Myriam Jacob-Allard's project Un coin du ciel uses an installation and video to explore representations of "the mother" in Quebec's country & western culture. Through the use of iconography and deconstruction of texts from popular songs, she explores the gap between smaller and larger narratives to better understand the distortion caused by these fragmentations. These stories allow us to envisage the construction of identities transmitted from mother to daughter and to consider the concept of lineage in culture, the possibilities for legacy or loss from one generation to the next.

Our History | | Notre histoire is a project by artist Michael Blum on the issue of Quebec and Canadian identity. The exhibition is the result of work carried out under the Galerie's summer residency program. The artist has set up a museum in the exhibition hall, offering a fanciful rewriting of the history of Quebec and Canada, in addition to a publication containing the responses of 86 people to a survey on their vision of identity.

The exhibition

Born in Jerusalem, Michael Blum settled in Montreal after residing in Europe and the United States. He has been here four years, “here” being UQAM, Montreal, Quebec, Canada and, indeed, the New World. In witnessing the massive student protests of the Maple Spring of 2012, the controversy over the Quebec Charter of Values, which was submitted to public consultation by the Parti Québécois government in 2013, and that government’s crushing defeat in April 2014, he discerned in this conjuncture a sensitive issue that would be conducive to investigating connections between generations, between Quebeckers and Canadians in the rest of the country, whether Canadian-born or immigrants, and between French speakers and English speakers. In response to our invitation to do a residency and an exhibition at the Galerie de l’UQAM, he assumed, as he frequently does, the attitude of an investigator conducting an inquiry into this issue.

Inspired by his own immigrant experience, Blum developed his dual artist’s museum – with a Quebec side and a Canada side, separate entrances but a common exit – as in a “real” museum that displays artifacts according to a classification system in a carefully devised setting with supporting references, the whole lying between truth and fiction, scholarly demonstration and mythifying fantasy.

The museum as an artist’s work is of incontestable interest to a university gallery that focuses on multifarious and changing considerations of exhibition practice and the application of knowledge produced in the museum realm. In this regard, Blum’s project is doubly interesting in that it exemplifies and parodies the genre of the exhibition as an artist’s museum while investigating symbols of cultural, social and political cohesion and division. The result of displaying the recent work of such an artist in the context of an artist residency is exposure to both the project’s conceptual development and its material realization. With Our History || Notre histoire, the Galerie de l’UQAM duly records a partly real, partly imaginary chronicle of this country, activated by the critical yet playful perceptions of the artist as investigator.

In addition, the artist developed a survey—"non-scientific" by his own admission—addressed to more than 600 more or less public figures in politics, the arts, journalism and academia, to help establish a conceptual framework for his artistic project. The exhaustive views of the 86 respondents are collected in a publication that runs between cynicism and humour, candour and fervour, in English and French. They formed a kind of field of reflection on daily life. The publication is neither an exhibition catalogue nor an essay, but rather the report on research conducted by the artist with the goal of examining the history of his host country in the light of certain current events that exposed him to the dizzying notion of "identity". The book reveals the answers to the following questions:

• What is Quebec for you?
• How would you explain the difference between Canada and Quebec to a foreigner?
• If a museum had to preserve the history of the differences between Canada and Quebec, how would you envision it?
• How do you see the relations between Canada and Quebec within two or three generations?
• What common language other than English or French could we use?

About the artist 

Michael Blum was born in Jerusalem in 1966. He studied history at the Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and photography at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles (France). Using video, publications and installations, he develops a body of work aiming at a critical re-reading of the production of culture and history. His major projects include A Tribute to Safiye Behar (9th Istanbul Biennial, 2005), Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co. (De Appel, Amsterdam, 2006), Cape Town - Stockholm (On Thembo Mjobo) (Mobile Art Production, Stockholm, 2007), Exodus 2048 (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2008; New Museum, New York, 2009), Faktories und Felder (Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon, 2012) and War and Peace (VOX – Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal, 2014). His work has been the object of numerous publications including Monument to the Birth of the 20th Century (Revolver-Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, Frankfurt, 2005); Mein Land (Unrast Verlag, Münster, 2008); and With Different Clothes, It’s a Different Lady (Beit Hatfutsot, Tel Aviv, 2008). He’s a professor at UQAM’s School of Visual and Media Arts since 2010. blumology.net

The residency program 

The Galerie de L'UQAM presents Secret Citadel, a major exhibition by Canadian artist Graeme Patterson, recently shortlisted for the prestigious 2014 Sobey Art Award. With inventiveness and nostalgia, Patterson explores ideas of friendship from childhood to old age. Five years in the making, this body of work is a semi-autobiographical story told by two anthropomorphic animals, a bison and a cougar. Playful creativity brings the characters together while awkwardness splits them apart.

This touring exhibition was co-produced by the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and co-curated by Melissa Bennett and Sarah Fillmore. After Montreal, the exhibition will be presented in winter 2015 at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Alberta and in autumn 2015 at the Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, British-Columbia.

Secret Citadel

Secret Citadel features an animated video and four large, intricate installations containing stop-motion animations of the stages of life of the bison and the cougar, representing Patterson and a lost childhood friend. In creating these detailed miniature worlds, Patterson transports the viewer to a parallel universe blending personal memories with fiction.

Although Patterson focuses on the trials and tribulations of male friendship through reinterpreted fragments of memory, the exhibition explores the subtleties that enter into any close relationship. Patterson’s work probes universal themes of longing, loss and recovery.

Exhibition trailer: http://youtu.be/hyIr0ZOVaSY

About Graeme Patterson

Atlantic finalist for the 2014 Sobey Art Award, Graeme Patterson was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and now lives in Sackville, New Brunswick. Graeme’s practice stems from a self-taught method of producing stop-motion animations but has expanded into building large video/sculptural installations. These installations consist of animation, sculptural models, robotics, sound, music and some interactive elements. Graeme Patterson has been nominated for a JUNO Award (2011) and won the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award in Media Arts (2012) for outstanding mid-career artists.
www.graemepatterson.com

Support provided by:

Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec
Canada Council for the Arts

Through the study of two distinct buildings— Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond in Massachusetts and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University—Marie-Ève Martel stages an aesthetic and philosophical dialogue on the “place of knowledge.” Through this dialogue, she seeks to question the way in which we use architecture to build an existential, social/political, and religious/spiritual order. She also sets out to explore this order’s imaginary dimension and psychological impact by presenting two apparently opposite ideological viewpoints: on the one hand, institutionalized, even materialized knowledge; and on the other, free or innate knowledge.

