle de Bains in Lyon. The meeting will aim both to present the activities of the two places, questioning how their small scale allows them to develop specific experiments – and also how they can possibly constitute an obstacle.

Thursday, October 18, 2018, 6-8 pm
Ensad, 31 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris

In the wake of counter-cultures and the “do it yourself” movements, we observe in France a growing number of places and networks creating exogenous conditions toward the existing art exhibition structures. These initiatives are particularly part of a digital context linked to social networks and platforms such as third places. They draw an “era of the outside” (that we call here “exocene”) where the investment of new spaces leverages to invent new experimentation agencies.

Organized by EnsadLab Displays / ICCA Labex, these four Exocene panels thus welcome those in charge of places and facilities that create new conditions for experimentation in the field of exhibitions. Sometimes (but not systematically) created in precarious economies, they are characterized by innovative conditions of space and relationship to their territories. Thought as alternatives to institutional arrangements that have sometimes become less effective in their context, aiming to leverage the creation of new conditions and public art practices, do these frameworks renew the potential of the exhibitions they host? What is the specificity of the relationships they establish with their environments and the public? How to develop counterspaces while fighting for their necessary recognition?

Organised at the Ensad, this programme will consist of 4 talks, each time bringing together two guests in dialogue with the Displays group, each with a duration allowing an in-depth exchange with the guests and the public. Meetings will be held from October to December 2018.

Guests are chosen among actors whose work the Displays team knows, in order to sometimes continue exchanges already initiated, in a format allowing a real dialogue and deepening with the public – rather than successive conferences. Indeed, since these projects do not fall within the scope of the exhibition curating but define frameworks for action to host it afterwards, it is fundamental to be able to deploy open exchange to assess their conditions, their modalities of action and the issues they raise.

Organisation

Created in 2015 by Thierry Fournier and J. Emil Sennewald, the EnsadLab Displays research group is the first doctoral program in France dedicated to exhibition research and creation. It aims to question and experiment the contemporary forms of exhibition: the evolution of the objects on display (in the broad sense), the roles, spaces and temporalities of exhibitions and the critical positions toward the powers and cultural industries. Its activity includes two components: a “research through exhibition” approach, which deploys exhibition situations as moments of research on its issues; and public exchanges with actors in this field (conferences, meetings, publications). Each time, the latter deliberately adopt very specific protocols and scales, aiming to qualify the interaction modalities between its guests, in order to adapt them to the subjects addressed and to the working methods they relate.

The ICCA Laboratory of Excellence (Cultural Industries and Artistic Creation) is an interdisciplinary research laboratory focused on the practices and markets of culture, art and leisure. Created in 2011, ICCA’s main objectives are to define new economic and regulatory models, study new uses and emerging markets and transform legal frameworks, both in traditional sectors and in the digital world. ICCA brings together teams from several universities in different disciplines (sociology, economics, law, communication, educational sciences, design). ICCA is also a forum for dialogue with professional organizations and industrial actors in the cultural and arts sectors. ICCA is a research program funded by the “Future Investment” program.

*

Coordination Thierry Fournier & J. Emil Sennewald
Students-researchers Displays 2018-2019 : Bettina Blanc-Penther, Inés Moreno, Fanny Terno

Image: Claude Lévêque, Cérémonie, in situ installation in a flat, La Maladrerie, CAPA – Centre d’Arts Plastiques d’Aubervilliers, 2017. Photograph Julie Joubert.

30.08.18-2.09.18 – Inés Moreno, Workshop, Projekt Bauhaus Werkstatt / Datatopia _ The Floating University, Berlin

After the preliminary course “From Bauhaus to Silicon Valley” last year, this summer projekt bauhaus revives the Bauhaus’s workshop structure in order to explore the emancipatory potential of technology, to question the idea of progress, and to formulate a critique of the present through design.

The classical avant-garde believed in progress, a better future, and in improvement through innovation. The new has lost its innocence. These days, “utopias” increasingly pursue ambitions of deceleration (slow food, urban gardening, etc.)
 and preservation (climate goals and conservation of the environment and culture). Whereas ever-accelerating capitalist processes are often experienced as problematic, a (largely conservative) critique aims to negate or reject them. Is progress still emancipatory and preservation reactionary, or are things in fact fundamentally very different? Accelerationism’s plea for a renewal of the alliance between emancipatory aspirations and technological and scientific advances has given rise to the debate whether this liaison can deliver on its promise, or whether emancipation should rather use the means of criticism and deviance. Moreover, technology and financialization create new geopolitical orders, shift ideological narratives, and transform societal systems. But scientific and technological advancements only lead to limited social improvements within society. Thus, the question must be asked: does the current backward-looking political and ideological trends are taking place in spite of—or due to—advances in information technology? What are the current models of a cultural practice that consider technology and knowledge production in terms of the progress of society as a global whole? How can such a practice be shaped and communicated? And how can it be disseminated to the public?

projekt bauhaus invites international teams of practitioners and theoricians from different disciplines in order to explore the emancipatory potential of technology, the decolonisation of progress and the critique of the present through design. Over four days, the guests and the participants will exchange on the current state of research through workshops, lectures, exhibitions and performances. projekt bauhaus Werkstatt features also artistic interventions specially developed for the occasion by Morehshin Allahyari, Olaf Nicolai and Brave New Alps and that will be performed onsite. projekt bauhaus Werkstatt takes place in the sculptural and performative Floating University, designed and initiated by raumlaborberlin as an experimental and interdisciplinary laboratory for knowledge production.

With Morehshin Allahyari, Alliance of Southern Triangle, Armen Avanessian, Benjamin Bratton, Beatriz Colomina, Brave New Alps, Keller Easterling, Victoria Ivanova, Olaf Nicolai, Öffentliche Gestaltungsberatung, T’ai Smith, Ida Soulard, Georg Vrachliotis, Eyal Weizman, Ines Weizman, Mark Wigley, among others.

Participation in working group& workshop “The Social Media Bauhaus” directed by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley.

www.projekt-bauhaus.de.

www.floatinguniversity.org

2018-2019: Bettina Blanc-Penther and Fanny Terno, new students researchers at EnsadLab Displays

EnsadLab Displays is pleased to welcome Bettina Blanc-Penther and Fanny Terno, the new EnsadLab Displays student researchers in 2018-2019.

