After its great success at the Galerie de l’UQAM in spring 2015 and in Paris in the fall, Aude Moreau. The Political Nightfall, the first major solo show of the artist, continues a tour that will bring her to Toronto and Luxembourg (September 2016). 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.

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 is 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 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 presented several of Jean-Pierre Aubé's interventions on electromagnetic pollution.

Partners

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On the invitation of the Galerie de l’UQAM and the curator Louise Déry, the Quebec artist Jean-Pierre Aubé carried out a series of live interventions during the preview days of the  Venice Biennale (May 6 to 8, 2015). This project is now the subject of a 25-minute film, Jean-Pierre Aubé à Venise, which will be presented for the first time on June 7 at the Galerie de l'UQAM. The screening will take place in the presence of the artist and the curator of the project, Louise Déry. Free admission. 

Produced by the Galerie de l'UQAM, the film and the project of the Venice Biennale has been made with the support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

To learn more about the project: Venice Biennale

Maria Hupfield presents Post Performance/Conversation Action, a hybrid performance and conversation with guest artists on the topics in their work as a form of intergenerational community building and solidarity.

Creation and performance: Maria Hupfield
Special guest: Alanis Obomsawin
Assistant: Lindsay Nixon

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Presented as part of Indigenous Contemporary Scene (ICS), a programming produced by ONISHKA.

About the artist

Currently based in Brooklyn New York, Maria Hupfield is a member of the Anishinaabe Nation at Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario. Her work traveled across Canada for the exhibit Beat Nation: Aboriginal Art and Hip Hop and have shown at the Museum of Arts and Design New York, Toronto Power Plant, and 7a*11d International Performance Festival. Her project Artist Tour Guide was commissioned by The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, New York with an iteration at The McCord, Montreal Quebec Canada. In 2015 she designed a nine foot birchbark style hunting canoe out of industrial felt to be assembled and performed in Venice Italy for the premiere of Jiimaan. Her work is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau in Montreal.mariahupfield.wordpress.com

The Galerie de l'UQAM is proud to present the event Hetep-Bastet, A Famous Mummy in Montréal during the 30th edition of Montréal Museums' Day (MMD) on May 29. For the Galerie’s first participation in Montréal Museums' Day, the public will be invited to meet the iconic mummy in the Collection d'oeuvres d'art de l'UQAM, as well as her sarcophagus. It is a rare opportunity to view these important pieces and learn about their numerous adventures, from the birth of Hetep-Bastet in ancient Egypt to the present day.

Who was Hetep-Bastet?

Hetep-Bastet was a wealthy Egyptian woman who lived during the 26th Dynasty of the Pharaohs, around 600 B.C. In 1927, the Cairo Museum gave her mummy and its priceless sarcophagus to Montréal's École des Beaux Arts, which displayed this extraordinary gift in their entrance hall. Probably during the protests of 1968, Hetep-Bastet was hurled to the ground by a student who had smashed her glass case, also damaging her wooden coffin. With no resources to repair them, the damaged mummy and the sarcophagus were stored in a vault in the building until they were transferred to UQAM in 1969, when it was founded and merged with the École des Beaux Arts. But the treasures would have to wait until the late 1990s for their restoration.

This is only a small piece of the dramatic destiny of Hetep-Bastet, who, in the years that followed, became an object of insatiable study for Egyptologists, an exceptional source of scientific advances, the muse of a documentary film, and the star of exhibitions on ancient Egypt and contemporary art. Visitors will be able to discover Hetep-Bastet's many incarnations on Montréal Museums' Day, more than 2600 years after her birth.

The mummy’s last public appearance dates back to 2008. It was loaned to the Canadian Museum of Civilization for the exhibition Tombs of Eternity: The Afterlife in Ancient Egypt, where it was displayed alongside 200 artifacts from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and other ancient Egyptian artifacts from Canadian collections. The last time the mummy was on view in Montréal was in 2003. at the Galerie de l'UQAM, for the exhibition Sarkis. 2600 ans après 10 minutes 44 secondes. The Armenian-born artist mounted an installation on the theme of death, featuring various objects, including the remains of Hetep-Bastet.

