email: bureaudoove@gmail.com
Edith Doove is a curator, writer and researcher specifically interested in notions of self-organisation, emergence and contingency, cross and transdisciplinary collaborations. Her curatorial practice started in 1987 in Belgium when she started making exhibitions at her apartment.
She started her creative consultancy BUREAU DOOVE in August 2014 to promote her own work as well as a choice of international artists. After obtaining her PhD in 2017, she moved to France where she currently works and lives in Rouen. Her important network in Belgium led her to be invited as curator visual arts for the Watou Arts Festival in 2023. In September 2024 opent her show The Research Group in Het Stadsmus, Hasselt on the group of artists about which she wrote her master thesis in 1996. She moderated several Laser Talks Brussels in collaboration with Alexandra Dementieva who initiated these.
As part of her research Doove redeveloped a drawing practice, the results of which can be found on her website everything else.
* Doctoral research:
Laughter, infra-mince and cybernetics: Exploring the Curatorial as Creative Act (2017)
Marcel Duchamp, Door: 11, Rue Larrey (Porte: 11, Rue
Larrey), 1927. Three-dimensional pun: a door that
permanently opens and shuts at the same time, made
by a carpenter after Duchamp’s design, 86 5/8 x 24 11/16 in.
Collection Arman, New York. Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
This research identifies and responds to an impasse in the curatorial, which it sees as being both caused by its rapid expansion since the late 1980s as well as through its mainstream appropriation, which leaves it altogether in a confused state. The research proposes a strategy of recovery of its most basic working and regarding the curatorial as a creative act. It does so by locating the curatorial in the collaboration between both human and non-human elements – the curator, artist and/or scientist versus text, artefact, space and time. A poetic investigation of an invisible force that is seen as instrumental in the curatorial and meaning making in general, is underpinned by investigating a set of three major, intersecting ideas or intertwining narratives: laughter, inframince and cybernetics.
Using an essentially diffractive methodology, building on amongst others Whitehead and Barad, this thesis connects to ideas of non-linearity and relay in (art) history, building a rich meshwork, which allows for an original reconnection of the curatorial to its provenance and connoisseurship.
*Presentations at conferences and seminars, lectures:
– Paper presentation ‘Opacity as curatorial gesture’, conférence Ways of Picturing, Thinking and Telling Our Time. Cinquante ans à voir le voir en compagnie de John Berger. The SEAC Annual International Conference 2022, l’Université de Lorraine, Metz, 20-21 October 2022
– Entre chien et loup – quand l’abstraction et la figuration se croisent, Seminar Stratégies abstraites de la peinture contemporaine, ESADHaR Le Havre/Rouen in collaboration with Institut ACTE, École des Arts de la Sorbonne, Paris; Rouen 15 November 2019
– Transtechnology Research Seminar Permaculture and art: ‘The Art of Permaculture, Transtechnology Research, University of Plymouth, UK, 17 April 2019
– Transtechnology Research Seminar The blue one or the red one. Towards a creative vision for the future as part of Panel 2: Ideoplasticity and the problem of felicitous falsehoods, Slow Conference, Transtechnology Research, University of Plymouth, UK, 21 March 2018
– Transtechnology Research Seminar Narrative medicine: Pathos and the inframince membrane, Transtechnology Research, University of Plymouth, UK, 18 January 2017
– Transtechnology Research Seminar Ephemeral Affections: Mobile Absolutes (or Absolute Mobiles), Transtechnology Research, University of Plymouth, UK, 16 December 2015
– Presentation Slow/Networked Media Art and the Museum: Who Takes Care of Whom?, Renewable Futures Conference, RIXc, Riga, 9 October 2015
– Poster presentation at Off the Lip – Transdisciplinary Approaches to Cognitive Innovation conference, University of Plymouth, UK 9 September 2015
– Transtechnology Research Seminar The Opaque Lens: Affect and Subversion in Media Practices, Transtechnology Research, University of Plymouth, UK, 18 February 2015
– Transtechnology Research Conference Public Dialogues – Dialogues at the Interlude: Between Body, Artefact and Discourse, Session 6: ‘Artist, Territory, History’ – Chair: Edith Doove (Transtechnology Research) with Pascale Weber (University Paris 1), Jean Delsaux (Université d’Auvergne Clermont 1) and Claudia Loch (University of Brasilia), Plymouth Arts Centre, 13 July 2013
– Presentation Territory Beyond the Frame, Deleuze Conference, Lisbon, 10 July 2013
– Transtechnology Research Seminar Categories of Partial Knowledge with Martyn Woodward, Transtechnology Research, University of Plymouth, UK, 15 May 2013
– Research seminar On dialogue and the nonsensical, Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth, UK, 16 May 2012
– Transtechnology Research Seminar On Translation, Transtechnology Research, University of Plymouth, UK, 26 October 2011
– Lecture on Wolfgang Tillmans, British Art Show 7 Associated Artists events, Peninsula Arts Gallery, Plymouth, UK, 20 October 2011
– Debates on ‘Art & technology’ – two debates with a.o. Peter Beyls, Pieter-Paul Mortier, Angelo Vermeulen, Group T, Leuven, B, 19-20 May 2010
– Presentation Exhibition Making as Research, Conference Arts Research: Publics and purposes, GradCAM, Dublin, IRE, 19 February 2010
– PhDArts Conference The Artist as Researcher – moderator of parallel sessions, member of the plenary panel discussion, 5-6 February 2010, Royal Academy of the Arts, The Hague, NL
* Recent publications:
Doove, E. (2024) De Research Group – Een kunstenaarscollectief 1967-1972, Het Stadsmus, Hasselt, B (Dutch with an English and French summary)
(2023) Dominique De Beire, Accroc et caractère. In Point Contemporain. https://pointcontemporain.com/dominique-de-beir-accroc-et-caractere/
(2023) Watou 2023 /kom.po’zi.cio:/, catalogue arts festival Watou, B
(2021) Il curatore animale. L’infrasottile in Duchamp e l’animalità. In Ecologie complesse – Pensare l’arte oltre l’umano. Edited by Gabriela Galati. Milan: Meltemi Press
(2019) Attunement and the inframince. In Dust and Shadow Reader #2 – Attunement, FOaM. Available at: https://libarynth.org/dust_and_shadow/inframince
(2017). Slow/Networked Media Art and the Museum: Who Takes Care of Whom? In: Smite, R. and Smits, R. eds. (2017). Renewable Futures Conference Proceedings 2015. Riga: Acoustic Space #16.