Bettina Blanc-Penther is a visual artist. Graduated from Le Fresnoy – national studio of contemporary arts in 2018, she holds a DNSEP from the Ecole nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs (Paris) in 2015, after studying Modern Literature at the University Paris IV La Sorbonne.

Fanny Terno is a visual artist. In 2018, she graduated from the DNSEP at the École Nationale Supérieure de Photographie d’Arles. In 2016-2017, she completed an exchange semester in Japan at Kyoto art and design university, photography and contemporary art section, under the direction of Tadashi Ono. She graduated from the École supérieure d’arts appliqués Duperré, Paris in 2014.

2017 – Collaboration with ESACM: Sur-expositions

Sur-expositions [Over-exposures] – actors, images, projections of a new trend is a research group located at ESACM, École Supérieure d’Art Clermont Métropole and coordinated by Jacques Malgorn, Camille Varenne, J. Emil Sennewald. Starting from the redundant phenomenon of “artafricanism”, its objective is to raise questions about the function and functioning of the exhibition as a device and as a means of identifying artistic places, objects and subjects, particularly at the time of an “overexposure” of artists of a scene identified as “innovative”. This project is intended to be the starting point for future artistic research projects questioning Europe, Africa and the World.

Designed in collaboration with the EnsadLab Displays research group, working meetings scheduled for 7 and 8 December in Clermont-Ferrand will identify main lines of action to discuss explanations of the new Afro-European momentum, raise exemplary positions, particularly in photography and film, analyse the role of festivals, biennales and fairs and specify the ecosystems involved and possible areas of criticism.

By applying the practice of research through art, the group carries out its work not by confirming the emergence of contemporary African art, but rather by acting with. The objective is not to dissociate oneself from the object of research in order to analyze it, but on the contrary to become one, and to experience its different forms and states. Dialogue and exchange are therefore at the heart of the methodology. To articulate this collective thinking, meetings must be built upstream, to strengthen the link and create the conditions for a broader and free flow of information.

These days are therefore mainly dedicated to the organization of “over-exposure” meeting days, which will take place in early May 2018 at ESACM.

For more information contact jesennewald AT esacm.fr

2017-2018: Inés Moreno, new student researcher at EnsadLab Displays

EnsadLab Displays is pleased to welcome Inés Moreno as a student researcher in 2017-2018.

Plastic artist, Inés Moreno holds in 2006 the Higher National Diploma of Plastic Expression (Licenciatura en Bellas Artes, BAC+5) from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Bellas Artes, and in 2009 a Master 2 Research Master – History and Aesthetics of Dance (Thesis: Dance and Exhibition) from the University of Paris VIII, UFR Arts, Technologies, Esthetics.

In 2010-2012 she attended the doctoral course in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid – Museo Reina Sofia (Centro de Estudios), and in 2007 the Professional Training of Choreographic Artist (Ex.e.r.ce 07) with Xavier Le Roy Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon.

Versions, international workshop & lectures, 2016

What do we expect of the exhibitions, especially in the context of post-digital cultures? VERSIONS is an international practice, debate and critique workshop-conference to experiment and discuss exhibition forms that will take place at the Maison Populaire de Montreuil (5-16 Sept 2016). in dialogue with the venue’s team and with Vladimir Demoule and Marie Koch, the 2016 season exhibition curators. The process will be documented in real time and a publication will be edited after the event, in late 2016. Unlike a curatorial approach starting from a given project to organize works, Versions will take as its starting point suggestions made by stakeholders themselves, in order to reveal an experimentation of the exhibition’s “conditions of possibility”. Participants will work in groups of three for two weeks: a series of workshop days and two day of public debates, where the public is invited to take part in the discussions “What do we expect of the exhibitions?”

September 5-6, first workshop with Yuk Hui, philosopher, associated researcher at the Center for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Jan Kopp, artist, teacher (Esacm Clermont-Ferrand), Mathilde Roman, art critic, curator and teacher-researcher at Pavillon Bosio – École Supérieure d’Art de la ville de Monaco and the Displays team.

September 7th, first public panel “What do we expect of the exhibitions?” with Eli Commins, artist, coordinator for digital policy at French Culture Ministry, Jean Cristofol, philosopher and teacher-researcher at Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix en Provence, Yuk Hui, philosopher, associated researcher at the Center for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Jan Kopp, artist, teacher (Esacm Clermont-Ferrand), Claire Malrieux, artist, teacher (Ensci, Beaux-arts Hauts-de France) and researcher at EnsadLab, Mathilde Roman, art critic, curator and teacher-researcher at Pavillon Bosio – École Supérieure d’Art de la ville de Monaco, Ann Stouvenel, curator and head for visual arts at Mains d’Œuvres,

September 8-9, second workshop with Jean Cristofol, philosopher and teacher-researcher at Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix en Provence, Claire Malrieux, artist, teacher (Ensci, Beaux-arts Hauts-de France) and researcher at EnsadLab, Ann Stouvenel, curator and head for visual arts at Mains d’Œuvres and the Displays team.

September 12-13, third workshop with Milad Doueihi, historian and chairman for Digital humanities at University Paris-Sorbonne, Laura Gozlan, artist, Véronique Souben, curator and head of FRAC Haute-Normandie and the Displays team.

September 14th, second public panel “What do we expect of the exhibitions?” with Martin John Callanan, artist, Milad Doueihi, historian and chairman for Digital humanities at University Paris-Sorbonne, Laura Gozlan, artist, Guilhem Pratz, director and producer, Véronique Souben, curator and head of FRAC Haute-Normandie, Pau Waelder, art critic and curator, Marion Zilio, art critic, curator and head of Young International Artists art fair.

September 15-16, fourth workshop with Martin John Callanan, artist, Guilhem Pratz, director and producer, Pau Waelder, art critic and curator and the Displays team.

An event co-organized by the Displays research group, EnsadLab Research Laboratory and the Labex ICCA. The Displays research group is coordinated by Thierry Fournier (artist and curator, EnsadLab) and J. Emil Sennewald (art critic and journalist, ESACM, EnsadLab). EnsadLab / Displays students-researchers: Gaspard Bébié-Valérian, Thomas Cheneseau, Dorian Reunkrilerk. EnsadLab / Displays associated researchers: Pauline Gourlet (designer and postgraduate Université Paris 8), Rahaf Demashki (postgraduate Université Rennes 2). Thanks to Annie Agopian, Floriane Benjamin, Marie Koch, Vladimir Demoule and the Maison Populaire de Montreuil team.