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Montréal Museums' Day

Montréal Museums' Day is a popular open house event aimed at publicizing Montréal's museums and encouraging the public to form an attachment to them. Each spring, MMD attracts over 100,000 visitors in a single day. This festive outing is presented by Québecor in collaboration with the STM and a number of other partners. museesmontreal.org

The Collection d'oeuvres d'art de l'UQAM

The Hetep-Bastet mummy is part of the Collection d'oeuvres d'art de l'UQAM, which includes pieces transferred from the École des Beaux Arts (EBAM) at the founding of the University in 1969. Managed by the Galerie de l'UQAM, it currently comprises more than 4000 works and objects that reflect the teaching of art in Montréal, some currents of contemporary art in Quebec, and the individual practices of recognized Quebec artists. The major element of the collection is the legacy of Albert Dumouchel's engraving workshop, comprising some 3000 prints made by students between 1955 and 1970, including Pierre Ayot, Francine Beauvais, and Louis Pelletier. It also includes the corpus of public art integrated into the UQAM campus as well as a number of works acquired independently since 1980. Sculpture (Henri Saxe, David Altmejd, Marcel Barbeau, Danielle April, Michel Goulet), photography (Raphaëlle de Groot, Alain Paiement, Angela Grauerholz, Geneviève Cadieux), paintings (Paterson Ewen, Janet Werner, Françoise Sullivan, Claude Tousignant, Cynthia Girard), drawings (Pierre Gauvreau, Stéphane Gilot, Edmund Alleyn), video (Pascal Grandmaison, Chantal duPont, Michel de Broin, Jocelyn Robert), engravings and artists books create a rich, current portrait of the vitality of the visual arts at UQAM. Several sets of ancient objects from various cultures and periods, mostly inherited from the École des Beaux Arts, complete the collection. Additional information: Collection

Support

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The Galerie de l’UQAM presents Nos terres louables by Marie-Claude Gendron, graduating master’s student in visual and media arts (MFA), UQAM. For five days, the artist will occupy the observation deck overlooking the site of the open pit mine located in Malartic, Abitibi-Témiscamingue.

By her steady and continuous presence on site, Marie-Claude Gendron wishes to highlight citizen engagement and resistance movements in the face of ambient stagnation. Visitors will discover this "act of immobility," which follows a series of similar interventions beginning in 2013, as it will be transmitted simultaneously at the Galerie de l'UQAM, from May 26 to 30.

The issues raised by the project will be questioned by the essayist Alain Deneault, artist Michelle Lacombe, author Alexis Desgagnés, art collective AOOS and activist Dominique Bernier in a multidisciplinary event presented on June 5, 2016, in collaboration with the OFFTA - live arts festival.

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Thanks to

Hélène Doyon, Jean-François Dugas, Pascal Audet, Katherine-Josée Gervais, Alexis Desgagnés, AOOS, Michelle Lacombe, Dominique Bernier, Alain Deneault, Marie-Andrée Poulin, Kamissa Ma Koïta, Marie-Michèle Beaudoin, Magali Babin and FARE.

Motion brings together the work of twenty artists from Quebec and Geneva in an anthology of video pieces on the theme of "motion," understood in two senses: as movement and as a proposal. The concept of motion takes into consideration the energy that activates as well as the principle that motivates. This double raison d'être initiates often absurd or even preposterous processes and actions in the works exhibited, a sort of infernal circle that directs our attention to the planetary issues of food and energy production. Their reserve supply, which is not always renewable, becomes a test zone crying out for inventive alternatives. Destruction and death, nourishment and survival: the motion that has now become urgent at the intersection of these inescapable realities is borne by artists and their observation of today's world.

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.

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.

Motion. Montreal/Geneva is the first visual arts encounter between Montreal and Geneva. For the occasion, the Fabrique d’expositions and LiveInYourHead, the HEAD Curatorial Institute, Geneva created a video compilation of works by 11 Montreal artists and 12 Swiss and international artists associated with HEAD (Geneva University of Art and Design). Their works share a common theme: motion, as movement or proposition.

The exhibition

The Motion project was born of a conversation between two institutions devoted to art education and dissemination: the Galerie de l'UQAM in Montreal and HEAD – Geneva. To start off this exchange, the Montreal collective of curators at La Fabrique d'expositions selected videos by Quebec artists inspired by the concept of motion. The double meaning of the word encompasses a duality between action and proposition, between what engenders movement and what prompts the adoption of a position. The encounter of these works produces a variety of performative, aesthetic, political and sociological points of view, reflecting what currently activates and motivates the thoughts of the artist as an actor in the world.

