Photo : “I asked the students in my French class to read a text by René Lévesque.” Adam Kinner, 2017.

OUTSIDE | Performing the Sovereign and the Foreign at Quebec’s Border

An exhibition curated by Adam Kinner

January 17 - March 10, 2018

Opening reception: Wednesday, January 17 from 6 to 8 PM

 

The upcoming exhibition at Artexte experiments with the paradoxical notion of the outside. At once an escape and an inevitable recuperation, at once an impossible imaginary and the only option for a future, the notion of an outside animates and distinguishes artistic, cultural and political practices. What is at stake in this delimitation between inside and outside, this world and others? We want to leave, but how and where to?

Starting from the idea that the outside is a performance, this exhibition brings together traces of actions that rethink leaving, that perform outness in all its circumscribed and impossible glory. Coming from jazz improvisation, the term outness is most directly understood as a temporary leaving (of the harmony, the rhythm, or the melody) that produces the enclosure it simultaneously escapes or denies. Across the borders of nations, institutions, collections, disciplines, careers and lives, outness—here—is a multiplicity of practices that help to redraw boundaries and rethink our enclosures.