Turn or Burn explores moral absolutism and the human desire for certainty through encounters with born-again evangelical street preachers across the United States. Between promises of salvation and threats of damnation, their performances reveal how conviction becomes spectacle, authority, and power. Rooted in the American context, it examines a broader dynamic: the power of certainty in an uncertain world, echoing political polarization and the rise of extremist movements worldwide.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

By Daniel Fiset, Curator

With Turn or Burn, Jean-François Bouchard presents a museum-scale exhibition, premiering new works while exploring the connections between belief, image, and power in the public sphere

For his first museum-scale exhibition, Jean-François Bouchard’s Turn or Burn brings together a series of new works that document his encounters with evangelical street preachers. The project examines how their words and actions replay, with growing intensity, the tensions between faith, performance, and politics in public space.

The phenomenon of Christian evangelism has been woven into American identity for centuries. To this day, its various movements rely on the power of images and discourse to convince as many people as possible to rally behind their ideologies. Photography has always played a central role in spreading these ideas to the public. More recently, the rise of televangelism has emphasized the spectacular and performative aspects of preaching, allowing an even more frenzied version of it to enter the collective imagination. These new preachers have become veritable celebrities who operate at the top of highly influential structures; many current political figures are born-again Christians, and modern-day evangelism is a growing industry that generates a wide array of products and platforms that serve as vehicles for exclusionary and discriminatory narratives. 

Today, in contrast with these masters of evangelical spectacle, street preaching persists, although in a much more limited form. Its practitioners still walk the streets of American cities with their slogans and placards, spreading their dichotomous view of the world to all who will listen. By meeting with these preachers and mobilizing a range of formal approaches—photography, video, and installation—Bouchard continues to explore contemporary culture’s marginal areas. In doing so, he questions how beliefs and ideologies are socially perpetuated between individuals and the systems they are embedded in.