In response to the Montreal proposal, HEAD – Geneva is presenting a selection of videos from its project Performance Proletarians. In October 2014, under the leadership of Lili Reynaud Dewar and Benjamin Valenza, a group of artists and students transformed an arts centre into a space for the production of performances that were not open to the public. The creators became their own public, connected to Internet users scattered around the world and absorbed by the contemplation of this continuous flow of performance viewed through the lens of their cinematography. For Motion, Yann Chateigné plunges us into twelve sequences from the intense productions of this active, vital community.

In conjunction with Motion, the Cinémathèque québécoise is also presenting the first projection on this side of the Atlantic of L’Exposition d’un Film / The Exhibition of a Film (2014) by Mathieu Copeland, a singular cinematic experience in which 46 major artists – choreographers, performers, musicians, writers or visual artists – were invited to participate in the creation of a work that is equally an exhibited film, the film of an exhibition and a filmed exhibition.

The artists

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

L’Exposition d’un Film

On April 7, 13 and 16, 2016, at 7 p.m., the Cinémathèque québécoise will present L’Exposition d’un Film, a project by Mathieu Copeland (2014, 100 min.) produced by HEAD – Geneva with the support of  HES-SO. Mathieu Copeland will be present at the first screening, on April 7.

With the participation of 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, and Lawrence Weiner.

The curators

Created in 2009 by Jean-Pierre Greff, Director of HEAD – Geneva, LiveInYourHead is an exhibition program, a venue for curatorial experimentation, and a working and living space for artists and students. Its activities are based on an intense program of guests from various fields – artists, curators, critics, designers, filmmakers, and musicians – invited to carry out a specific project, with the sole constraint that it be conceived and produced in collaboration with a group of students. These "curatorial objects" regularly provide an opportunity for cooperation and exchange with partners, including recent collaborations with the CCA Wattis Institute in San Franscisco, the Artsonje Art Center in Seoul, and Kunstverein in Amsterdam. The LiveInYourHead program is run by Yann Chateigné.

Performance Proletarians is a proposal by Lili Reynaud Dewar and Benjamin Valenza. Produced by: HEAD – Geneva and EBABX. Lili Reynaud Dewar is a teacher in the HEAD – Geneva, Work.Master program. Contemporary artistic practices.

La Fabrique d’expositions is a collective of Montreal curators committed to realising projects in a spirit of collegiality in partnership with various exhibitors. They periodically are involved in major cultural events in Canada and abroad, while also developing new initiatives for disseminating the most current artistic forms. Their most recent project, Videozoom. L’entre-images, has been presented in 12 cities in Canada and abroad. Its members have been working together for several years, encouraging the pooling and brewing of ideas. The collective is comprised of three curators: Julie Bélisle, Louise Déry and Audrey Genois.

Educational opportunity

Guided tours of the exhibition

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Motion is produced by the Galerie de l'UQAM, Montreal, in collaboration with HEAD – Geneva

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Performance Proletarians is a proposal by Lili Reynaud Dewar and Benjamin Valenza, and a production of HEAD – Geneva and the École des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.

The educational booklet

An educational booklet is offered to the public free of charge as a a guide to the exhibition.

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La Biennale de Montréal and the Galerie de l’UQAM are presenting the work of German artist Judith Hopf, as part of BNLMTL 2016 – The Grand Balcony. Hopf will show new hybrid sculptures integrating past video pieces.

The 2016 edition of La Biennale de Montréal calls for a materialist and sensualist approach. It recasts the pursuit of sensual pleasures, making a case for its decisive role in everyday life and political decision-making. The Grand Balcony bets on the liberating potential of art and invites us to rethink both the (im)possibility of an emancipation through pleasure – and its urgency.

The exhibition

In her sculptures, installations and videos, Judith Hopf transfigures modest settings and ordinary materials into droll, sometimes even stupid expressions of humanistic values. The artist herself describes her working method as an attempt to do something “that doesn’t put me in a bad mood”. The small scale and low resolution of most of Hopf’s works stem from her belief that when it comes to human beings expressing themselves, they should enlist whatever means are at hand. For The Grand Balcony, she designed simple, but perforated furniture (a table, a bench, a plinth) that incorporates screens featuring some of her absurdist films that evoke contemporary experience in a society of overstretching, burnout and chronic exhaustion.