The Galerie de l'UQAM presents The Political Nightfall, the first major solo show of artist Aude Moreau. This exhibition features a body of work developed by the artist over the last 7 years, with night-time panoramas of cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Montreal and Toronto. Curated by Louise Déry, The Political Nightfall is produced by the Galerie de l'UQAM in partnership with the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg and The Power Plant in Toronto, institutions where it will be shown.

Galerie antoine ertaskiran, which represents Aude Moreau, also will be exhibiting the artist’s work from March 11 to April 18. 

The exhibition

The photographic, film and sound works of Aude Moreau cast a hitherto unexampled light on the North American city, with its modernist grid, its towers soaring to breathtaking heights, its illuminated logos speaking the language of the multinationals, its solids that box us in, its voids that provide an exit. Because the artist embeds film in architecture, writing in glass, politics in economics, transparency in opacity, indeed the private in the public, she deflects and refashions the iconography of these often stereotypical urban images, whose future shows no way around the gathering political darkness.

The exhibition features the premiere of the film The End in the Background of Hollywood, shot by helicopter over Los Angeles, with the twin towers of the City National Plaza conveying a powerful end-of-the-world message. In tandem, Inside (23/12/2014 - Los Angeles, Downtown) offers a street view of one of the towers and its mundane nocturnal activity, while The Last Image, shows generic endings of films about the end of the world. The starry night of the world film capital is also captured in several photographs showing the iconic Hollywood sign and the illuminated logos of big financial corporations studding the sky. Visitors will revisit Sortir, shot from a helicopter circling the Montreal Stock Exchange, Reconstruction, a moving panorama of the Manhattan skyline from the Hudson River, and discover Less is more or… on Mies van der Rohe's towers in Toronto.

According to the curator, by investing architecture with a metaphorical power that lies between reality and fiction, between the image itself and what it recounts, Moreau makes us spectators of the present: we are subjected to the mechanisms of power and grapple with the catastrophic scenarios that flow by in an endless loop. “The artist’s thinking and observations on the city derive from Gordon Matta-Clark, Ed Ruscha and Mies Van der Rohe; created between 2008 and 2015, the four groups of works included in this exhibition give the leading role to Montreal, New York, Los Angeles and Toronto. They exhort us to immerse ourselves in the texture of their images and sounds, to enter the temporality of a relentless end, to cross through the space between the images and, in that movement, perceive a world at rest, perhaps its final rest”, specifies Louise Déry.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated monograph with essays by the curator and invited authors, such as Kevin Muhlen (Luxembourg) and Fabrizio Gallanti (Princeton University). The launch of the publication is scheduled for September, at the opening of the exhibition at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris.

The artist 

Aude Moreau has developed a practice that encompasses her dual training in scenography and the visual arts. Whether with concepts painstakingly developed over several years to produce ambitious installations, films and photographs, or material interventions in an exhibition context, like her famous sugar carpets, Aude Moreau focuses a relevant, critical gaze upon showbiz society, the privatization of the public space, and the domination of the State by economic powers in today's world. Her work has been shown in Quebec, France, the United States and Luxembourg. Aude Moreau has a Master's in Visual Arts and Media from the Université du Québec à Montréal. She is a recipient of the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art (2011), as well as the Powerhouse Prize from La Centrale (2011). Aude Moreau is represented by galerie antoine ertaskiran in Montreal. audemoreau.net

The curator 

With a PhD in art history, Louise Déry has been the Director of the Galerie de l'UQAM since 1997. She has been a curator at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and has worked with a number of artists, including Rober Racine, Dominique Blain, Nancy Spero, Michael Snow, Daniel Buren, Giuseppe Penone, Raphaëlle de Groot, Shary Boyle and Sarkis. Curator of some thirty exhibitions abroad, including a dozen in Italy, and others in France, Belgium, Spain, Turkey, the United States and Asia, she was curator of the Canada Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007, with a David Altmejd exhibition, and a performance by Raphaëlle de Groot at the 2013 Biennale. At the 2015 Biennale, she will present several of Jean-Pierre Aubé's interventions on electromagnetic pollution.

Partners

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.  Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.   Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Support provided by

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.     Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Curated by Marie-Ève Charron and Thérèse St-Gelais, The Disorderliness of Things features works exploring democratic dimensions of disobedience and disorder that defy authority and convention. Visitors will discover works by Edith Brunette, Michel de Broin, Arkadi Lavoie Lachapelle, Mathieu Lefèvre, Emmanuelle Léonard, Christine Major, Maria Marshall, Catherine Opie, Melanie Smith and Rafael Ortega, Pilvi Takala, and Rosemarie Trockel. The curators and several of the artists will attend the opening.

The exhibition

The works in The Disorderliness of Things give voice to the positive aspects of disobedience.

How can art express insubordination in liberal democracies? In this context where our freedoms are relative, how does contemporary art serve as a critic without assuming a militant stance?

Defying authority and convention, all these works create zones of counter-cultural resistance. They unmask what seems, under the inoffensive guise of normalcy, devoid of meaning and offer a political critique of banality. They shake up our predefined realities, often diverting them with humour.

Unconventional scenarios and objects are subjected to the restrictions of customary rules in an urban space. Through simple actions, characters reveal their ability to act and their refusal to be bound by norms or canons. The works defy artistic traditions and imagery. Standard artistic venues are occupied by intrusion. Division within debate takes precedence over the management of the social order by consensus. Some of the works contain blatantly improper figures while others coolly unmask the regulated environments of closed communities. Thus the selected works reveal various forms of conditioning while questioning their authority.

In The Disorderliness of Things, dissent is not an evil to be eradicated, but rather the exercise of critical vigilance where vitality is the ultimate value.

The curators

Art critic for Le Devoir, Marie-Ève Charron also writes regularly for the magazine esse arts + opinions of which she was a member of the editorial board. As a catalogue author, her most recent publications have focused on the work of Anthony Burnham, Michael Merrill and Les Fermières Obsédées. She was curator of the group exhibition Au travail (Musée régional de Rimouski, 2010) and, with Marie-Josée Lafortune and Thérèse St-Gelais, co-organized Archi-féministes!, a group exhibition presented at Optica (2011-2012). Since 2004, she has taught art history at UQAM and at the Cégep de Saint-Hyacinthe.

