Exhibited for the first time in Canada at UQAM Centre de design, the exhibition TOTAL SCREEN, features Jean Baudrillard’s photographs in conversation with pieces by Adam Basanta, Charlie Doyon, Clint Enns, Mishka Henner + Vaseem Bhatti, Penelope Umbrico, and Xuan Ye. The omnipresence of screens in our societies and daily lives is questioned in order to reveal the topical and critical—even subversive—potential of the philosopher’s thought, as well as its interpretation and appropriation by several generations of artists and designers on the international scene.
The exhibition
At a time when the explosive evolution of our visual practices relays the major transformation of our relationship to images, this exhibition explores the screen as an interface for virality, simulation, surveillance, and implosion. As these concepts developed by Jean Baudrillard are embodied in his own photographic practice that is firmly anchored in his time—before the advent of Web 2.0—the exhibition proposes to update these main motifs, themes and approaches in the face of contemporary technologies and uncertainties. The philosopher’s photographic snapshots will share the stage (and the screens) with the installations of four invited international artists (Adam Basanta, Mishka Henner/Vaseem Bhatti, and Penelope Umbrico), as well as with the work of the three winners of the competition for emerging artists and designers (Charlie Doyon, Clint Enns, and Xuan Ye), all of whom critically and reflectively expand on and rethink the philosopher’s observations and intuitions for the digital age and its exponential multiplication of images.
Through photographs, projections, and installations, the ÉCRAN TOTAL/TOTAL SCREEN exhibition features three distinct experiences of mediation. The first one is a very ‘real’, physical exhibition at the Centre de design, where art installations seem to wait in quiet contemplation alongside the images of Jean Baudrillard and flanked by his aphorisms. The second one is an outdoor installation at the Centre de design, where the exhibited pieces are revealed in all their hyperreality, exacerbating their absent presence by proxy. The third experience is that of the reimagined exhibition, progressively and partially re-mediated online, and accessible from a distance within a totally fabricated dimension: that of the total screen that surrounds us today.
Public activities
In conjunction with the exhibition, a series of conferences, round tables, and workshops will be held from 18 to 25 May 2021, exploring the different roles and forms of the screen in our daily social and cultural practices.
French and English
For more information: ecrantotal.uqam.ca
2021 Venice Architecture Biennale
TOTAL SCREEN / ÉCRAN TOTAL will been included in the program of events curated by Arts Letters & Numbers (ALN) in the Virtual Pavilion of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Book your visit here: Free registration
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