Le devenir-œuvre d’art : une analyse processuelle d’une expérience curatoriale en arts médiatiques

This dissertation aims to strengthen the existing dialogue between art studies and curatorial studies through communication sciences, and more precisely, through the analysis of the interactions that take place between human and other-than-human actors composing the process of conception and realization of an art exhibition. The exhibition Femynytees, that I co-curated, was on display during the summer of 2018 in Montreal and was specially conceived as the fieldwork for this experience.   Throughout the creation of Femynytees, I was able to observe a phenomenon that I propose to call the becoming-artwork, to which this dissertation devotes particular attention. By this, I mean a relational phenomenon by which the work, as created by the artist, is put in relation with the "curatorial" (von Bismarck and Rogoff, 2012; Martinon, 2013), considered here as a mode of knowledge engendered during the production of a specific curatorial project. This encounter generates transitions in the work that allow it to be understood as a path (Souriau, 2009), thus becoming a process that can be defined as both artwork and curatorial at the same time.   To observe this phenomenon, I adopt a theoretical approach, inspired by the new materialisms, which proposes that the curatorial be conceived as a set of “material-discursive practices” (Barad, 2003). These practices are at the origin of the changes that occur with the artwork when it is brought into contact with a particular curatorial process. According to this perspective, artists, curators, visitors, installation choices, exhibition spaces, and any other element related to the setting in motion of such an event, are part of the curatorial and are thus taking part in its material-discursive practices.  Moreover, this research focuses on media art practices, as this type of art is considered to be more permeable to the curatorial because of the relative flexibility of its materialization process, as well as the collaborative aspect of the system in which it is generally produced. The term "media arts" refers here to practices that mobilize media technologies – that is, electrical, electronic or digital technologies – in the creation of an artwork.  From a methodological point of view, the becoming-artwork is analyzed from a ventriloqual perspective on communication (Cooren, 2013), an approach that makes it possible to identify the complexification of voices (Mazzei and Jackson, 2012) that participate in this phenomenon. Following an analysis of conversations held during studio visits and meetings between curators and artists, emails exchanged between artists and curators, and interviews with 30 of the visitors, this dissertation shows how the fundamental relationships at the heart of the becoming-artworks concretely operate in the case of a media art exhibition. It is thus a situated (Haraway, 1988), relational, and processual research that positions communication as constitutive of all reality (Cooren, 2012).

Keyphrases: Curatorial, Artwork, Becoming artwork, Material-discursive practices, Exhibition, Path, Processual analysis, Relational analysis, Media arts