Following the exhibition Stutter, imagined by Nicholas Cullinan and Vanessa Desclaux in 2009, gathering works by Sven Augustijnen, Anna Barham, Dominique Petitgand, Michael Riedel and Will Stuart at Tate Modern, Vanessa Desclaux questionned the format of the exhibition in the context of a lecture given at King’s College, University of London in 2010.

Presented again at CRAC Alsace, A stuttering exhibition (Une exposition qui bégaie), questions the presence of works of art within the lecture format. Through spoken discourse, the figure of the curator affirms her desire to control the relationships between the works. The curator nevertheless breaks down the traditional apparatus of the lecture by deploying, alongside her verbal discourse, a material discourse that does not depend on the former, emancipated from the hierarchy that habitually commands the relationships between artworks and language. The experience of stuttering is proposed as a filter capable of connecting artworks through various artistic, cultural and political issues that relate to the role of language and its relationship to norms. Interpreted in multiple ways by the artists, the works make use of video, performance, sound, text or light. While the lecturer attempts to transform a past exhibition by adapting it to the lecture format, inevitably making the exhibition stutter, some artists have chosen to intervene directly in the lecturer’s speech, redoubling, interrupting or staging it in various ways.