BNLMTL 2016 – The Grand Balcony

This edition of La Biennale de Montréal draws loosely on Jean Genet’s Le Balcon, in which the play’s high porch is a space of contestation between revolution and counter-revolution, reality and illusion. As stated by curator Philippe Pirotte, “The Grand Balcony is simultaneously playful and fatalistic in its presentation of rooms, corridors and balconies. Deflecting every attempt to fit in or create an overarching narrative, to be introduced into a system of classification or to be pinned down, the exhibition becomes a place of fallacy, where things can go astray”. The Grand Balcony was conceptualized and curated by Philippe Pirotte in consultation with curatorial advisors Corey McCorkle, Aseman Sabet and Kitty Scott, and in close collaboration with Sylvie Fortin, Executive and Artistic Director of La Biennale de Montréal. bnlmtl.org

The artist

Born in Berlin in 1969, Judith Hopf lives and works in Berlin. Her works have been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museion—museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea di Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy (2016); kaufmann repetto, Milan, Italy (2015); Neue Galerie—Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel (mhk), Kassel, Germany (2015); PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2014); Kunsthalle Lingen, Lingen, Germany (2013); Studio Voltaire, London, Britain (2013); Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples, Italy (2013); Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden (2012); Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria (2012); Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany (2008), Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany (2007); Secession, Vienna, Austria (2006); Casco—Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht, Netherlands (2006); and Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2006). Hopf has participated in the 8^th Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2014); Contour 2013—6^th Biennial of Moving Image, Mechelen, Belgium (2013); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012) and in group exhibitions at Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY (2014) and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013).

The curator

Philippe Pirotte (born in Belgium in 1972) is an art historian, curator, critic, and Director of the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule and of Portikus, leading centres for contemporary art in Germany and beyond. Pirotte was one of the co-founders of the contemporary art centre objectif_exhibitions in Antwerp, Belgium. From 2005 to 2011, he was Director of the internationally renowned Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland where he organized solo exhibitions by artists such as Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Owen Land, Oscar Tuazon, Jutta Koether, Allan Kaprow, and Corey McCorkle. From 2004 to 2013, Pirotte held the position of Senior Advisor at the Rijksakademie for Visual Arts in Amsterdam. In 2012, he became Adjunct Senior Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He also served as Advising Program Director for the Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing and is an advisor for the Kadist Art Foundation (Paris/San Francisco).

Public activities

Guided tours of the exhibition
Available any time, free of charge. Reservations required with Philippe Dumaine: 514 987-3000, poste 3280, or dumaine_allard.philippe@uqam.ca

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Educational booklet

La Biennale de Montréal and the Galerie de l’UQAM are presenting the work New York collective Thirteen Black Cats, as part of BNLMTL 2016 – The Grand Balcony. Thirteen Black Cats will premiere Corpse Cleaner, a short film that addresses the legacy of atomic power in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

The 2016 edition of La Biennale de Montréal calls for a materialist and sensualist approach. It recasts the pursuit of sensual pleasures, making a case for its decisive role in everyday life and political decision-making. The Grand Balcony bets on the liberating potential of art and invites us to rethink both the (im)possibility of an emancipation through pleasure – and its urgency.

The exhibition

Corpse Cleaner, the latest film produced by the research and production collective Thirteen Black Cats, focuses on the letters exchanged between Claude Eatherly, the air force pilot whose “all clear” weather report enabled the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and Günther Anders, the German philosopher, theorist and anti-nuclear activist whose work fixated on technology’s capacity to outpace human intention.

As a voice-over retells the content of the letters, we learn that Hollywood producer Bob Hope approached Eatherly to make a film about his life. Anders actively encouraged Eatherly to refuse the offer. A former movie prop cleaner in the Hollywood Custom Palace, Anders claimed that the Hollywood apparatus would not be able to process this “fatal act”.

BNLMTL 2016 – The Grand Balcony

This edition of La Biennale de Montréal draws loosely on Jean Genet’s Le Balcon, in which the play’s high porch is a space of contestation between revolution and counter-revolution, reality and illusion. As stated by curator Philippe Pirotte, “The Grand Balcony is simultaneously playful and fatalistic in its presentation of rooms, corridors and balconies. Deflecting every attempt to fit in or create an overarching narrative, to be introduced into a system of classification or to be pinned down, the exhibition becomes a place of fallacy, where things can go astray”. The Grand Balcony was conceptualized and curated by Philippe Pirotte in consultation with curatorial advisors Corey McCorkle, Aseman Sabet and Kitty Scott, and in close collaboration with Sylvie Fortin, Executive and Artistic Director of La Biennale de Montréal. bnlmtl.org

The artists

Thirteen Black Cats is a research and production collective based in New York, founded by Lucy Raven, Evan Calder Williams and Vic Brooks. thirteenblackcats.org