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Publication: Research through exhibition and post-digital condition

English translation of the publication: Thierry Fournier, J. Emil Sennewald and Pauline Gourlet, Recherche par l’exposition et condition post-numérique, Proteus Journal 10 | 2016, (Le Commissariat comme forme de recherche / Curating as a form of research) [online].

Research through exhibition and post-digital condition

Thierry Fournier, J. Emil Sennewald and Pauline Gourlet
(Displays research group / EnsadLab Research Laboratory, EnsAD, Paris, France)

Thierry Fournier is an artist, curator and researcher; he heads the Displays/EnsadLab research group (Ensad research laboratory, PSL). J. Emil Sennewald is an art critic, journalist, and lecturer at the École supérieure d’art Clermont-Metropole; he co-coordinates the Displays/EnsadLab research group. Pauline Gourlet is a designer and PhD student at University of Paris 8, Displays/EnsadLab, Labex Arts-H2H. www.displays.ensadlab.fr

Abstract
If exhibition as practice is taken as a form of research, it has to be approached today regarding its post-digital condition, which is characterized by the overall presence of digitality and networks. In the following paper, we develop the effects of this condition. After showing how it has shifted exhibition-curating to curating in a broader sense and especially as curation, we are going to develop how it transformed interactions between actors, objects and spaces and furthermore changed methods and practices of exhibition. Rather than questioning curating, we understand exhibition as a “cognitive practice” triggering thinking and not just representing its results. How can “research through exhibition” activate an emancipation-process in regard to today’s economies of attention and digital industries? Our answer: By placing its constituting elements and agents in a transductive situation crystalizing the intra-active relations between subjects, contexts, objects, spaces, machines and apparatuses.

Keywords
Curating, curatorship, post-digital, emancipation, transduction

 

“And how could it be otherwise, since we wouldn’t have been read this text, in the best of cases, only after having visited the exhibition?” Hubert Damisch[1]

Under the influence of contemporary cultural industries, as institutions, art dealers and politicians seek to maximize the symbolic profit of the arts, as digital technologies are becoming the daily fare of museum education programs and of exhibition design[2], and as the spaces of decision-making authority are being renegotiated between cultural and scientific players under the label “research”[3], it becomes essential to raise the question of conditions. Research, culture, and exhibition conditions that are largely remodeled by the omnipresence of digital technologies and of the internet, which have not yet come to an end, but, as Hito Steyerl so aptly put it, “is all over”[4]. After the utopias, the promises and the ideologies of “new technologies”[5], after the ubiquity of digital technologies[6], after the experience economy and the attention economy[7], and finally, after the cultural sphere was fundamentally transformed to become a process that watches itself as it acts[8], how can the way of thinking exhibitions evolve and how can curating constitute a type of research?

In order to limit this article’s scope of analysis, we have concentrated here on art exhibitions. We will try to define what it is that characterizes a post-digital condition, and what this condition has changed so far in exhibition processes. We will then discuss what research through the exhibition would be, and attempt to outline the stakes of critical thinking through the exhibition and how the latter would be redefined by a post digital condition. We will subsequently be challenging possible re-appropriations of these apparatuses: how can artists and curators offer an emancipating experience?

The post-digital condition, curating and curation

We suppose, first of all, that the question of exhibition curation as a form of research must be reconsidered in relation to its post-digital condition[9]. This term refers to the situation in which digital technologies and the network have become widespread and constitute the framework for nearly all human actions. The prefix “post” does not qualify a notion of time (what would happen after the advent of digital technologies), but rather a condition – what happens when digital technologies are present everywhere[10].

On this particular point, recent history of the relation between art and digital technology bears witness to a significant evolution that qualifies and historically sets the term post-digital[11]. From the 60s to the 00s, one could witness the development of different approaches that treat digital technology in art mainly as a medium, and share the common objective of extending the expressive and experiential field of art through digital technology: net art, generative art, interactivity, etc. Frequently backed by an ideology of dematerialization that views “digital technology as a tool” – which also characterizes the economy and human sciences of the period – the logic behind these approaches can be qualified as “modern” in Bruno Latour’s sense of the word. This has actually been an obstacle to their acknowledgment by the contemporary art world, which is committed to materiality and art-works that distance themselves from technologies[12].

From the 00s on, artists began to develop or transpose digital technologies’ logics into works that increasingly use physical media (prints, installations, drawings, sculpture, etc.). These developments have successively been described by the terms post-internet[13], new aesthetics[14], neo-materialism[15], post-digital[16]. Beyond the differences in approaches that these designations involve, they are all indicative of the Internet’s ubiquity and of the digital’s obviously disruptive character, of a critique of techno-positivist accounts of innovation, and of an interest in recent materialist schools of thoughts, in particular the actor-network theory and speculative realism[17]. In the present paper, the term post-digital generically describes this set of transformations in the art world.

Curatorial practices have also evolved, in two consecutive phases. The first is the redefinition of exhibition curating as an authorial approach, which begun notably with Harald Szeemann (When Attitudes Become Form, 1969) and later became a major issue, as demonstrated by the increasing number of artists involved in this activity[18], and by the considerable theoretical production it has sparked over the last ten years[19].

A second phase that has, in contrast, seldom been documented in the academic field of curating, coincides with the emergence on the web of the concept of “content curation”, which involves selecting, editing and sharing content on a given subject. These practices are the result of the interactive evolution of the web and are directly connected to the specificity of digital images as conversational/interactive objects – understood as a documented interaction that becomes at least as important as the content it concerns[20]. After 2007, such practices have been encouraged by social networks and publication or content aggregation platforms (Tumblr, Pearltrees, Pinterest, etc.), and have become a major means of web participation that competes with ex-nihilo content creation. The verb “to curate” no longer belongs exclusively to the preserve of exhibition curation or of „knowledge economies“, and now refers to an increasing number of activities that involve selection in a wide range of fields[21], a marked departure that has been criticized as early as 2009[22].

