Discussion/Table-ronde

Facillitator:
Amber Berson (Curator and Ph.D. Candidate)

Invited participants:
Andrea Joy Rideout (Edgy Women)
Catherine Lalonde M. (La Centrale)
Martine Lauzier (Skol)
Sophie Le-Phat Ho (Festival Les HTMlles)
Anne-Marie Proulx (Artiste)
Libby Shea (Articule)

Experimental practices and ethics in the (invisible) administrative work of managing an organisation

The participants are invited to do a short presentation on the reality of administative coordination in artist-run centres.
We often discuss the duties and responsibilities of administrators ( who are often women ) without discussion of the specific context of experimental self-governance associated with the mandate of artist-run centres. Invited participants are artists, researchers, critics and administrators. Their other commonality is that they ground their practices ( artistic and administrative ) in an interest in political and feminist issues. Which strategies does each put in place ? How does their artistic approach and their political interests influence their manner of administering the centres in which they work ?

Presented in association with the exhibition Les résolutions by Anne-Marie Proulx, a project in which poetic and political truths emerge from administrative documents found after decades in the archives of La Centrale. Anne-Marie Proulx sees the archives as material to make images and tell stories. During a residency in the archives of La Centrale, she examined the administrative documents and artist files in order to find extracts imprinted with accidental poetry. Les résolutions presents itself as a collection of these chosen pieces : a few well laid-out words, dated affirmations, incomplete correspondences, existential problems and miraculous resolutions.

Amber Berson is interested in the idea of utopia and issues of labour, diversity and equality within artist-run centres. She is working on a PhD on that subject in Art History at Queens University. She works at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art; is on the editorial committee of .dpi, a feminist journal of digital art and culture; and sits on the Board of Directors at SKOL. Most recently she organized the Montreal edition of the Art and Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon and curated TrailMix (2014) and *~._.:*JENNIFER X JENNIFER*:.~(2013) at Eastern Bloc; The Annual Art Administrator’s Relay Race (2013); and The Wild Bush Residency (2012-ongoing), in Val David Quebec and Amden, Switzerland.