The Québec city contemporary art biennial.
Curator : Lisanne Nadeau.
The Québec city contemporary art biennial
Espace GM du 509, rue Saint-Joseph Est
Québec, Canada
www.manifdart.org/manif4
The numerous tools and means of communication developed over the last two decades confront us with previously unheard-of interpersonal rapports. Electronic mediation marks our human relationships, simultaneously spurring us to question our self-image and the previously standard links that existed between the contemporary subject and his or her environment. Because our former means of communication sustained the idea of distance and territoriality, the Internet and the instantaneous transmission of information bring with them an unparalleled space-time upset in which concepts of solitude and exchange are profoundly reinvented. What, then, of our zones of affinity, of our attempts at closeness or dialogue ?
At the core of these new inter-subjective means, sometimes intimate, sometimes anonymous, even fictional, it is obvious that a tangible attainment of the other constitutes a hypothesis that is constantly put to the test.
If the 90s was considered a decade of the aesthetics of communication, if a certain relational aesthetic subsequently swept the entire landscape of contemporary art in Québec, what is to be made of the representation and instrumentalization of our interpersonal relationships ? What is to be made of attaining the other when that other singularizes himself and enters the destabilizing territory of the intimate ?
At the heart of the theme of this 4th Manif, the second person singular conjugates this new alterity. Addressed not only from the angle of distinctness, the otherness we are dealing with here is inseparable from a process of dialogue. The interrogation is located within this interface, which inexorably unites self and the other. From the couple who met by chance, from the expectative of the other to his or her rejection, from merger to rupture, from the real or fictional meeting, human communication is becoming a vital issue for creators in visual arts.
