The Art of Research project originated with a desire to valorize those artistic practices based on research and experimentation, from the idea of resisting the reflex to cover up the reflexive portion, the artistic posture so essential to developing a creative project—an artwork. It is thus a question of bringing forth this muted behind-the-scenes, to cast light on those untilled moments, moments of sway, if not of tension, between the conceptualization of a project and its realization.

Something unique has been instilled over the course of this initiative, which is that in granting me the privilege of infiltrating their research process, the artists have taken directions that forge room for the other: the person who looks, who visits, who reads, who enters the work. While art plays out a priori through a rapport of attraction that may very well remain on the surface, the artists gathered here have placed value on the welcoming, the openness, the generosity required by the gesture of allowing the other to enter in, visit, appropriate, manipulate, and even leave with a piece of the work. Difficult to convey in French, the equivocal meaning of the English word please often came to mind during my conversations with the artists. Please—which is as much about pleasing, seducing, satisfying, as it is about showing respect, a certain protocol, or sometimes an element of deference—seems to generate an interesting image of the shift instigated by an approach focused on research. To the "I want to please" is added a "Please come in." Without depriving ourselves of seduction, such a call suggests an important commitment to practice in its evolutionary process of research since at any moment an unknown can slip in.

In choosing research as the leitmotiv for this project, we wanted to offer the artists a climate that would privilege creation while also highlighting how Dazibao's approach is particularly rooted in in-depth and long-term relationships with artists. In this perspective of making room for the preliminary stages of a project and accompanying the artists throughout its development, our reflections are guided by the stance that research shouldn’t be compromised in the interest of what is functional since the actual function of research is to explore, to propose new paradigms. In this sense, Dazibao wishes to offer a free zone, set apart from the influences of normative knowledge, an experimental space for artistic thought, critical research and non-conforming production of new knowledge. It is therefore a matter of opening up a speculative, alternative space, independent of the rhetoric of requisite pertinence or socio-economic effectiveness. — FC

An exhibition prepared by France Choinière for Dazibao.

Art of Research is divided into three components: the present exhibition, the notebooks that testify to the research undertaken by each of the artists, and a forthcoming publication documenting the works produced, which, brought together, will form a single object.