Thérèse St-Gelais is a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) where she teaches the history of contemporary art and the contribution of women to the visual arts. Curator of the exhibitions Ghada Amer (Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2012) and Loin des yeux près du corps (Galerie de L'UQAM, 2012), she also has directed colloquia (and their proceedings) on État de la recherche « Femmes : théorie et création » dans la francophonie (2010) and The Undecidable: Gaps and Displacements of Contemporary Art (2008). She co-organized the exhitbition Archi-feministes! (Optica, 2011-2012), with Marie-Ève Charron and Marie-Josée Lafortune.

 Passage à découvert is an opportunity to discover the works of tomorrow’s contemporary artists and teachers who will take their place in museums, galleries and schools. The exhibition illustrates the students’ creative vitality, curiosity and freedom and bears witness to recent graduates’ professionalism and the excitement that their projects stirs up. Presented each year, this exhibition also reveals the wealth and diversity of the programs offered by the École des arts visuels et médiatiques, which favours a pluridisciplinary education.

The Electrosmogs exhibition by Jean-Pierre Aubé will relate the Electrosmogs series to the V.L.F. Natural Radio project realised in Finland, Scotland and Quebec and offering sound and images of low frequencies emanating from natural phenomena such as the Aurora Borealis. Two new video works will be presented: Electrosmog Venezia, realised during the Venice Biennale, and Radio Vaticana, presenting the capture of the signal from Vatican Radio, one of the world's major sources of radio frequency emissions.

Round table

The opening of the exhibition will be preceded by a round table organized by RAM radioartemobile at 5 pm, with a varied group of researchers and thinkers on the issue of radio frequencies.

Participants:
Jean-Pierre Aubé, artist
Louise Déry, art historian and curator of the exhibition
Giuseppe Di Giugno, physicist focusing, since the 1970’s, on the audio digital, founder of IRIS
Michelangelo Lupone, composer, researcher, designer of soundscapes
Cristian Stanescu, astrophysicist
Luca Zevi, architect and urbanist

Artist Statement

A graduate of the MFA program at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Jean-Pierre Aubé is well known for his sound and visual representations of very low frequencies and radio frequencies using ingenious methods and technologies, which enable him to sound the magnetosphere and space. Over the years, he has become a sort of explorer-artist who, equipped with curious antennas, radio receivers, software of his own making and an array of computer hardware, captures various frequencies and then models this data into singular landscapes, which are displayed via charts, photographs and audio and video recordings.

Jean-Pierre Aubé

Born in 1969 in Kapuskasing, Ontario, lives and works in Montreal.
Education: MFA, Université du Québec à Montréal
Exhibitions: Expression (St-Hyacinthe, 2015), Le Fresnoy (Tourcoing, 2013), Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal, 2012), Clark (Montreal, 2012), Séquence (Saguenay, 2011), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2011), AXENÉO7 (Gatineau, 2010), Galerie de l’UQAM (Montreal, 2008 and 2010), Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Quebec City, 2008), Palais du Tau (Reims, 2008), Ludwig Museum (Budapest, 2007), ZKM (Karlsruhe, 2005)
Performances: Elektra (2012 and 2011, Montreal), MUTEK (2010, Montreal), Mois Multi (Quebec City, 2005), @rt Outsiders (2005, Paris)
Award: Prix Giverny Capital 2013
www.kloud.org

Louise Déry

Louise Déry holds a PhD in Art History and has been the director of the Galerie de l’UQAM since 1997. Previously, she was curator of contemporary art at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She has curated numerous exhibitions accompanied by catalogues (Rober Racine, Dominique Blain, Raphaëlle de Groot, Nancy Spero, David Altmejd, Michael Snow, Giuseppe Penone, Shary Boyle, Sarkis…) of which over thirty were shown abroad (Europe, Turkey, the US and Asia). She was the curator of the Canada pavilion at the Venice Biennial with an exhibition by David Altmejd (2007) and in 2013 she returned there to present a performance by Raphaëlle de Groot.

RAM radioartemobile

Platform for contemporary art based in Rome, dedicated to visual and sound research. RAM, born in 2004, has founded the SoundArtMuseum, a permanent archive of sound art works available on-line. RAM LIVE’s programming is streamed live 24 hours a day at
http://live.radioartemobile.it

RAM radioartemobile
Via Conte Verde n.15 - Roma
phone: +39 06 44704249
www.radioartemobile.it

Videozoom. Between-the-Images is a videographic anthology of works by seven Quebec artists who define themselves not as filmmakers but as visual artists motivated by the exploration of the image in motion. The works it brings together are all too brief and make no claim to being representative of video and film practice in Quebec in the absolute. A full account of this impressive effervescence would required a far more ambitious format. It should also be borne in mind that many artists – and all those included here – create video works to be exhibited in museums and galleries as installations, their projection conditioned by format and specific equipment in spaces that enable visitors to experience the works in a controlled environment. However, the present exhibition, in the form of a continuous showing of all the works on the same screen, offers the advantage of conveying shared sensibilities, displaying affinities for an often carefully crafted image, attesting to concern for an audio presence and revealing effective elliptical strategies of the image.

This project is offered as a glimpse, an opening, a breach into the immense production of images that characterizes the contemporary world. The works must be viewed as if one were peeping at them through a slit, a sort of “between-the-images,” both for what they represent within contemporary practices and for what they are individually in their respective formal and narrative dimensions: between video and cinema, film and digital image, visual presence and aural reality. This notion of a “between-the-images,” taken from the theorist Raymond Bellour,¹ is first of all interesting because it implies we must seek in depth, dig below the surface of the images, and not be content to pass distractedly, superficially, from one to the next. We must not simply linger over the “endless flow” of images. This same notion also implies that the proliferation and saturation of images are not the real problem facing us today. As Pierre Scheffer writes, “We have no idea whether or not we are saturated with images, and we never will. We weren’t there in prehistoric times, when guys were probably saturated with images because their noses were stuck in graffiti in the caves, and it was a lot worse than TV.”² This remark eludes a widespread assumption to the effect that no one knows how to look at an image any more because there are too many of them. On the other hand, it is our belief that what matters is what occurs between the images, or between them and the sound that accompanies them, or between them and the sound and text that tell their story in parallel. As witnesses to their movement, we must capture their immobility; before these animated figures, we must “re-figure” their image; exposed to their aural dimension, we must seek their silence.

