April 30th-May 25th, 2012.
Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery,
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Jean Berger always claimed to be a painter in front of his judges. Beyond these statements, no evidence exists of his works or artistic career. Instead, the breadth of historical information surrounding his life originates from court documents chronicling his many problems with the justice system: accusations of money forgery, mugging, and the resulting masterful avoidance of punishment that culminated in his escape from prison to New England around 1710.

Was he a painter of signs? Of decorative motifs? Of portraits? Of religious tableaux? The attempt to construct Berger’s history proves to be a challenging one. His life belongs to a remote past, fragmentarily accessed through testimonies, historical documents, and archival notes. Moreover, from all recovered traces of his life, his missing (art)work stands out. This exhibition will interrogate the act of storytelling and the transmission of historical knowledge: Who gets to tell the stories? How is it possible to tell stories in a way that makes them engaging, answering to the affective power of the missing pieces? How can we select voices, perspectives, characters? What narratives remain untold and not passed along as history? Seeing the court testimonies not only as evidence of Montreal's 18th century history, but as pieces of active autobiographical writing, we can engage with them through the lens of contemporary art.

The process of recovering the past is marked by inherent lapses of information, which can be filled by the agency of imagination. The Jean Berger Project will look at the inevitable gaps that determine historical research and knowledge. In an essay accompanying Sylvia Kolbowski’s project An Inadequate History of Conceptual Art, art historian Rosalyn Deutsche clarifies the term inadequacy, explaining that it does not indicate “the presence of deficiencies that can and must be corrected…Rather, inadequate describes the condition of all cultural histories, since history is a representation of – a narrative about – the past and therefore unequal to reality”*. Similarly, this project envisions the absence of knowledge about Jean Berger as a space for productive interpretation and creation. This “blurred” knowledge will make room for intersections between art, historical research, artistic practice and curatorial strategies. The creative noise thus produced by subsequent series of inadequacies will be the challenge posed by The Jean Berger Project.

*Deutsche, Rosalyn. “Inadequacy.” Silvia Kolbowski: Nothing and Everything. Curated by Michèle Thériault. Montreal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, 2009. 21-28. Print.