Such an evolution could have been attributed to a simple shift in language, if artists and curators had not reclaimed it with platforms (such as Tumblr) that constitute spaces that are both personal (collection or experimentation spaces) and conversational (spaces of exchange, interaction and exhibition). We consider this evolution as a very important one, because it is in line with the culture of reinterpretation of images and forms that one can find in the works themselves. Certain platforms created by artists are claimed as works (Joe Hamilton for instance, with joehamilton.tumblr.com), in a logic of continuous flow that may concern the artist’s own productions, references found on the web, or texts; others are observatories (James Bridle’s New Aesthetic Tumblr[23], for instance) or art curation sites (Ubuweb, Rhizome, NewHive, etc.), others still are exhibition platforms (Speedshow site, created in 2010 by artist Aram Bartholl[24]). Here, once again, the limit between works and curation fades. In each of these configurations, what we are able to see is a perspective and a course that have no time delimitation, because their flow is constantly being updated; nor are they spatially bound, since they can be accessed anywhere, including in an exhibition.

There is a porosity throughout the network between the practices of art professionals and those of the general public. They share an active community dimension, a redefinition of materiality, a culture of accessibility and open-source through a critical vision of the concept of authorship – occasionally integrated into the perspective of a “collaborative turn”[25].

The years since 2010 have also witnessed the emergence of entirely online exhibitions (such as the digital art biennial, The Wrong) that bring together different forms of digital art works (net art, photography, gifs, videos, 3D works). To these, one can add selection and/or online art sales platforms (Artsy, Sedition) that assert themselves as spaces that showcase but also sell art, as well as any space where digital works are sold or exhibited through all inclusive, closed and non modifiable functions that simultaneously include screens, computers, required software and works ( Dad, Electric Objects, etc.). Access to works through these platforms has become a central issue, and frequently substitutes the physical experience of the exhibition[26]. Many gallery owners and curators invent continuities between the web and the physical space of the gallery, which moves away from the exclusive historical role of the white cube, in order to become a place of experiences and of more on-off social encounters[27]. On an editorial level, due to increasing circulation of low-run objects and to the porosity that exists between paper and online editions, publications are no longer documentary objects or proof of exhibitions but rather, they become complementary to exhibitions, or may even substitute them[28]. The exhibition of art is diffracted into a multitude of levels, whose physical object is merely one of these instances, that artists such as Caroline Delieutraz, Marisa Olson, Hito Steyerl or Artie Vierkant play on.

These evolutions (the turn operated by artists in relation to digital technologies; the relationships between curatorship, curating and curation; the porosity that exists between the web’s vernacular cultures and those of professionals; the diversification of exhibition spaces and of their accessibility; the evolution of publications), taken together, simultaneously involve a modification of the objects, roles and spaces concerned by exhibition curation. The direction towards which all of these transformations seem to be converging begins to resemble the direction that underlies “lifelike art”. Both value action and practice, the everyday and its processes, peer-learning and the re-appropriation of production methods. The post-digital condition therefore turns the exhibition into a process and an operation, rather than the end and the outcome of an action[29].

Faced with this dissemination of forms and this situation that liberates its protagonists, one can notice an opposite movement with the industrialization of the web. Access to cultural objects occurs in a context of attention economy lead by industries such as the GAFAM[30]: profiling and prescription, monetization of uses, tougher legal protections[31]. The extension of filter bubbles (restriction of a user’s environment to information he is assumed to like) means that access to a radical alterity is becoming increasingly rare. This evolution towards predictability is not specific to the web: an increasing number of cultural institutions adopt these rationales in order to increase their attendance. The limits between museum and data base fade: the growing importance of data serves a rhetoric of audiences’ supposed demand[32]. In parallel, this predominance of quantification leads to the emergence of an exhibition aesthetic that is relatively homogenous on a global level, in particular in the context of biennials and large institutions that have emerged over the last decade.

The exhibition as practice, research through art

This brief description of the post-digital context establishes the framework of our problem: beyond curation, what future can we expect for the exhibition as practice? To underline the importance of this evolution of the exhibition’s status, it is important to remember that as soon as they appeared in the second half of the 18th century in France and in England, art exhibits radically transformed artists and audiences. Let us also recall how the “court artist” became the “exhibition artist”, how his audience became both a consumer and a critic, evidencing the political challenges surrounding the French “salons” and the market stakes surrounding English galleries. One can view the evolution of the exhibition as a pivotal element of societal history: “the audience has become a new social body that has formed as a counter-authority”[33]. If today, the exhibition is considered a practice, one must refer back to this historical revolution and to the original meaning of the term “praxis”: the virtuous deed performed for the end goal being action. In this sense, the exhibition can also acknowledge as determining agents the multiplicity of its protagonists, at all levels: technicians, exhibition directors and designers, communications professionals, art educators, web masters, mobile app developers, audience segments (schools, groups), professionals (media), etc. Practice in this case is not considered merely from a social or political perspective, nor as a reconsideration of the relations between artists, works and “pratiqueurs”[34], but also and especially as a cognitive practice that prompts thought, rather than represents it. To approach the exhibition as a practice enables one to broaden the perspective, from its display or apparatus qualities towards it properties as an interface, in the wider sense of the word. This being directly connected to the exhibition’s post-digital condition, new forms of critique then become possible[35]. In other words, the exhibition’s post-digital condition creates a new condition that is critical of curating.

Taking the exhibition’s post-digital condition into consideration brings us to question the stakes of research through the exhibition, firstly by distinguishing it from art research (here, we will set aside the case of research on art, which falls into the areas of art history and theory). On the other hand, art research – which is currently being discussed in France in art schools and government departments[36] – is often understood as an opportunity to open up avenues towards knowledge that would not be accessible otherwise (“tacit knowledge”[37]); it concerns the artist’s own research, conducted within the scope of his personal practice; methodologies, matters and results are intimately connected to it. What makes this research particular is its singularity, which cannot be shared. Research through art is based on artistic methodologies and processes to develop one’s matter, hypotheses and questions. The concepts of serendipity[38] and of abductive reasoning[39] are in this case key words for research that will provide greater freedom in terms of its questions and their development, which can sometimes be surprising or unexpected. To research through art is to start from a practice in order to get to a theory that will be characterized by a techne-based approach, which concerns itself with the general organology and the rules that govern knowledge. We are calling here for a performative discursiveness that is not based on a linguistic or anthropocentric dimension, but rather on the relations between agents and their ability to make reality “come into action“. Reality is not treated as preexisting, but rather as a result of an “intra-action”[40]. In this sense, we see the post-digital condition also as a post-human condition: “a digital humanism”[41] that takes into account the objectivization, by digital technology, of what is human.