The works gathered together for this edition of Videozoom on Quebec thus provide a moment’s pause to contemplate the work of artists who are among the most captivating and enterprising in investigating the image. These short videos deal with a variety of subjects in the realm not only of politics, popular culture, television and movie imagery but also of the poetical image. The emphasis is sometimes on form, sometimes on narrative or content, while sound, time, the archive, landscape and performance are some of the compositional elements from which what is displayed is constructed.

Several of the works are a function of a specific parameter suggested to the artists: a duration under four minutes. This concentration in time has two consequences. On one hand, such a restriction forces an artist to accelerate the process of giving form to an idea through an image so as to achieve a certain perceptual and narrative effectiveness. On the other hand, a short work can have an effect of slowing down on viewers, who are at liberty to take the time to look carefully, dissect, scrutinize the images one by one to fully appreciate what they see in a time frame that is easier to assimilate than a full-length feature. In the “between-the-images,” a language takes shape between what is perceived and named, what is seen and designated, the world and art. For today, images truly confront us with what they embody or disembody, construct or deconstruct, repeat or reinvent. They are more often a suggestion than a demonstration, and therein lies their appeal.

La Fabrique d’expositions, Montreal, October 2012

1. Since the early 1980s, Raymond Bellour has developed a thorough analysis of the connections between film, video, photography and mixed regimes of the image. He founded the cinema review Trafic (1991) with Serge Daney and has published, among other things, L’entre-Images (1990) and L’entre-Images 2 (1999). He collaborated on the exhibition Passages de l’image at the Centre Pompidou and was the curator of Thierry Kuntzel. Lumières du temps and Thierry Kuntzel – Bill Viola. Deux éternités proches at Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing, France.

2. Pierre Scheffer, in Maurice Mourier, Comment vivre avec l’image (Paris: PUF, 1989), p. 340.

Vidéozoom Québec. Between-the-Images is a videographic anthology of works by seven Quebec artists who define themselves not as filmmakers but as visual artists motivated by the exploration of the image in motion. The works it brings together are all too brief and make no claim to being representative of video and film practice in Quebec in the absolute. A full account of this impressive effervescence would required a far more ambitious format. It should also be borne in mind that many artists – and all those included here – create video works to be exhibited in museums and galleries as installations, their projection conditioned by format and specific equipment in spaces that enable visitors to experience the works in a controlled environment. However, the present exhibition, in the form of a continuous showing of all the works on the same screen, offers the advantage of conveying shared sensibilities, displaying affinities for an often carefully crafted image, attesting to concern for an audio presence and revealing effective elliptical strategies of the image.

This project is offered as a glimpse, an opening, a breach into the immense production of images that characterizes the contemporary world. The works must be viewed as if one were peeping at them through a slit, a sort of “between-the-images,” both for what they represent within contemporary practices and for what they are individually in their respective formal and narrative dimensions: between video and cinema, film and digital image, visual presence and aural reality. This notion of a “between-the-images,” taken from the theorist Raymond Bellour,² is first of all interesting because it implies we must seek in depth, dig below the surface of the images, and not be content to pass distractedly, superficially, from one to the next. We must not simply linger over the “endless flow” of images. This same notion also implies that the proliferation and saturation of images are not the real problem facing us today. As Pierre Scheffer writes, “We have no idea whether or not we are saturated with images, and we never will. We weren’t there in prehistoric times, when guys were probably saturated with images because their noses were stuck in graffiti in the caves, and it was a lot worse than TV.”³ This remark eludes a widespread assumption to the effect that no one knows how to look at an image any more because there are too many of them. On the other hand, it is our belief that what matters is what occurs between the images, or between them and the sound that accompanies them, or between them and the sound and text that tell their story in parallel. As witnesses to their movement, we must capture their immobility; before these animated figures, we must “re-figure” their image; exposed to their aural dimension, we must seek their silence.

The works gathered together for this edition of Vidéozoom on Quebec thus provide a moment’s pause to contemplate the work of artists who are among the most captivating and enterprising in investigating the image. These short videos deal with a variety of subjects in the realm not only of politics, popular culture, television and movie imagery but also of the poetical image. The emphasis is sometimes on form, sometimes on narrative or content, while sound, time, the archive, landscape and performance are some of the compositional elements from which what is displayed is constructed.

Several of the works are a function of a specific parameter suggested to the artists: a duration under four minutes. This concentration in time has two consequences. On one hand, such a restriction forces an artist to accelerate the process of giving form to an idea through an image so as to achieve a certain perceptual and narrative effectiveness. On the other hand, a short work can have an effect of slowing down on viewers, who are at liberty to take the time to look carefully, dissect, scrutinize the images one by one to fully appreciate what they see in a time frame that is easier to assimilate than a full-length feature. In the “between-the-images,” a language takes shape between what is perceived and named, what is seen and designated, the world and art. For today, images truly confront us with what they embody or disembody, construct or deconstruct, repeat or reinvent. They are more often a suggestion than a demonstration, and therein lies their appeal.

La Fabrique d’expositions, Montreal, October 2012

1. Louise Déry and the Fabrique d’expositions thank the artists, Mary-Angela Schroth of Sala 1, Pierluigi Matera, director of the Museo di Roma in Trastevere, the Québec Government Office in Rome, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and UQAM, who contributed in various ways to the realization of this project.

2. Since the early 1980s, Raymond Bellour has developed a thorough analysis of the connections between film, video, photography and mixed regimes of the image. He founded the cinema review Trafic (1991) with Serge Daney and has published, among other things, L’entre-Images (1990) and L’entre-Images 2 (1999). He collaborated on the exhibition Passages de l’image at the Centre Pompidou and was the curator of Thierry Kuntzel. Lumières du temps and Thierry Kuntzel – Bill Viola. Deux éternités proches at Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing, France.

3. Pierre Scheffer, in Maurice Mourier, Comment vivre avec l’image (Paris: PUF, 1989), p. 340.

Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal presents, in partnership with the Galerie de l'UQAM, Another Life, the first solo show of artist Patricia Piccinini in Canada. In keeping with the theme of this 14th edition of the International Biennial of the Contemporary Image, The Post-Photographic Condition, the exhibition Another Life takes an intriguing and ambivalent look at the relationships between species in a context of genetic tinkering. Through photography, video and sculpture, Piccinini creates a world where humans, animals and monsters coexist and even help each other.

The exhibition

On a planet that has been invaded, not by aliens but by images, Patricia Piccinini questions our future as humans. And in doing so, she avoids the monstrous image to concentrate on the image of the monster: monstrum, monstrare. The monster is revealed.

