[Winter 2013] This issue of Ciel variable includes a fifty-page special section on the appropriation by visual artists of questions related to forensic evidence. Organized by guest editor Vincent Lavoie, professor of art history and photography at UQAM, this issue continues in the spirit of some of our previous issues focusing on specific aspects of […]
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon
This issue of Ciel variable includes a fifty-page special section on the appropriation by visual artists of questions related to forensic evidence. Organized by guest editor Vincent Lavoie, professor of art history and photography at UQAM, this issue continues in the spirit of some of our previous issues focusing on specific aspects of photographic studies […]
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Vincent Lavoie
Since the 1990s, there has been a rise to pre-eminence of forensic imaginaries. This phenomenon can be observed in contemporary literature, as in novels by Kathy Reichs (Déjà Dead, 1997), herself a forensic anthropologist by profession, and in television series (Crime Scene Investigation, 2000; Forensic Files, 2000; Bones, 2005) that promulgate a belief in the […]
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Vincent Lavoie | Artists: Taryn Simon
January 24, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — On 6 June 1985, the international press was invited to the small Embu das Artes cemetery in Brazil to witness an extraordinary discovery. A team of police officers and medico-legal experts had just exhumed the presumed remains of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor at Auschwitz. A series of photographs taken on this occasion by reporter Robert Nickelsberg show the press’s infatuation with this event…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Susan Schuppli | Artists: Errol Morris
January 22, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Standard Operating Procedure, directed by Errol Morris, offers a concise example of a methodological shift – what we (in the European Research Council project that I am affiliated with) have elsewhere called a forensic turn – within the investigation of human rights violations and war crimes…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Lussier | Artists: Corinne May Botz
January 17, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Ever since Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) first took his metric photographs, in which he tried to produce accurate maps of crime scenes, legal photography has always been, in spite of itself, a “photography of interiors.” This involved considerable technical constraints (cramped quarters with no place to pull back, poor of insufficient lighting, and so on), as Rodolphe Reiss (1875–1929) often demonstrated…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Marianne Cloutier | Artists: Paul Vanouse
January 15, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — The American artist Paul Vanouse, known for his collaboration with the collective Critical Art Ensemble, has had a practice involving diversion since the early 1990s. He appropriates techniques, tools, materials1 , and knowledge from the techno-sciences in order to better examine what is at stake in those disciplines…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Vincent Lavoie | Artists: William E. Jones
January 10, 2018 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — In the summer of 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio, police department, convinced that homosexual practices created a predisposition to perpetrate serious predatory crimes, decided to put the public restroom in a large park in its town under surveillance. The site was suspected of being the scene of clandestine sexual activities…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Gaëlle Morel | Artists: Emmanuelle Léonard
December 20, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — After devoting a number of projects to the world of work, Montreal photographer and videographer Emmanuelle Léonard investigates the notions of visual traces and information in her most recent works…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade | Artists: Phil Chadwick
December 20, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Meteorology is a science of prediction. Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of information are analyzed in order to anticipate precipitation, predict temperatures, and so on.1 The weather report, on tv or radio, has become an indispensable barometer, and there are now countless weather “aps” available…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Essays
Authors: Jean-François Nadeau | Artists: Beatrix von Conta, Gabor Szilasi, Guillaume D. Cyr, Jocelyne Alloucherie, Martin Beaulieu, Maryse Goudreau, Yana Ouellet
December 18, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Essays
Authors: Karen Henry | Artists: Henri Robideau
November 6, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Who would have thought that the 1980s were such a stimulating time. There is so much emphasis in cultural memory on the 1960s and 1970s that it seemed like it was all over by the 1980s – but not so, as revealed in the two-part exhibition on photography in Vancouver c. 1983…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Julien Champagne | Artists: Ryoji Ikeda
December 11, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Pierre Rannou | Artists: Jan Švankmajer, Melanie Gilligann
December 6, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier | Artists: Nicolas Baier
December 4, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Serge Allaire | Artists: Luc Delahaye, Simon Norfolk
November 29, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Berenice Abbott
November 27, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Toronto, being such an architectural and photographic city, seems the perfect venue for a Berenice Abbott show. In collaboration with the Jeu de Paume in Paris, Toronto’s Ryerson Image Centre mounted a fine, comprehensive survey exhibition of Abbott’s life in photography. Early on, Abbott got to know Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray in Greenwich Village, New York, before heading for Paris to become Man Ray’s apprentice and assistant…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Eloi Desjardins | Artists: Larry Clark
November 22, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Guy Sioui Durand | Artists: Edward Curtis
November 20, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Catherine Lebel Ouellet | Artists: Ivan Binet
November 15, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Book Reviews
Authors: Carol Payne
November 13, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Mutations : Perspectives sur la photographie / Perspectives on Photography, the major publication marking the 2011 edition of the Paris Photo biennial exhibition, is an omnibus collection of current thinking about photography theory and recent photo-based art. Edited by Chantal Pontbriand, founder and editor of the now defunct (and still much lamented) Montreal-based journal Parachute…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Book Reviews
Authors: Bernard Schütze
November 8, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Live rightly, die, die…, the book that accompanies the two-part exhibition organized by the artist-curator David Tomas at Dazibao, is no ordinary exhibition catalogue with its requisite visual documentation and explanatory theoretical essay. Live rightly, die, die… does in fact contain ample visuals and a lengthy essay, but instead of cataloguing and contextualizing the exhibition the book is an experimental extension and integral part of the overall Live rightly, die, die… project. The unusual nature of the publication is made immediately apparent as one opens the book and flips to the page facing the title page…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Book Reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier
[Winter 2013] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Par Sonia Pelletier Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012; edited by Matthew S. Witkovsky, 264 pp., Eng.) Le langage des […]
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Interviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés, Joan Fontcuberta | Artists: Joan Fontcuberta
November 6, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — After forty years of international recognition and numerous exhibitions, today catalonian artist Joan Fontcuberta is a major voice in the discourse on photographic issues in the era of Web 2.0. In 2011, he was co-curator of the controversial exhibition “From Here On,” presented at the rencontres d’Arles…