As a consequence, we can and we must open critical discourse to the artistic act of making (given that one of the characteristics of art is precisely that it does not dissociate practice and theory): it is no longer possible nor is it relevant today to convey a pre-conceptual state of art. A more adapted approach would be to consider on the same level different forms of thought (artistic, scientific, technical, and others) and objects, materials, data or the technological structures that condition them. This approach does not exclude “discursiveness”: on the contrary, in a “Foucauldian” sense, it broadens it, by increasing the field of its protagonists and by taking into account their interactions in the process of knowledge production. Concretely, the choice of a venue, the participants involved or the financiers will be considered as research objects, as will be the means implemented to transmit knowledge, reach out to an audience or communicate about an event. Processes such as Maria Eichhorn’s Money at the Kunsthalle Bern, 2001; the collective Relax (chianzera&hauser&co)’sDie Belege, Les Quittances, The Receipts, Kunsthaus Centre Pasquart Biel-Bienne, 2005; !Mediengruppe Bitnik’sSame same, watching algorithms – Cabaret Voltaire edition, 2015; or Damien Béguet and P. Nicolas Ledoux’s (since 2010) Ludovic Chemarin® project would constitute methodological examples of such research through the exhibition, completed by taking into account code, digital machinery and data flows, and the interconnections that make them possible.

It appears necessary to us to highlight that this approach is not incompatible with scientific research. Indeed, to oppose scientific and artistic research would amount to pitting against each other two fundamentally different epistemic fields: one could say that the former seeks truths, while the latter looks for attentions. On this particular point, art is a primordial practice of knowledge, a “practice of differentiation”, which is, therefore, intrinsically critical[42].

Unlike philosophy, art is also and above all a showcasing practice[43]. If knowledge becomes manifest in art through difference and demonstration/presentation, its medium is the exhibition. It is in this field that different forms of research can find a common interest, putting an emphasis on their specific epistemic approaches. We understand this interest as being emancipating. It thus becomes possible to speak of “thought through the exhibition” in a sense that questions the exhibition not only as a time-space structure, but also as a method. To think through the exhibition is to “think by exposing one’s thinking”, and supply the conditions that make it possible.

It seems to us then that one of the ways to approach the question of the future of the exhibition is to question the processes operating behind curatorial practices and to make them visible by reifying them, by questioning conditions and methodologies that are often implicit: a transactional situation, which implies a network of objects, procedures, production and valorization modes, agents, spaces and temporalities.

Transduction: an emancipation and re-appropriation method

How does the “seamless landscape” that has developed between digital technology and everyday life create new opportunities for emancipation through the exhibition? A first point of convergence appears in the relationship that exists between artists and the web, through the possibility of creating critical environments that escape the industrial – albeit cultural – standardization we mentioned above. And while our culture is undoubtedly one of software[44], it is also through the re-appropriation of code that this emancipation must take place. We therefore notice that the presence (or absence) of computer programs and of the network in the exhibition or in works remains a powerful marker of differentiation.

The second point is connected to the concept of “thought through the exhibition”: to induce a critical reflection by and on the exhibition project itself, going beyond the sum of works it presents. Some examples would be the Anri Sala exhibit in 2012 and the Pierre Huygue exhibit in 2013 at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the section held at La Sucrière at the Lyon Biennial in 2013, Ceryth Wyn Evans at the Serpentine Gallery (London) in 2014, Korakrit Arunanondchai at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) in 2015, Marcel Broodthaers at the Monnaie de Paris, also in 2015. For each of these exhibitions, questions regarding what an exhibition can achieve were raised by their very structures and the relations they brought about, regarding not only the works, but also the outside world. On the contrary, we often note that exhibitions that merely offer a thematic presentation do not bring much as exhibitions (all considerations regarding the works themselves asides), other than the verification of their statement, or even their submission to a prior rhetoric[45]. Here again, resistance to a thematic injunction directly inherited from certain cultural industries is all the more determining, as it is now shared as something that is taken as a given by a large number of public as well as private actors[46].

Faced with this reality, a possible method to begin to undertake a process of re-appropriation and research through the exhibition would be to apply the latter as a „transduction catalyst“. This term, borrowed from Gilbert Simondon[47], implies a crystallization among artists, critics, curators and audiences, and with the structures and programs: “according to Simondon, life is a type of relation”[48]. Research through the exhibition associates experimentation, discussion and demonstration situations in a single time and space unit; as such, it is not merely a display, but also a critical practice that challenges, in the Kantian sense, the conditions of possibility to exhibit. It is in this sense that we use the term emancipation: to leave behind the immaturity that we can ourselves be responsible for. This requires an awareness of codes and machines as agents of the exhibition, as well as abandoning any attitudes of technophobic ignorance, which is always very widespread and comfortably applied by many of the art world’s participants.

In conclusion, and in sum, the post-digital condition is characterized by a porosity between protagonists, objects and spaces, by self-referencing and the establishment of a process. Research through the exhibition seeks to bring about reflection on this condition by placing its participants and agents in transducting situations: subjects, contexts, objects, spaces, machines and displays. Its goal is to offer the exhibition as a way of thinking to its pratiqueurs.


Notes

[1] Damisch, Hubert, 1995, Traité du trait – tractatus tractus, Paris, Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux (authors’ translation).

[2] Desvallées, André, Mairesse, François, (dir.), 2007, Vers une redéfinition du musée ?, Paris, L’Harmattan; Mairesse, François, 2010, Le musée hybride, Paris, la Documentation française; Chaumier, Serge, 2014, “Vers la fin de l’exposition temporaire ?”, invisibl.eu, [on line], posted on February 3rd, 2014, accessed on March 6th, 2016, URL: invisibl.eu/fr/vers-la-fin-de-lexposition-temporaire

[3] Smith, Marquard, Holly, Michael Ann (dir.), 2009, What is research in the visual arts?: obsession, archive, encounter, Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute; Manci, Isabelle, 2014, “La recherche dans les écoles supérieures d’art”, Culture et Recherche, no. 130, [on line] posted on February 24th, 2015, accessed on March 4th, 2016. URL: www.culturecommunication.gouv.fr/var/culture/storage/pub/culture_et_recherche_130/index.htm

[4] Steyerl, Hito, 2015, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” in Aranda, Julieta, Kuan Wood, Brian et al. (dir), The Internet does not exist, Berlin, Sternberg Press.