(2016) Il faut cultiver notre jardin …On the need for gardening. In: Doove, E., Fritz, D., Maes, A., Medosh, A., Steels, L. Alchimia Nova. Ghent: MER. Paper Kunsthalle
(2016) Letter. In: Wade, C. ed. As We Alter It, So It Alters Us. Birmingham: Rope Press
(2014). Poet as Machine, on Calvino’s Cybernetics and Ghosts. In: M. Punt and M. Blassnigg, ed., Media Archaeology and Cognition – Transtechnology Research Reader 2014/15, 1st ed. Plymouth: Transtechnology Research, pp.150-156.
This essay discusses Calvino’s text ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’ (1967) as a tool for the exploration of the cognitive role of storyteller and reader. Calvino suggests replacing the poet and author by a machine, a suggestion based amongst others on his understanding of the activities of the so-called Oulipo group that unites authors and mathematicians.
(2013). Peter Beyls – The artist as found system, a case study. In: Bit by Bit. Frankfurt: DAM Gallery
(2012). Exploring the Curatorial as Creative Act Part II: The Artist as Found System. In M. Punt and M. Blassnigg, ed., Transtechnology Research Reader 2012-13, 1st ed. Plymouth: Transtechnology Research
This essay is intended as a thought experiment around the idea of the artist as found system, open-ended and in constant becoming, as an alternative and more flexible solution for the usual art historic conceptualizing of artists. Inspired by Daumal’s Mount Analogue and the island of Mandelbrot it makes use of a pataphysical, pragmatist approach, exploring the realm between fiction and reality, and tries to apply Duchamp’s infra-mince in order to develop a system(atic) thinking about the artist(ic).
(2011). Exploring the Curatorial as Creative Act: Part I – Hidden Similarities. In M. Punt and M. Blassnigg, ed., Transtechnology Research Reader 2011, 1st ed. Plymouth: Transtechnology Research
This essay explores the focus on an immaterial in-between, an interval, the seemingly marginal or peripheral as constitutional elements for the curatorial as a creative act. It takes four, seemingly unconnected, antagonists as its starting point: Warburg as an important advocate of the iconology of the interval and as curator avant la lettre, Jarry’s introducing the idea of paired books, Duchamp as the inventor of the infra-mince or infrathin, and Koestler for his notion of the bisociative act.
(2011). Koen Vanmechelen – The chicken and its audience. [plastik] [on line], Plastik #02 – In vivo, L’artiste en l’œuvre ?, 3 June 2011. ISSN 2101-0323.
Available on http://art-science.univ-paris1.fr/plastik/document.php?id=475
(2010). En voyage/in-between – Ways of nomadic thinking in the work of Boldireva/Olga/ Boldyreff. In: Olga Boldyreff. Nantes: Musée de Nantes, 2010
(2010). Parallellepipeda Boek. Leuven: Acco
Also see Overview publications and Leonardo Online Reviews
*Recently curated or upcoming projects:
2024 The Research Group – an artist collective (1967-72), on demand by the Friends of the City Museum (Vrienden van het Stadsmuseum) in collaboration with PXL MAD, Hasselt, Belgium – 21 September to 5 January 2025
2023 Arts Festival Watou – /kom.po’zi.ci.o:/, Belgium – 1 July to 3 September 2023
2021 LaserTalks Brussels in collaboration with Alexandra Dementieva, ongoing
BOLERO – Centre André Malraux, Grand Mare, rue des Bons Enfants, Rouen, 20 March – 10 April
Troupe/troep – ChezKit, Pantin, 29-31 January
Empirical Nonsense Daily – online project initiated by Jimi Dams, New York from 1 August until the end of July 2021
2020
Loving Care – 12 portraits of children by Pierre Mertens, Blikfabriek, Antwerp, 27 September – 25 October
Empirical Nonsense Daily – online project initiated by Jimi Dams, New York from from 1 August until the end of July 2021
2019
ENSEMBLE – Diplômé.e.s 2019 Art, Architecture, Design en Normandie, l’Abbatiale Saint-Ouen, Rouen, France, 24 October-15 December 2019
Also see Overview exhibitions