Piccinini parodies monstrosity and demonstrativeness as a kind of apocalyptic precursor. In her surprising and captivating universe, forms drawn from biology and aesthetics swing between Frankenstein and Walt Disney, Pixar and H. R. Giger, and The Island of Dr. Moreau and Dolly the sheep. In the artist’s native Australia, the fauna has evolved endogenously to produce species not found anywhere else in the world. How long will these animals survive if their environments are threatened? As if on a rescue mission, Piccinini has conjured up a new species whose role is to protect endangered creatures. This gesture reminds us that life increasingly pushes the boundaries of nature, resulting in implants, in vitro fertilization, cloning, biotechnology, mutations – in short, genetic tinkering.

Another Life conveys a sense of fascination and horror of the monstrous when it permeates everyday life, as an embodiment of the Freudian uncanny. If human beings are animals that know how and are able to smile, as George Steiner stated, what does post-humanity have in store for us? Will we be able to reject the new barbarism? In all likelihood, we will be capable of doing so only by opting to humanize technology, rather than technologize people.

The artist

Patricia Piccinini was born in 1965 in Freetown, Sierra Leone; she lives and works in Melbourne. Her works have been presented in solo and group exhibitions at the Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne (2015), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne (2014), the National Portrait Gallery of Australia in Canberra (2014), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney (2014), the Canberra Museum and Gallery (2013), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei (2013), the Haunch of Venison in London (2012), the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (2011), the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago (2011), the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2010), the Frye Museum in Seattle (2007), and the Venice Biennale (2003). Her works are included in many public collections in Australia, including those of the National Gallery of Australia, the University of Melbourne, the Waverly City Gallery, and the Parliament House. In 2014, she received the Artist Award from the Melbourne Art Foundation. She is represented by Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney. patriciapiccinini.net

Interview with the artist: https://youtu.be/Swx7ewLxyfw

The curator

Over almost four decades of prolific dedication to photography, Joan Fontcuberta (born in Barcelona in 1955) has developed an artistic and theoretical practice, which focuses on the conflicts between nature, technology and truth. He has written a dozen books about aspects of the history, aesthetics and epistemology of photography. He has curated international exhibitions, including Fotografia 2.0 (Círculo de Bellas Artes, PhotoEspaña, Madrid, 2014), Artwork as Collection (FotoColectania, Barcelona, 2013), From Here On (Les Rencontres d’Arles, 2011), Idas & Chaos. Trends in Spanish Photography 1920-1945 (International Center of Photography, New York, 1987). In 1982, he co-founded the biennial photography festival Primavera Fotográfica in Barcelona, and in 1996 he was appointed artistic director of the Arles Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie. Since 2008, he has been president of the Visual Artists Association in Catalonia. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Chicago Art Institute, among others, and his works are featured in a number of institutional collections, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and the Centre Georges- Pompidou in Paris. In 2013, he received the Hasselblad Foundation Award.

Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, 14^th edition – The Post-Photographic Condition

For its 14^th edition, Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal explores The Post-Photographic Condition, a theme conceived by Catalan guest curator Joan Fontcuberta. The post-photographic era is characterized by the massification of images and by their circulation and availability online. Digital technology not only provokes ontological gractures in photography, but also engenders prodounf changes in its social and functional values. Deployed in 16 exhibition sites, the biennal will feature the works of 29 Canadian and international artists who critically react to this massive presence of images and their unlimited access in our current visual culture. moisdelaphoto.com

Solistes is an installation of video canvases whose cadence is created through a symbiosis of landscapes and human activity. Orchestrated to create a rhythmic progression, through the alternation and juxtaposition of images and their soundtrack, the scenes projected in the gallery space explore the concept of a global community through a diversity of harmonious and dissonant elements. Uniting these sequences is a disjointed symphony that combines irregular breathing with the soft rustle of leaves.

With his exhibition TOUT n’est pas un sandwich, Louis Bouvier focuses on the discursive potential arising from encounters between various "art" objects. By juxtaposing eras, cultures and ideas, he incites us to question traditional prejudices regarding the artist's craft. Within the gallery space, photorealistic drawings are displayed alongside sculptures and found objects. The nature of the artistic testimony in these works is lost in a profusion of forms and materials, calling into question the precious, sacred and oracular attributes of artistic creation. By mobilizing the conventional codes of exhibitions, TOUT n’est pas un sandwich creates a paradoxical space that undermines – with a degree of irony –modernist ideas of the status of the work of art.

Connexion is a major exhibition of Canadian artist Hank Bull. Relatively unknown to the general public, despite his fundamental importance in the development of visual arts in Canada, Hank Bull takes a central role in a global network of artists and various institutions. The exhibition transforms the personal archives of the artist, covering a period of over fifty years, in a sculptural installation. Neither a retrospective nor an archive exhibition, Hank Bull. Connexion rather seeks to make sense of the materials gathered by the artist throughout his career and highlights an artistic practice based on collaboration .

The exhibition

Since the 1970s, Vancouver-based multimedia artist Hank Bull has acted as a connecting figure between artists and artistic communities internationally. Inspired initially by experimental music, mail art, Fluxus, and the absurdist performances associated with Dada and pataphysics, much of his practice has been ephemeral and dialogic, produced for underground audiences in artist-run and improvised contexts. Performance, communication, and the building of networks have thus often eclipsed the production of material things. Yet, material things have played an important role in his career — as documents, as vehicles of communication, as props, and as aesthetic objects in their own right. Hank Bull: Connexion considers the material traces of a life lived as art, exhibiting the varied collection of the artist as a sculptural installation.

Presented in varying states of order and chaos, this diverse array of things — performance props, photographs, videos, documents, technology — points to a network of relationships with artists and communities around the world. It embodies a collaborative practice that has consistently embraced juxtaposition and exchange across boundaries—whether geographic, temporal, cultural, political, disciplinary or psychic. Bull’s arrangement of objects, in which a decorative ceramic vase might sit comfortably next to a stack of political newspapers or a prop from a film, mirrors the experimentation with collective ways of working, living and being together, that is at the core of his approach. The connections between seemingly incongruous objects spark unexpected associations, while also extending outward to their wider social significance and histories. For Bull, art is a way of being in the world: of responding to, improvising with and sculpting the material of the social. Connexion proposes an expanded notion of the artist as a connector of people.