Born in Tucson, AZ in 1977, Lucy Raven lives and works in New York. Her work has been shown in exhibitions and screenings internationally, including solo exhibitions at VOX – Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal (2015); Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Troy, NY (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt (2014); and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014). Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013); Whitney Biennial, New York (2012); and the Manchester International Festival, Manchester, England (2011). lucyraven.com

Born in Portland, ME in 1982, Evan Calder Williams is a writer, theorist, and artist who lives and works in Woodstock, NY. He is the author of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (2011), Roman Letters (2011), as well as two forthcoming books, Shard Cinema and Donkey Time. His writing has appeared in Film Quarterly, The New Inquiry, Radical Philosophy, World Picture, The Third Rail, and elsewhere. He has presented films, performances, and audio works at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2014); Images Festival, Toronto (2014); Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Montréal (2014); Artists Space, New York (2013), Tramway, Glasgow (2012); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012).

Born in London in 1979, Vic Brooks lives and works in Woodstock, NY. She is a curator and producer at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center and Rensselear Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. She has worked at LUX, London, co-founded The Island, London and co-curated at the Serpentine Gallery, London.

The curator

Philippe Pirotte (born in Belgium in 1972) is an art historian, curator, critic, and Director of the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule and of Portikus, leading centres for contemporary art in Germany and beyond. Pirotte was one of the co-founders of the contemporary art centre objectif_exhibitions in Antwerp, Belgium. From 2005 to 2011, he was Director of the internationally renowned Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland where he organized solo exhibitions by artists such as Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Owen Land, Oscar Tuazon, Jutta Koether, Allan Kaprow, and Corey McCorkle. From 2004 to 2013, Pirotte held the position of Senior Advisor at the Rijksakademie for Visual Arts in Amsterdam. In 2012, he became Adjunct Senior Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He also served as Advising Program Director for the Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing and is an advisor for the Kadist Art Foundation (Paris/San Francisco).

Public activities

Guided tours of the exhibition
Available aby time, free of charge. Reservations required with Philippe Dumaine: 514 987-3000, ext. 3280, or dumaine_allard.philippe@uqam.ca

Artists' Talk - Thirteen Black Cats (in English)
Panel with Luke Willis Thompson, Michael Blum and Nathalie Melikian
October 19, 2016, 3:00 to 4:30 pm
Société des arts technologiques, 1201 Saint-Laurent Boulevard, Montréal
$10 / Free for BNLMTL 2016 Passport holders
Organized by La Biennale de Montréal

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Educational booklet

La Biennale de Montréal and the Galerie de l’UQAM are presenting the work of Toronto artist Luis Jacob, as part of BNLMTL 2016 – The Grand Balcony. Jacob will deploy in the Galerie one of his Albums, in which he connects hundreds of images taken from the history of art, popular culture and news feeds.

The 2016 edition of La Biennale de Montréal calls for a materialist and sensualist approach. It recasts the pursuit of sensual pleasures, making a case for its decisive role in everyday life and political decision-making. The Grand Balcony bets on the liberating potential of art and invites us to rethink both the (im)possibility of an emancipation through pleasure – and its urgency.

The exhibition

Luis Jacob’s historical and urbanistic considerations are coupled with a philosophical and anthropological approach that characterizes his artistic, literary and curatorial practice. The bank of images found and then assembled by Jacob in Album XII (2013-14) highlights the subjective framework of the aesthetic experience, which is projected from the work of art into a broader perception, toward the gaze we cast on what we are made up of individually and collectively. Grouped together according to a principle of free correspondence, the images suggest analogies that are to be constructed, developed or completed by the viewer. Analogy is offered as form and content, both in the dialogue between the images and in the meeting of the perceiving subject and the perceived object.

The philosophical extensions of Jacob’s research also come through in the silkscreen print The Demonstration (2013), whose central subject, a white monochrome held by a pair of anonymous hands, frames the personal, complex experience of the viewer, who is responsible for a large part of the content. These pieces reflect the conceptual basis of Jacob’s art, whose many different, unpredictable forms work to neutralize artistic nomenclatures at the same time as they interrogate them.

