Caroline Boileau

In her multidisciplinary practice, Caroline Boileau takes a feminist approach to explorations of the portrayal of women’s bodies in relation to personal, public, social, and political health. Her works are marked by a formal and conceptual hybridity: the bodies that she invents and represents problematize the knowledge produced by art history, medicine, and science. Corps qui hantent d’autres corps is the outcome of a four-month residency at McGill University’s Osler Library of the History of Medicine. Presented in the library space itself, the exhibition brings together various elements that intersect with the practice of drawing. Boileau consulted works on medicine dating from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, searching for the few representations of the female body. Echoing the illustrations made by physicians of the period, she wished to study and understand them through drawing, a practice that provides the time and active gaze required for interrogating and shaking up the knowledge imbedded in the visual representations in these books. The drawings are exhibited in display units in which they interact with book excerpts and objects from the library. Each unit is a microcosm that proposes a reading of that which haunts medical knowledge and its ignorance: connections with the plant and animal kingdoms or with the imagination, at once sensitive and perverse, employed before the advent of dissection. These juxtapositions highlight intimate insights, disarming the power of oppressive representations. Video sequences render performative readings of particular documents, including a nineteenth-century Japanese scroll manuscript portraying an anatomized female body, illustrated in a palette surprisingly similar to that in Boileau’s watercolours. Available for consultation on site is Gravidités, an artist book created from obstetrics-related findings that terrified Boileau as much as they fascinated her. It is accompanied by audio recordings of pairs of women commenting on their journey through the book. The reactivation of these seemingly antiquated documents shows that medical knowledge was constructed upon a generic male body at a time in which the female figure and body also came under a system of control. Translated from the French by Ron Ross Caroline BoileauGravidités, vue d’exposition, livre d’artiste accompagné d’un choix de quatre enregistrements audios, Rare Books and Special Collections, salle de lecture du 4e étage, Pavillon de la bibliothèque McLennan, Université McGill, 2019.Photo : Jacquelyn Sundberg, permission de l’artiste Caroline BoileauDessin de la série Corps qui hantent d’autres corps, 2019.Photo : courtesy of the artist Caroline BoileauDessins tirés des pages du livre d’artiste Gravidités , 2019.Photo : courtesy of the artist Caroline BoileauDessins de la série Corps qui hantent d’autres corps, 2019.Photo : courtesy of the artist

Caroline Boileau

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