The artist

Hank Bull was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1949 and now lives in Vancouver. A multimedia artist as well as an arts administrator, he has been an important member of the legendary Western Front Society since 1973. He is also the founder and executive director of Centre A (Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art) since 1999. Hank was an early adopter of telecommunications technologies and, between 1978 and 1986, joined a global network of artists who produced collective works using distance transmission of video and text. During an extended trip around the world with artist Kate Craig in the 80’s, he met numerous artists in Japan, Indonesia, India, Cameroon, Yugoslavia and France. In the wake of this experience, he co-founded, with Robert Filliou, The Afro-Asiatic Combine, “to research the influence of African and Asian thought on Western culture.” His work was presented at the Museum of Modern Art (1991) as well as at the Venice Biennale (1986), the Dokumenta in Kassel (1987) and Ars Electronica (1982, 1989). An active member of his community, he served for five years on the Sectoral Committee for Arts and Culture of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO and has been a regular contributor to Art Matters, an initiative of Her Excellency Michaëlle Jean, Governor General. His work is part of the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Netherlands Media Art Institute and many private collectors.

The curators

Joni Low is an independent curator and writer living in Vancouver, British Columbia. Recent curatorial projects include Fountain: the source or origin of anything, a large-scale outdoor photographic mural and webwork by Laiwan (The Wall: CBC Plaza, 2014) and Idle Wild by DRIL art collective (Café for Contemporary Art, 2012). Her writing has appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues and in publications including Canadian Art, C Magazine, Fillip, The Capilano Review and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. A member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects and the Doryphore Independent Curators Society, she has held positions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Long March Space Beijing, and Centre A, where she developed a specialized public library on contemporary Asian art.

Pan Wendt is Curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery (CCAG) in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. He worked as a freelance curator and critic, and was Adjunct Curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery from 2007 to 2010. Exhibition credits include James Lee Byars: Letters from the World’s Most Famous Unknown Artist (Mass MoCA, 2004); Colleen Wolstenholme: A Divided Room (CCAG, 2008); Funkaesthetics (with Luis Jacob, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, 2009); Free Parking (CCAG, 2011); Aganetha Dyck: Guest Workers (CCAG, 2011); Swintak and Don Miller: Artist-Run Bunker, Vol. 1 (CCAG, 2012); and Quotation (CCAG, 2013). He has been co-curator of Art in the Open in Charlottetown since its inception in 2011. He has taught at University of Prince Edward Island, served on numerous local and national juries, and published in various contemporary art journals and catalogues.

The catalogue

The opening of October 22 will also be the opportunity to launch the publication accompanying the exhibition.

The richly illustrated catalog is published by the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in collaboration with the Burnaby Art Gallery. Built in the image of a notebook of the artist, the publication continues the work of the exhibition in creating multiple links between disparate elements of collected archives. The publication also contains essays by Hank Bull, curators Joni Low and Pan Wendt and contributions by Serge Guilbault, Alex Muir, Kevin Rice and Ellen van Eijnsbergen.

Free activities

The artist will give a guided tour of the exhibition on Thursday, November 5, from 5 pm to 6 pm

The artist will be present in the exhibition space to meet the public on Friday and Saturday, November 6 and 7, during the opening hours of the gallery

Guided tours of the exhibition:

Available at any time. Reservations required with Philippe Dumaine, 514-987-3000, ext. 3280, or dumaine_allard.philippe@uqam.ca

Support

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.     Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.   Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

After touring the world for the last 23 years, the exhibition do it, conceived by the renowned curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, is coming to Quebec where it will be presented at the Galerie de l'UQAM. As its title implies, do it involves the host institution, visitors and guest artists in realizing the works, which arrive only as sets of instructions. Featuring more than 80 Quebecois and international artists, do it Montréal rethinks the traditional codes of the exhibition in order to offer new experiences to visitors and to reflect on the meaning and function of museums.

do it is a traveling exhibition conceived and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. The exhibition and the accompanying publication were made possible, in part by grants from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, and with the generous support from Project Perpetual and ICI’s International Forum and Board of Trustees.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

do it

In 1993, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier imagined an exhibition that could constantly generate new versions of itself. To test the idea, they invited 12 artists to propose artworks based on written instructions that can be openly interpreted every time they are presented. The instructions were then translated into 9 different languages and circulated internationally between 1994 and 1996. Since then, more than 400 artists have taken part in the project in over 30 countries, giving new meaning to the concept of an exhibition in progress. Nowadays, the project circulates in the form of a book, do it: the compendium, an anthology comprising 250 instructions, published in 2012. For each incarnation, the host institution is responsible for making a selection from this anthology and coordinating the interpretations. That flexibility provides not only variations among versions of the same work, but also the emergence of a new set, a new configuration whose uniqueness is directly related to the specific context where do it is (re)deployed.

Video presenting the do it concept: https://vimeo.com/93191691

do it Montréal

The Montreal edition of do it includes 60 instructions from the book do it: the compendium, in addition to 10 exclusive instructions developed by Quebecois artists, choreographers, authors or playwrights. 14 artists and collectives were also invited to interpret the instructions of other artists. The project is presented in three spaces: in the Galerie de l’UQAM, on campus and off campus (in a  “take-out” version). Several mediation activities are planned for the Galerie and on the campus, calling on visitors to get involved in interpreting the works. The public will be encouraged to share their contributions via social media with the hashtag #doitmtl .The evening of the opening and the events of January 27 and February 3, 2016 will be an opportunity to watch artists in action interpreting some of the instructions: Danièle Desnoyers, Adam Kinner, Christian Lapointe, Rodolphe-Yves Lapointe, Thierry Marceau, Alexis O'Hara, Pour ici ou pour s’emporter, Françoise Sullivan and Wants & Needs Dance.

For this version of do it, the Galerie de l'UQAM has given curator Florence-Agathe Dubé-Moreau the task of selecting the works  (instructions) and inviting artists to rethink the functions and codes of the exhibition in order to investigate their role in the production of knowledge in the arts. She wants to prompt reflection on curation, new approaches to museology and alternative art discourse and spaces. do it Montréal questions museum institutions by re-examining their political and social engagement as well as their embedding in the broader contemporary art system.

