Andrea Fraser : Museum Tours

Since its foundation, Galerie UQO has presented numerous works and exhibitions that examine, question, or reuse artistic, cultural, and museum institutions. To highlight its 10th anniversary—and confirm its current and future ideology—it was only fitting to invite American artist Andrea Fraser. A leading figure of institutional critique, Fraser is well-known for her museum-based video performances: Museum Highlights (1989), Welcome to the Wadsworth (1991), Little Frank and His Carp (2001), and A Visit to the Sistine Chapel (2005). This exhibition brings these four works together for the first time in Canada. Each video presents a different tour of a Western museum where Fraser delivers critical analyses through the figure of an artist, a guide, a lecturer, or a visitor equipped with an audio-guide, and ironically subverts the function and experience of the institution’s cultural mediation. This selection of artworks seeks to highlight the importance and relevance of this conceptual artist’s work, in which the political conditions of art and its institutions, and artistic engagement in the face of hierarchy and social expectations are integrated into a methodology of research and creation that draws on historical, sociological, and feminist approaches.  

This exhibition represents Mélanie Boucher and Marie-Hélène Leblanc’s third joint curatorial project. By taking a dialogical approach to narrative, they offer a differentiated reading of the works they curate, exploring the diversity of relationships between contemporary art and the museum. Through the prism of specific locations and periods, they locate Fraser’s work as an embodied critique of the museum—an artist who performs the institution while revealing its mechanisms.  

The total running time of the video program is 75 minutes.  

This exhibition was produced in collaboration with CIÉCO Research and Inquiry Group and Équipe Art et musée. Galerie UQO is supported by the Université du Québec en Outaouais, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Ville de Gatineau, the Fonds de recherche du Québec—Société et culture, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.