[5] Turner, Fred, 2008, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

[6] Greenfield, Adam, 2006, Everyware: the dawning age of ubiquitous computing, Berkeley, New Riders.

[7] Citton, Yves (dir), 2014, L’Économie de l’attention, nouvel horizon du capitalisme ? Paris, La Découverte.

[8] Flusser, Vilém, 1992, Die Schrift: Hat Schreiben Zukunft? Göttingen, European Photography, chapter 18: “Digitale”, p. 138-145.

[9] Bosma, Josephine, 2014, “Post-Digital is Post-Screen: Arnheim’s Visual Thinking applied to Art in the Expanded Digital Media Field”, A Peer-Reviewed Journal About Post-Digital Research (APRJA), 3 (2014), N°1 [on line], accessed on February 26th, 2016, URL: www.aprja.net/?p=1892 ; Cramer, Florian, 2015, “What is post-digital” in Berry, David M., Dieter, Michael (dir.), Postdigital esthetics, Arts, computation and design, Londres, Palgrave Macmillan.

[10] Doueihi, Milad, 2012, Pour un Humanisme numérique, publie.net, [on line], published on June 19th, 2012, accessed on March 4th, 2016, p. 9.

[11] Cox, Geoff, 2014, “Prehistories of the Post-digital: or, some old problems with post-anything”, APRJA 3, n°1.

[12] On this same topic, see also Nicolas Bourriaud’s sentence in Esthétique relationnelle which durably marked (at least in France) digital approaches to art: “Art only exercises its critical duty with regard to technology from the moment it shifts its challenges. So the main effects of the computer revolution are visible today among artists who do not use computers.” Bourriaud, Nicolas, 2002, Relational Esthetics, translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, Les Presses du Réel, p. 67. See also:  Bishop, Claire, 2012, Digital Divide, ArtForum [on line] posted in 2012, accessed on February 10th, 2016, URL: https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201207&id=31944&pagenum=0

[13] Olson, Marisa, 2008, interview with Régine Debatty, We Make Money Not Art, [online], posted on March 28th 2008, accessed on February 26th, 2016, URL: we-make-money-not-art.com/how_does_one_become_marisa ; Mc Hugh, Gene, 2010, Post internet [online] posted between 2009 and 2011, accessed on February 10th, 2016. URL: www.linkartcenter.eu/public/editions/Gene_McHugh_Post_Internet_Link_Editions_2011.pdf ; Vierkant, Artie, 2010, The Image Object Post-internet [online], posted in 2010, accessed on December 15th, 2013, URL: jstchillin.org/artie/pdf/The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_us.pdf

[14] Bridle, James, 2011, Waving at the Machines, Web Directions, [on line], posted on December 5th, 2011, accessed on February 10th, 2016, URL: www.webdirections.org/resources/james-bridle-waving-at-the-machines

[15] Simon, Joshua, 2013, Neomaterialism, Berlin, Sternberg Press.

[16] Cramer, Florian, 2015, “What is post-digital” in Berry, David M., Dieter, Michael (dir.), Postdigital esthetics, Arts, computation and design, Londres, Palgrave Macmillan.

[17] Two examples among many others that might be mentioned: Latour Bruno, 1991, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique, Paris, La Découverte; et Harman, Graham et Meillassoux, Quentin, 2011, Philosophy in the Making, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

[18] As reflected in the distinction, which exists in French, between the terms “commissariat d’exposition” (which often describes an operation in the context of an institution) and “curatoriat” (used rather to describe the individual initiative of a curator as author).

[19] Jens Hoffmann in his article Le Commissariat d’exposition entre les lignes reveals that 292 books on this question were published between 2010 and 2014. Hoffmann, Jens, 2014, “Le Commissariat d’exposition entre les lignes”, Critique d’art [online], 41 | 2013, posted on June 24th, 2014, accessed on March 5th, 2016. URL: critiquedart.revues.org/8312. See also: Airault, Damien, C-E-A, Commissaires d’exposition associés (dir.), 2015, Réalités du commissariat d’exposition, Paris, Beaux-Arts de Paris éditions.

[20] Gunthert, André, 2015, “L’image conversationnelle. Les nouveaux usages de la photographie numérique”, L’Image partagée, Paris, Textuel.

[21] Rosenbaum, Steven, 2011, Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators, Londres, Mc Graw Hill.

[22] Williams, Alex, 2009, On the Tip of the Creative Tongue, The New York Times [online], posted on October 2nd, 2009, accessed on January 20th, 2016. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/fashion/04curate.html; Smith, Terry, 2012, Thinking Contemporary Curating, New York, Independent Curators International

[23] URL: http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com, accessed on February 20th, 2016

[24] The Speed Show exhibition series site is dedicated to online works and is open in a cybercafé for one night. The exhibition format is free and can be used by anyone, anywhere. URL: http://speedshow.net, accessed on February 23rd, 2016.

[25] Lind, Maria, 2007, “The collaborative turn”, Lind, Maria, Billing, Johanna,  Nilsson, Lars (éd.), Taking The Matter Into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices, London, Black Dog Publishing, p. 15-31; Kestner, Grant H., 2011, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, Durham, Duke University Press.

[26] On this topic, see curator Lindsay Howard’s interview, “Curating Internet Art, Online and IRL”, Observer Culture [online] published on February 25th, 2016, accessed on February  25th 2016 URL: observer.com/2016/02/curating-internet-art-online-and-irl

[27] Saltz, Jerry, 2013, “Saltz on the Death of the Gallery Show”, Vulture, March 30th, 2013, [on line], published in 2013, accessed on March 4th, 2016. URL:
www.vulture.com/2013/03/saltz-on-the-death-of-art-gallery-shows.html

[28] Ludovico, Alessandro, 2012, Post-digital print: the mutation of publishing since 1894, Eindhoven, Onomatopee.