BNLMTL 2016 – The Grand Balcony

This edition of La Biennale de Montréal draws loosely on Jean Genet’s Le Balcon, in which the play’s high porch is a space of contestation between revolution and counter-revolution, reality and illusion. As stated by curator Philippe Pirotte, “The Grand Balcony is simultaneously playful and fatalistic in its presentation of rooms, corridors and balconies. Deflecting every attempt to fit in or create an overarching narrative, to be introduced into a system of classification or to be pinned down, the exhibition becomes a place of fallacy, where things can go astray”. The Grand Balcony was conceptualized and curated by Philippe Pirotte in consultation with curatorial advisors Corey McCorkle, Aseman Sabet and Kitty Scott, and in close collaboration with Sylvie Fortin, Executive and Artistic Director of La Biennale de Montréal. bnlmtl.org

The artist

Born in Lima, Peru, in 1971, Luis Jacob lives and works in Toronto. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at Kunsthalle Lingen, Lingen, Germany (2012); Musée McCord, Montréal (2011); Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2011); Art in General, New York (2010); Fonderie Darling, Montréal (2010); Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany (2009); September, Berlin (2008); Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg (2008); and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2007). He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain (2010); Generali Foundation, Salzburg, Austria (2011); Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, Switzerland (2010); Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium (2010); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX (2012); Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2009); and dOCUMENTA 12, Kassel, Germany (2007).

The curator

Philippe Pirotte (born in Belgium in 1972) is an art historian, curator, critic, and Director of the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule and of Portikus, leading centres for contemporary art in Germany and beyond. Pirotte was one of the co-founders of the contemporary art centre objectif_exhibitions in Antwerp, Belgium. From 2005 to 2011, he was Director of the internationally renowned Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland where he organized solo exhibitions by artists such as Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Owen Land, Oscar Tuazon, Jutta Koether, Allan Kaprow, and Corey McCorkle. From 2004 to 2013, Pirotte held the position of Senior Advisor at the Rijksakademie for Visual Arts in Amsterdam. In 2012, he became Adjunct Senior Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He also served as Advising Program Director for the Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing and is an advisor for the Kadist Art Foundation (Paris/San Francisco).

Public activities

Guided tours of the exhibition
Available any time, free of charge. Reservations required with Philippe Dumaine: 514 987-3000, poste 3280, or dumaine_allard.philippe@uqam.ca

Artist's Talk -  Luis Jacob (in English)
Panel with Lena Henke, Shannon Bool and Celia Perrin Sidarous
October 20, 2016, 1:00 - 2:30 pm
Canadian Center for Architecture, 1920 Baile Street, Montréal
$10 / Free for BNLMTL 2016 Passport holders
Organized by La Biennale de Montréal

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Educational booklet

The Galerie de l’UQAM presents Nos terres louables by Marie-Claude Gendron, graduating master’s student in visual and media arts (MFA), UQAM. For five days, the artist will occupy the observation deck overlooking the site of the open pit mine located in Malartic, Abitibi-Témiscamingue.

By her steady and continuous presence on site, Marie-Claude Gendron wishes to highlight citizen engagement and resistance movements in the face of ambient stagnation. Visitors will discover this "act of immobility," which follows a series of similar interventions beginning in 2013, as it will be transmitted simultaneously at the Galerie de l'UQAM, from May 26 to 30.

The issues raised by the project will be questioned by the essayist Alain Deneault, artist Michelle Lacombe, author Alexis Desgagnés, art collective AOOS and activist Dominique Bernier in a multidisciplinary event presented on June 5, 2016, in collaboration with the OFFTA - live arts festival.

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Thanks to

Hélène Doyon, Jean-François Dugas, Pascal Audet, Katherine-Josée Gervais, Alexis Desgagnés, AOOS, Michelle Lacombe, Dominique Bernier, Alain Deneault, Marie-Andrée Poulin, Kamissa Ma Koïta, Marie-Michèle Beaudoin, Magali Babin and FARE.

The Galerie de l’UQAM presents the exhibition Angle mort by Jonathan Plante, a graduating master’s student in Visual and Media Arts at UQAM. The artist will reveal a series of paintings and prints on lenticular supports, a process that creates an impression of movement. Depending on the viewpoint of the observer, images appear, disappear and transform themselves. Plante activates the gaze and involves the viewer’s body in the experience of the image’s various temporalities.

On the occasion of the opening, the journal esse will launch its latest issue exploring the theme of the Library.

The exhibition

For Jonathan Plante, the Angle mort (Blind spot) is the gap created by setting the image into motion. In revisiting abstract painting, op art and kinetic art, as well as experimental cinema, the series of painting-screens comprising the exhibition explores, amplifies and systematizes the plastic character of the movement. The paintings and silkscreen prints on lenticular supports display images that foreground the indissociable link between the viewer’s movements and his or her perception.

