Dissolving your ear plugs

Curators : Maud Jacquin and Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre

From June 11 2023 to September 4 2023

About —

The group exhibition Dissolving your ear plugs presents projects by twenty-two solo and duo artists from Québec, Canada, and abroad who address the core principles behind the work of Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016), an experimental musician and composer who formed her practice on a singular listening concept she called “Deep Listening.” The title is a reference to one of Oliveros’ scores, “Dissolving your ear plugs,” which singlehandedly sums up the driving impetus of her work. The first part of this project will open at the Musée d’art de Joliette in June, followed by a second exhibition later this fall at Bétonsalon – centre d’art et de recherche, in Paris, co-curated by Émilie Renard (director of Bétonsalon). At the Musée d’art de Joliette, the public is invited to consider the perceptual and political dimensions of three musical terms: noise, resonance, and dissonance freed from convention. From these musical concepts, as embodied in Oliveros’s work, we ask the following question: how can a sensorial event transform our relationships and thus constitute an intrinsically political experience?

In keeping with Oliveros’s research, this exhibition involves a concept of listening that is defined in the broadest sense of the term—in other words, one that extends to the body as a whole and concerns our relationship to ourselves, others, and our environment. Through audio works, installations, participatory works, videos, sculptures, and photographs, the exhibition will make us reflect on how the practice of listening can redistribute power relationships and increase our capacity for togetherness and connection with others and with our surroundings. In concrete terms, the works in this exhibition will help audiences feel the transformative power of listening, both from an individual and social perspective. A series of performances will complement the works on view in the gallery.

Bilingual booklet

Artists —

Tarek Atoui, le désert mauve (Charline Dally and Gabrielle Harnois-Blouin), Marie-Michelle Deschamps and Corinne René, Julia E. Dyck, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Nik Forrest, Lola Gonzalez, Anna Holveck, Mikhail Karikis, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, Violaine Lochu, Abdessamad El Montassir, Hanna Sybille Müller, Pauline Oliveros, Lauren Tortil, Sandra Volny, Daniel Weintraub and IONE, Christopher Willes.

Biographies of the co-curators —

Maud Jacquin is an art historian and curator. With Sébastien Pluot, she directs Art by Translation, an international research and exhibition program involving partner institutions in four countries and participating artists engaged in a post-master’s program carried by the art schools of Cergy and Angers.

From 2015 to 2019, they developed a multidisciplinary research around a work by Alison Knowles, The House of Dust, and reactivated its generative potential through several group exhibitions, colloquia and performances. In 2016 and 2017, Maud Jacquin was co-artistic director of the Cneai, in Pantin and, before that, associate curator of Residency Unlimited, an artist residency in New York.

She completed her master’s degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and her PhD at University College London. Her research, published in various contexts, focuses on moving image and performance, feminist histories and theories, and theories of narrative and translation. Her dissertation focused on the politics of narrative in feminist experimental film and video, with a particular emphasis on the English scene of the 1970s and 1980s.

Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre holds an M.A. in Art Studies from the Université du Québec à Montréal and a B.A. in Visual Arts from the University of Ottawa. Appointed curator of contemporary art at the Musée d’art de Joliette in 2017, she has since produced more than twenty exhibitions, including projects with artists Kapwani Kiwanga, Shannon Bool, Jin-me Yoon, Monique Régimbald-Zeiber and Irene F. Whittome, many of which have circulated throughout Quebec, Canada and internationally. She is particularly interested in identity, cultural issues as well as questions of performativity and representation that problematize the intersections between reality and fiction.

This exhibition is co-produced with Bétonsalon – centre for art and research with the support of the ADAGP, Copie Privée, l’Institut français, the ministère des Relations internationales et de la Francophonie du Québec and the ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires étrangères de la République française, in the context of the Commission permanente de coopération franco-québécoise (CPCFQ), and the Canada Council for the Arts.