[29] Kaprow, Allan, 1993, Essays on the blurring of art and life, Berkeley University Press, p. 201.

[30] Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.

[31] Jeune, Raphaële, 2013, “Instant, anomie, neutre, indétermination: l’événement au temps du bégaiement du présent et de l’innovation forcée”, Optical Sound, n°1, Fall 2013,  [online], accessed on March 5th 2016, URL: raphaelejeune.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/opticalsound-instant-anomies-raphaele-jeune.pdf

[32] Pepi, Mike, 2014, Is a Museum a Database?: Institutional Conditions in Net Utopia, e-flux magazine 12/2014 [online], accessed on December 5th, 2014, URL:
www.e-flux.com/journal/is-a-museum-a-database-institutional-conditions-in-net-utopia

[33] Bätschmann, Oskar, 1997, Ausstellungskünstler: Kult und Karriere im modernen Kunstsystem, Cologne, DuMont Buchverlag, p. 14.

[34] Mahé, Emmanuel, 2012 “Les pratiqueurs”, in Fourmentreaux, Jean-Paul (dir), L’Ère post-média. Humanités digitales et Cultures numériques, Paris, Hermann, p. 117-136.

[35] Andersen, Christian Ulrik, Pold, Søren, Manifesto for a Post-Digital Interface Criticism, [on line], published on January 10th 2014, accessed on June 16th 2015, URL: mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/tne/pieces/manifesto-post-digital-interface-criticism

[36] This discussion is more advanced in the anglosphere, where, since Howard Singerman’s Art Subjects, in 1999, it also suggests a critical view of art education. Christopher Frayling, in 1993, attempted to structure said discussion and the stereotypes that are associated to it; his main line of questioning on “ who is the game maker”  remains pertinent to this day. See: Frayling, Christopher, 1993, “Research in Art and Design”, Royal College of Art Research Papers 1.

[37] See: Polanyi, Michael, 1998, Personal knowledge: towards a post-critical philosophy, London, Routledge and  Gourlay, Stephen, 2002, Tacit knowledge, tacit knowing or behaving?, Kingston upon Thames, [online], URL: http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/2293, p.1–24.

[38] Illich, Ivan, 1968, To Hell With Good Intentions, [online], published on September 18th, 2005, accessed on March 5th 2016, URL: www.swaraj.org/illich_hell.htm

[39] Abductive reasoning is a form of logical inference starting from an observation and searching intuitively for an explanation that involves eliminating early on any solution that is considered improbable, unlike in systematic exploration. It has become lately of new interest in computer science and artificial intelligence research.

[40] Barad, Karen, 1999, “Agential realism: feminist interventions in understanding scientific practices (1998)”, Biagioli, Mario, The science studies reader, New York, Routledge, pp. 1–11.

[41] Doueihi, Milad, 2012, Pour un Humanisme numérique, publie.net, [on line], published on June 19th 2012, accessed on March 4th 2016, p. 9.

[42] Mersch, Dieter, 2015, Epistemologies of aesthetics, Zürich – Berlin, Diaphanes.

[43] Mersch, Dieter, 2009, “Kunst als epistemische Praxis”, in Bippus, Elke (dir), Kunst des Forschens: Praxis eines ästhetischen Denkens, Zürich, Diaphanes, p. 27-39.

[44] Manovitch, Lev, 2013, Software takes command, New York, Bloomsbury.

[45] “A theme amounts to imposing limits and producing an order by which each work must stand- and hold its ground”. Chaillou, Timothée, 2003, When the fairy tales never ends [online], posted in 2003, accessed on February 19th, 2016. URL: www.timotheechaillou.com/reviews/when-the-fairy-tales-never-ends

[46] One could also mention a certain project and pitch culture, brought about by systems of aid and subsidies that drive artists and curators to define thematic and easily resumable entries in order to achieve acceptance of both financiers and audiences.

[47] Simondon, Gilbert, 2005, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, Grenoble, Éditions Jérôme Millon; Hui, Yuk, 2015, “Towards a Relational Materialism. A Reflection on Language, Relations and the Digital”, Digital Culture & Society 1 (2015), p. 131-148.

[48] Boucher, Marie-Pier, 2012, “Infra-Psychic Individualization: Transductive Connections and the Genesis of Living Techniques”, de Boever, Arne, Murray, Alex, Roffe, Jon, Woodward, Ashley (dir.), Gilbert Simondon: being and technology, Edinburg, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 92-109, here p. 99 (authors’ translation).

Panel 2015 #03: Experimentation and Audiences

How do audience expectations and practices evolve? June 4th, 2015, EnsAD.

With Eli Commins (author and stage director/ director, Digital policy coordination officer, Directorate general of artistic creation, French Ministry of Culture), Nathalie Candito (Head of Assessment, Musée des Confluences, Lyon), Raphaële Jeune (curator, Art to be) and François Mairesse (museologist, professor at Université of Paris 3, CERLIS/ICCA). Moderators: Thierry Fournier (artist, curator and researcher) and J. Emil Sennewald (critic and journalist, lecturer), heads of the Displays project.

How do audience expectations and practices evolve? How does the distribution (or reclaiming) of roles among artists, curators, critics, exhibition designers and planners develop? How can these be related to the context of institutional critique? How can we experiment with audiences or in the presence of viewers? What are the stakes involved in participation, particularly those of social networks in museums and exhibitions?

Panel 2015 #02: Spaces

How do exhibition spaces and venues evolve? May 29th, 2015, EnsAD.

With Jean Cristofol (philosopher and researcher, ESA Aix-en-Provence), Mari Linnman (curator, New Patrons program, Contexts, Paris) and Pau Waelder (critic, curator and researcher Palma de Mallorca). Moderators: Thierry Fournier (artist, curator and researcher) and J. Emil Sennewald (critic and journalist, lecturer), heads of Displays project.

How do exhibition spaces and venues evolve? Given that nowadays, a large part of audience experiences with the arts occur online, how does the exhibition’s distinctiveness evolve? What kinds new forms are being invented in the dialogue between real space and the network? How can the shared spaces of the exhibition and individual web practices be connected? How can criticism and emancipation in relation to the rationale of attention economics be constructed? How can relations between museums, online exhibitions and data bases be qualified?

Panel 2015 #01: New Objects

How do the exhibition’s objects evolve? March 30th, 2015, MAC Créteil.