Artistes

60 instructions from the book do it: the compendium

Etel Adnan, Kathryn Andrews, Cory Arcangel, Robert Barry, Jérôme Bel, Bernadette Corporation, Louise Bourgeois, Cao Fei, Boris Charmatz, Chu Yun, Claire Fontaine, Critical Art Ensemble, Minerva Cuevas, Jimmie Durham, Cerith Wyn Evans, William Forsythe, Simone Forti, Theaster Gates, Jef Geys, Gilbert & George, Édouard Glissant, Leon Golub, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joseph Grigely, Nicholas Hlobo, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huygue, Joan Jonas, Ilya Kabakov, Ragnar Kjartansson, Jiří Kolář, Július Koller, Suzanne Lacy, Bertrand Lavier, Sol LeWitt, Erik van Lieshout, Lucy R. Lippard, Jonas Mekas, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bruce Nauman, Albert Oehlen, Pak Sheung-Chuen, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Amalia Pica, Cesare Pietroiusti, Adrian Piper, Raqs Media Collective, Eszter Salamon, Peter Saville, Jim Shaw, Shimabuku, Michael Smith, Nancy Spero, Mario García Torres, Rosemarie Trockel, Hannah Weinberger, Lawrence Weiner, Erwin Wurm.

10 exclusive instructions

Anonyme, Christophe Barbeau, Martine Delvaux, Chloé Desjardins, Paul-André Fortier, Gallery Girls, Michelle Lacombe, Dana Michel, David Tomas, Larry Tremblay.

14 interpretations

Louis-Philippe Côté, Danièle Desnoyers, Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf, Adam Kinner, Vincent Lafrance, Christian Lapointe, Rodolphe-Yves Lapointe, Mathieu Lévesque, Thierry Marceau, Alexis O’Hara, Pour ici ou pour s’emporter, projets hybris, Françoise Sullivan, Wants & Needs Dance.

The curator

Hans Ulrich Obrist, a curator of Swiss origin, is Co-Director, Exhibitions and Programmes, and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London. He previously served as Curator of Contemporary Art at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, in addition to overseeing various international events (Berlin Biennale, 1998; Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon, 2007, etc.). With more than two hundred exhibitions to his credit, Obrist is recognized for his innovative curatorial practice, which also comprises writing and publishing. He is considered one of the most colourful, influential and powerful figures in the contemporary art world.

Education

Guided tours of the exhibition:

Available at any time. Reservations required with Audrey Genois, 514 987-3000, ext. 1424, or genois.audrey@uqam.ca

Online supplement:

Discover the special do it Montréal tab on the Galerie de l'UQAM website. It includes images, artists’ instructions, a glossary and critical essays by Maude Johnson.

Credits

do it is a traveling exhibition conceived and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. The exhibition and the accompanying publication were made possible, in part by grants from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, and with the generous support from Project Perpetual and ICI’s International Forum and Board of Trustees.

do it Montréal is produced by the Galerie de l'UQAM, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. It has been realised by the curator Florence-Agathe Dubé-Moreau, whose participation in the project is part of the initiative Premier commissariat of the Galerie de l’UQAM.

Florence-Agathe Dube-Moreau is a Masters in Art History candidate at UQAM. Her research, supervised by Marie Fraser and supported by the SSHRC, explores the effects of reconstituting contemporary art exhibitions. In 2013, she won the Young Critics writing competition sponsored by the journal esse arts + opinions. Her writing has been published in artichoke and esse, as well as in the monographs Trevor Gould. Watercolours 1996-2013 (2014) and BGL. Canadassimo (2015). The collective work Questionner l’avenir. Réflexions sur la réactualisation de la Biennale de Montréal (2015), which she initiated and co-organized, was published by les Éditions d'art le Sabord.

Support

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Should a photographic image solely be understood in its capacity to represent and its relationship to the real? If a word is put into practice by being spoken, a text by being read, how does this apply to photography? How do you put an image into practice? Faced with the image’s profusion and dematerialization, Caroline Mauxion aims to reconnect with her images through video and photography. It is by conceiving photography in its indexical logic that Caroline Mauxion seeks to explore the possible status of an image, both in its materiality and in its relationship to space. This deposit of light on the sensitive surface - this tangible and not visible link between the medium and its referent, nourishes her thoughts poetically and theoretically. The image is no longer limited only to an iconic end, it is an object to be manipulated and set in space. Her works are never fixed, but are rather in a state of movement and thus open to future transformations.

The Galerie de l'UQAM is pleased to collaborate with the Cinémathèque québécoise for the first screenings in America of L'exposition d'un film (2014, 100 minutes) by Mathieu Copeland. The film, which has achieved great success when it screened at the Tate Modern in London and at the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris, is presented as part of the exhibition Motion. Montréal/Gevena, underway at the Galerie de l'UQAM.

Please note that the film is in french.

The film includes interventions and works by Mac Adams, Fia Backström, Robert Barry, Erica Baum, Stuart Brisley, Jonathan Burrows, Nick Cave, David Cunningham, Philippe Decrauzat, Peter Downsbrough, Maria Eichhorn, F.M. Einheit, Tim Etchells, Alexandre Estrela, John Giorno, Sam Gleaves, Kenneth Goldsmith, Myriam Gourfink, Karl Holmqvist, Marie-Caroline Hominal, Myriam Lefkowitz, Franck Leibovici, Benoît Maire, Charles De Meaux, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, Ieva Miseviit, Meredith Monk, Charlotte Moth, Phill Niblock, Deborah Pearson, Vanessa Place, Michael Portnoy, Lee Ranaldo, Lætitia Sadier, Laurent Schmid, Leah Singer, Mieko Shiomi, Susan Stenger, Sofia Diaz + Vítor Roriz, Kasper T. Toeplitz, Daniel Turner, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Alan Vega, Lawrence Weiner.

L’exposition d’un film by Mathieu Copeland is produced by HEAD – Genève with support by HES-SO.

The exhibition Motion. Montréal/Geneva gathers works by Jean-Pierre Aubé, Patrick Bernatchez, BGL, Caroline Boileau, Michel de Broin, Pascal Grandmaison, Nelson Henricks, Myriam Laplante, Eduardo Menz, Nadia Myre, Chih-Chien Wang/Hugo Canoilas, Matthis Collins, Verena Dengler, Christian Falsnaes, Hadley + Maxwell, Lauren Huret & Camille Dumond, Nastasia Meyrat, Lou Masduraud & Antoine Bellini, Lea Meier, Guillaume Pilet, Lili Reynaud Dewar, Benjamin Valenza. It is presented with the support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Passage à découvert is an opportunity to discover the works of tomorrow’s contemporary artists and teachers who will take their place in museums, galleries and schools. The exhibition illustrates the students’ creative vitality, curiosity and freedom and bears witness to recent graduates’ professionalism and the excitement that their projects stirs up. Presented each year, this exhibition also reveals the wealth and diversity of the programs offered by the École des arts visuels et médiatiques, which favours a multidisciplinary education.