The artist uses the term “kinoplastic” to describe his explorations of the painting’s temporalities. The word was first used by the art historian and essayist Élie Faure in his 1922 article “De la cinéplastique”. He here envisaged “an art where time would really become a dimension of space.” In redefining Faure’s investigations in the current context, Jonathan Plante draws inspiration from his thinking to enrich his research. How can one think the image in a society where attention is constantly lured by movement? Movement becomes the law of our relationship to the world and it formats the way in which we read it. According to Plante, this perpetual movement has nowadays become the tool of an economy based on the creation and commodification of experiences.

The artist

Jonathan Plante lives and works in Montréal where he obtained a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Concordia University. In a practice that he characterizes as “kinoplastic,” he explores the conditions of the appearance of movement in the image. He is particularly interested in the still image that is set into motion by the viewer’s movements. Echoing op art and experimental cinema, his exhibitions are a fieldwork exploration of visual perception. Through an investigation of the image’s temporalities, he searches for new ways of seeing. In 2005, he travelled to Amsterdam for a two-year residency at De Ateliers. Throughout his stay in the Netherlands, he participated in solo and group exhibitions. In 2008, his work was included in the first Québec Triennial: Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed, organized by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. He presented the solo exhibitions Palindrome at the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides in 2010, Parallaxe at Galerie Division, in 2011, and Moonwalk, in 2014, at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, which represents the artist’s work. In 2013, he proposed a solo exhibition for a young audience, Lapincyclope, at VOX — Centre de l’image contemporaine in Montréal. Lapincyclope subsequently travelled to nine venues in Québec and Canada. In 2017, he will hold a solo exhibition at L’œil de poisson in Québec City. His works are part of private and public collections, including the collections of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.

Free activities

Artist talk: Jonathan Plante
Part of the series L’art observe

Tuesday, February 7, 2017
12:45 pm – 1:45 pm
Galerie de l’UQAM

Guided tours of the exhibition

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

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The Galerie de l'UQAM is proud to start off 2017 with an extraordinary Montréal artist, Françoise Sullivan. The director of the Galerie and curator of the exhibition has assembled a diverse set of works – many of which will be shown for the first time – by one of the most influential figures in the history of Québec and Canadian art.

The opening on January 10 will include a dance piece, Je parle, choreographed by Françoise Sullivan and performed by Ginette Boutin. Also at the event, the journal esse will launch its latest issue exploring the theme of the Library. A number of other activities (dance pieces, guided tours, a discussion forum, etc.) are scheduled throughout the exhibition.

The exhibition

Unfolding over many decades, the remarkable career of Françoise Sullivan occupies an important place in the history of Québec and Canadian art. In the mid-1940s, when she was surrounded by thinkers, poets and artists from all walks of life, her debuts in dance and painting were an opportunity to explore the aesthetic concerns shaking up the art world of the period, particularly as a member of Les Automatistes. The young woman who created Danse dans la neige (Dance in the snow) in 1948 – the most iconic work of Canadian contemporary dance –, and who exhibited her earliest paintings with Borduas, Riopelle and Gauvreau has since created an extensive, vibrant oeuvre of remarkable versatility and continually renewed inventiveness while remaining faithful to the principles of freedom and engagement she embraced during her early career. Inspired by the great European and Native North American mythological traditions, passionate about art and poetry, and influenced by the time she spent in New York, Italy, Ireland and Greece, Sullivan has, in her boundless curiosity, never stopped experimenting with form and colour, gesture and movement, figuration and abstraction, whether in sculpture, installation, performance, photography or, quite decisively, painting.

The works in this exhibition (some of which have been reconstructed from the artist’s archives) merge various conceptual trajectories that evolved from an investigation of the meaning and practice of art. In the words of Louise Déry, ”In these works, consciousness and the body are in a state of alert. Intuition of place and acuteness of the instant have prompted their appearance; individual destiny and collective myths have conditioned their imaginative thrust. For Sullivan, the frozen ground of a winter landscape, the apotheosis of a site housing oil refineries, the disenchanted legend of our uneasy heroes, the uncommon meeting beyond time of two young faces, and the words offered when a painting speaks or falls silent, when choreographed bodies are activated or immobilized, form a constellation of circumstances laden with meaning”.

In the performances, choreographies, writings, photographs and paintings that mark out path of the artist’s practice since the 1940s, concepts are brilliantly asserted in worked colour, fertilized abstraction, the pictorial body. Some works survive in a photographic image or a documentary record that embodies and extends them; others – tied to process and spontaneous, improvised, at times ephemeral manoeuvres – resist. Sullivan’s trajectories, so radiant and, to use Borduas’s word, so liberating, enlighten both our recent history and the present moment. She who still goes to work in her studio every day and continues to think (and think of herself) in and through art, invites us to engage in the vital relationship between the work of art, memory and the world around us.

