[Fall 2026]
Steve Giasson, Nouvelles nouvelles performances invisibles
By Karl-Gilbert Murray
Online
25.11.2025 — 14.05.2026
[EXCERPT]
For six months, Steve Giasson posted online, on a twice-weekly basis – on Tuesdays and Thursdays – a corpus of minimalist performances articulated around conceptual statements. This project, Nouvelles nouvelles performances invisibles, was an extension of one undertaken in 2015 and 2016 with Dare-Dare, then revived in 2020 and 2021 with Le Lieu, centre en art actuel.
Presented as a continuous virtual exhibition on social media and two dedicated websites, the group of fifty actions was deployed in a private space, a gallery, with no public in attendance. This absence, far from being simply a retreat, operated as a critical apparatus probing the paradigm of co-presence, historically a component of action art. The performance therefore fell within a broader field in which context and statement take precedence over direct experience. Disseminated in a flow of images, the event produced a deferred temporality, inviting viewers to reflect on the limits of the perceptible and on how artworks circulate in an era in which they are heavily mediatized.
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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 133 – INTIMACIES ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here : Steve Giasson, Nouvelles nouvelles performances invisibles ]
Art critic and historian Karl-Gilbert Murray has published numerous essays, catalogue pieces, and exhibition pamphlets. As a curator, he has organized more than twenty exhibitions in Canada. In his field of specialization, bearing on reflections about identity, he explores intersections between gender studies and the questions underlying alternative sexualities, particularly gay sexualities, in the visual arts.