Participating artists

Louis Alex, Sophie Aubry, Maude Auger, Myriam Bélanger, Aubane Berthommé, Ann Karine Bourdeau Leduc, Jorge Oswaldo Carranza Sanchez, Marie-Félix Cayouette, Frédérique Chassé, Véronique Charpentier and Valentine Chauvet, Madeleine-Zoé Corbeil-Robitaille, Mathieu Deschênes, Karolane Doré Desrochers, Kevin Dubeau, Catherine Filteau, Patrick Foisy, Xavier Ford-Legrand, Mélanie Gingras, Denis Gosselin, Rosalie Jean, Amélie Jodoin, Camille Lacasse, Édith-Manoushka Larouche, Amélie Maltais, Alexandre Ménard, Marilyne Minier, Guillaume Pascale, Caroline Pierre, Guillaume Plourde, Marie-Andrée Poulin, Camille Prat, Roxanne Séguin, Véronique Tremblay, Thomas-Alexandre Vincent

Les univers de création de l’auteur-compositeur-interprète Pierre Lapointe et de l’artiste visuel David Altmejd se sont rencontrés en 2011 pour faire naître Conte crépusculaire, un conte musical et visuel alliant musique, chant et arts visuels. Ce spectacle, coproduit par la Galerie de l'UQAM et Productions 3PM, a fait découvrir au public un univers allégorique d’une beauté fascinante au cours de six représentations à la Galerie de l’UQAM.

Cette rencontre inusitée et unique par sa liberté et son inventivité a donné lieu à une archive vidéographique, réalisée par Rénald Bellemare. Cinq ans plus tard, le public est invité à visionner le film et à revivre le spectacle en images du 4 au 7 mai 2016, à la Galerie de l’UQAM.

Dates et heures des projections :
Mercredi 4 mai, 18 h et 20 h
Jeudi 5 mai, 18 h et 20 h
Vendredi 6 mai, 18 h et 20 h
Samedi 7 mai, 13 h

Tarif régulier : 12$
Tarif réduit (étudiants, ainés, employés de l'UQAM) : 8$

Places limitées
Achat de billets en ligne

Le film est d'une durée de 42 minutes.

Conte crépusculaire

Conte crépusculaire met en scène un roi, dans un futur lointain, qui doit céder le trône à son fils puis accéder à un autre niveau de conscience en atteignant la mort. Pour perpétuer la tradition rituelle, le roi entreprend une grande tournée d’adieux. De retour dans son royaume, exténué par le voyage, confronté prématurément à l’arrivée de sa propre mort, il est prêt à vivre la cérémonie de passage.

Création multidisciplinaire, Conte crépusculaire est en quelque sorte un « tableau vivant ». Ce mariage de la scène musicale et visuelle a permis au public de vivre une expérience inédite : il a assisté à la création en direct d’une partie du conte, alors que des éléments de la pièce étaient réalisés par David Altmejd tout au long de la mise en scène. Chaque représentation a été unique.

Le conte met aussi en scène le travail du compositeur Yannick Plamondon, de la chanteuse Émilie Laforest, du Quatuor Molinari, du musicien Philippe Brault et du jeune Sacha Jean-Claude, alors membre des Petits chanteurs du Mont-Royal.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.      Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.    

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.     Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.      Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.     

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.     Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Genèse

C’est en 2006 que Pierre Lapointe et David Altmejd se sont rencontrés pour la toute première fois à la Galerie de l’UQAM. À l’époque, David Altmejd débutait son entrée fracassante dans l’univers de l’art contemporain québécois, canadien et international, notamment avec la présentation de sa première exposition solo à la Galerie de l’UQAM en 2007, et son exposition au Pavillon du Canada à la Biennale de Venise, dont la commissaire était Louise Déry, directrice de la Galerie de l’UQAM. En 2011, Louise Déry acceptait de soutenir un projet de collaboration qui fusionnerait leurs deux démarches en leur offrant une totale carte blanche. Conte crépusculaire était né.

À l’époque, la documentation vidéographique de Conte crépusculaire n’était pas destinée à être un film en soi. Devant la richesse du matériau, la Galerie de l’UQAM a souhaité en assurer la conservation en produisant cette archive visuelle du conte musical et visuel, coproduite par la Galerie de l’UQAM et Imagide.

Biographies

Né en 1981 à Alma, Pierre Lapointe vit et travaille à Montréal. Remportant le grand prix du Festival international de la chanson de Granby en 2001, il lance son premier album en 2004. Depuis, il en produit plus d’une dizaine qui connaissent un grand succès à la fois au Québec, en France et en Belgique. En plus de performer dans le cadre de nombreux festivals, il crée plusieurs spectacles inédits dans lesquels le travail visuel prend une place considérable, dont Mutantès, La forêt des mal-aimés et Pépiphonique. Outre David Altmejd, il collabore avec l’artiste visuelle Dominique Pétrin, le metteur en scène Claude Poissant et l’architecte Jean Verville. Sa carrière est ponctuée de nombreux prix, dont 13 Félix. pierrelapointe.com

Né en 1974 à Montréal, David Altmejd vit et travaille à New York, Diplômé en arts visuels de l’Université du Québec à Montréal (1998) ainsi que de l’Université Columbia (New York, 2001), David Altmejd a tenu de nombreuses expositions individuelles et collectives tant au Québec, au Canada qu’à l’étranger. Il représente le Canada en 2007 à la 52^e Biennale de Venise avec l’installation The Index, sous le commissariat de Louise Déry qui lui consacre plusieurs expositions dès 2000 et publie ses deux premiers catalogues majeurs. Il a de plus participé aux biennales du Whitney Museum en 2004 et d’Istanbul en 2003. Son travail fait notamment partie des collections du Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, du Whitney Museum, de la Art Gallery of Ontario, de l’Université du Québec à Montréal et du Musée des beaux-arts du Canada. Récemment, le Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris lui consacrait une grande exposition rétrospective, Flux, ayant ensuite circulé au MUDAM Luxembourg ainsi qu’au Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. davidaltmejd.com

Appuis

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Partenaires

Productions 3PM
Pascal Grandmaison
Uniform
Les Petits chanteurs du Mont-Royal
Conservatoire de musique et d'art dramatique du Québec