Art of Research

Stephanie Comilang, k.g. Guttman, Catherine Lescarbeau and Thérèse Mastroiacovo

From September 1 to November 5, 2022
Opening on September 8 at 5 pm
Publication launch on November 5 at 3 pm

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.

Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at transmediale (Berlin), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), Tai Kwun (Hong Kong), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Tate Modern (London), and Haus der Kunst (Munich). She was awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.

k.g. Guttman is a settler Canadian researcher, artist, and mother based in Tiohtiá:ke/ Montréal. She is a graduate of the PhDArts program of Leiden University and the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (Netherlands). She has received funding through SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) for artistic research that considers territoriality discourse, choreographic practice, and site-specific interventions.

Diverse invitations that bridge dance and visual art contexts include exhibitions at Gallery TPW and Blackwood Gallery (Toronto), VIVA! Art Action, RIPA, and La Centrale (Tiohtiá:ke/ Montréal), Musée d’art de Joliette, Klupko (Amsterdam), Espace Khiasma, Palais de Tokyo and Point Éphémère (Paris). Her choreographic residencies and commissions include l’Agora de la danse and Tangente (Tiohtiá:ke/ Montréal), the Canada Dance Festival and Dancemakers (Toronto), the University of Sonora (Hermosillo), Kunstencentrum BUDA (Kortrijk).

k.g. Guttman’s role as educator is intertwined with her artistic practices. From 2008 to 2013. Guttman was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Contemporary Dance at Concordia University, and in 2015 she taught in the photography department at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (Netherlands). k.g. Guttman worked as a professional dancer with the company Le Groupe Dance Lab under the direction of Peter Boneham from 1999 to 2005, and freelanced with Lynda Gaudreau, Louise Bédard, Antonija Livingstone, among others.

Catherine Lescarbeau is currently pursuing a PhD in Études et pratiques des arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She has participated in several solo and group exhibitions and presented various performances in Québec and France (Galerie UQO, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, La Mirage, Fonderie Darling, FRAC Lorraine). As a multidisciplinary artist, she is interested in the relationship between conceptual art and institutional criticism, as well as the relevance of these approaches today. Her most recent research focuses on the houseplant. By focusing her research on this object, Lescarbeau aims to develop an interface that allows her to reflect on the relationship between culture and nature within corporate and institutional spaces.

Thérèse Mastroiacovo’s work is about art as an idea, artistic process as methodology. It is about the precarious relationship art has to its own definition, open, half open, or slightly open for re-classification at any given time. The varying degrees of openness create space in-between, a space that gives way to meanderings, processes and procedures. Her work is situated here, in a space of potential created in the middle of preexisting structures. It is this — this large, large thing stated so, so plainly — that makes her work both familiar and unknowable.

The publication Art of Research was made possible with the support of Periculum. Foundation for Contemporary Art.