With Inke Arns (curator and director, Hartware Medienkunstverein, Dortmund), Charles Carcopino (curator, Exit festival and MAC Créteil), Marc-Oliver Gonseth (curator Ethnography museum of Neuchâtel), Emmanuel Mahé (research manager, EnsAD), François Mairesse (professor, University of Paris 3, CERLIS/ICCA), Claire Malrieux (artist and lecturer, ENSCI, Paris), and Omer Pesquer (exhibition designer and lecturer, University of Paris 3). Moderators: Thierry Fournier (artist, curator and researcher) and J. Emil Sennewald (critic and journalist, lecturer), heads of the Displays project.

How do the exhibition’s objects evolve: from physical objects and works towards gestures, performative situations, experimentations and processes? Do e-publishing, mobile platforms, the network, reproducibility and simulation transform curatorial forms? How can co-creation experiences with exhibition planning and design find their place in art? What types of critical approaches do these new objects require?

MAC Créteil, partner of the project, hosted Displays during the Exit festival, in its new experimentation space, “ MAC Plus”.

Displays Panels 2015

Displays organized three panels during the spring of 2015. They were designed to launch the project, identify problems, challenge realities and created tools for what was lies ahead. The meetings will serve as an initial space for discussion and prefiguration of the three main themes, and for collaboration with guests. An e-publication will be edited after the meetings, to serve as a documentation tool, a work tool and a development resource.

Panel 01 : New objects – March 30th, MAC Créteil

Panel 02: Exhibition spaces, May 29th, 2015, EnsAD

Panel 03: Experimentations and audiences, June 4th, 2015, EnsAD

EnsadLab Diip Panel 2014: Experiment the Museum

Expériment the Museum, panel organized on June, 20th 2014 at Ensad within the frame of EnsadLab / Diip research program, organized by Emmanuel Mahé, head of Ensad research and Thierry Fournier, artist, curator and lecturer.

How to experiment in the museum, or how to experiment the museum – for those who run them and for those who practice them as well? How far can you try, take risks, make mistakes, as a designer but also as a visitor? How to implement specific conditions for innovation and collective invention through time, space and organization? A publication was created in real time during the panel. Designed and built by the team of g-u-i designers with Lucile Haute, Tom Huet and Jean-Francois Robardet, it is published on Lulu.com. Thus this innovative experience extends the notion of experimentation in the editorial field.

Participants

This panel was conceived as an intensive discussion session during one day, between the audience and several guests: Samuel Bausson (co-fonder of the Museomix project), Abla Benmiloud-Faucher (head of parnerships, direction of cultural partnerships, Orange), Xavier Boissarie (founder and head, Orbe and lecturer, Paris), Noémie Breen (head of multimedia conception and production unit, Musée du Louvre, Paris), Nathalie Candito (head of publishing and valorisation, Musée des Confluences, Lyon), Anne Lamalle (head of digital cultural projects, RMN, Louvre, Louvre-Lens), Jean-Pascal Marron (head for multimedia projects, Nîmes Métropole). Moderators: Emmanuel Mahé and Thierry Fournier.

[Translation in progress]

Protocole : trois espaces pour une publication en direct

Pour permettre la création de la publication dans le même temps que la discussion, la journée d’étude est répartie en trois espaces :

Colloque

La journée d’études a été exclusivement consacrée à des échanges libres autour de questions choisies, le public peu nombreux étant invité à participer aux débats. Chacun avait pu prendre préalable connaissance des activités des invités, afin d’entrer directement dans le vif du sujet. L’absence de de keynote ou de vidéoprojection permettait de privilégier les discussions. Les invités partagent une table en « U » tournée vers le public. Quatre écrans dispersés dans la salle donnent à voir l’élaboration de la publication en direct, dans la pièce voisine.

Espace d’édition

Relié à l’espace de conversation par une retransmission audio, un secrétaire prend en note les notions abordées. Ces notes sont ensuite réparties entre trois postes de modeleurs qui vont en proposer une représentation. En fin de processus, un éditeur sélectionne les représentations, réécrit la note prise pour en faire une légende et recompose ligne par ligne la séquence de discussion.

Espace de restitution

Une sélection de modelages et le chemin de fer de la publication sont exposés aux participants et spectateurs, à la fin de la journée.

Publication

Commander la publication sur Lulu, 68 pages, couverture souple, prix 5.62 €.

Réalisée en direct pendant la journée d’études, cette publication propose un compte rendu sélectif de ses discussions. Cette expé­rience innovante prolonge ainsi la notion d’expéri­men­tation dans le champ éditorial. Un fil vertical associe des phrases-clefs notées au vol, une sélection issue du live tweet, des photographies et des modelages en plasticine figurant des concepts ou situations. Sa consultation peut être accompagnée de l’écoute du verbatim audio, ci-dessous.

Verbatim audio de la rencontre

Écouter l’ensemble des discussions de la journée d’études, chapitré par les différentes questions abordées.


Présentations générales

Expérimenter le musée

Quelles expériences de rupture ?

Où est l’expérimental ?

Quel rôle pour les artistes ?

Introduction après-midi

Quels modèles de collaboration ?

Quel espace existe-t-il pour les erreurs ?

L’expérimentation juridique

Comment évaluer les expérimentations

Conclusion : de quoi peut-on rêver ?

Organisateurs et modérateurs

Emmanuel Mahé, directeur de la recherche Ensad http://www.ensad.fr
Thierry Fournier, artiste, curateur et enseignant-chercheur (EnsadLab, Ensa Nancy, Sciences Po), http://www.thierryfournier.net

Intervenants

Jean-François Robardet, artiste plasticien, reportage photographique
Lucile Haute, Ensad, live tweet

Conception et réalisation de la publication

Benoît Verjat (artiste, designer et étudiant- chercheur à EnsadLab), Tanguy Wermelinger (éditeur et designer tanguywermelinger.com), Nicolas Couturier, Bachir Soussi-Chiadmi, Angeline Ostinelli, Sarah Garcin, Julien Gargot (designers, g-u-i.net), Tom Huet (scénographe et concepteur lumière et étudiant-chercheur à EnsadLab, tomhuet.com), Anne Sophie Milon (illustratrice et animatrice, anne-sophie-milon.com), Hélène Bertin (artiste).