A major publication will appear later in the year. In addition to the content of the exhibition, it will include all the texts written and published by the artist in the course of her career.

The artist

Françoise Sullivan has made her mark as dancer, choreographer and visual artist. She was one of the founding members of Les Automatistes, along with Paul-Émile Borduas, and a signatory of the Refus global manifesto in 1948. In the 1960s, her work branched out into sculpture, photography, installation and performance. Painting, however, has been her great passion over the years and she continues to work at it with impressive energy.

For many reasons, Françoise Sullivan is an outstanding figure in the history of Québec and Canadian art, as reflected by her numerous awards: the Prix Paul-Émile Borduas, the Ordre du Québec and the Order of Canada, the Governor General's Award, the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, etc. These honours recognize her exceptional career path and the creative diversity of her prodigious body of work. She has been the subject of retrospectives at the Musée d’art contemporain in Montréal (1981), the Musée national des beaux-arts in Québec City (1993), the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts (2003) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (2010) and has been featured in an impressive number of collective exhibitions in Canada, Europe and the United States, including On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2010), and The Automatiste Revolution: Montréal 1941-1960 at the Varley Art Gallery, Unionville, Ontario (2010) and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. She is represented by Galerie Simon Blais in Montréal.

The curator

Louise Déry (PhD Art History) is director of the Galerie de l'UQAM and associate professor in the Department of Art History at UQAM. Formerly a curator at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, and director of the Musée régional de Rimouski, she has curated numerous exhibitions, including Daniel Buren, Giuseppe Penone, Rober Racine, Sarkis, Nancy Spero, David Altmejd, Dominique Blain, Françoise Sullivan, Michael Snow, Stéphane La Rue, Raphaëlle de Groot, Artur Żmijewski, Manon de Pauw, and more recently Aude Moreau, to name just a few. She has presented some thirty foreign exhibitions of Canadian artists, including a dozen in Italy, as well as in France, Belgium, Spain, Turkey, the United States and Asia. She was curator of the Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale with a David Altmejd exhibition (2007). At the Venice Biennales of 2013 and 2015, she presented performances by Raphaëlle de Groot and Jean-Pierre Aubé. She is a recipient of the Hnatyshyn Award (2007) and the Governor General's Award (2015), and a member of the Royal Society of Canada.

Activities produced by the Galerie de l'UQAM

In conjunction with the exhibition, two dance pieces with texts by Françoise Sullivan will be presented free of charge:

Je parle (1993)

Tuesday, January 10, 2017, 5:30 pm (during the opening)

With Ginette Boutin, a dancer who has interpreted the choreographic repertoire of Françoise Sullivan for 30 years.

Saturday, January 21, 2017, 3 pm, 3:30 pm and 4 pm

With the dancers Michèle Febvre, Paul-André Fortier, Dana Michel, Myriam Arsenault, Andréa Corbeil and Nicolas Patry. The text by Françoise Sullivan accompanying the choreography will be interpreted by actress Christiane Pasquier.

The presentations will be followed at 4:30 pm by a Conversation between Françoise sullivan and Louise Déry.

Other complementary activities:

Hall of the pavillon Président-Kennedy, UQAM
Thursday, January 12, 2017, 12:45 pm – 1:45 pm
Wednesday, January 25, 2017, 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm

Tuesday, January 17, 12:45 pm – 1:45 pm
Thursday, February 9, 2017, 17:30 pm – 18:30 pm

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

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Educational booklet

An educational booklet is offered to the public as a a guide to the exhibition.

The Galerie de l’UQAM and the curator Louise Déry are presenting the Scottish artist Graham Fagen’s first solo exhibition in Canada by proposing a video and music-based installation that is emblematic of his research: The Slave’s Lament. The Glasgow artist, who very successfully represented Scotland at the 2015 Venice Biennale, is interested in the slave trade, the inhuman treatment of the deported populations and the Scottish involvement in Jamaica. Several drawings and photographs have been added to this major work in order to allow for a more encompassing extrapolation of the motifs opposing national identity and cultural identity.

The exhibition is presented in the context of Montréal’s Black History Month.

The exhibition

The exhibition The Slave’s Lament presents works by the multidisciplinary artist Graham Fagen on the theme of slavery and Scottish involvement in the fate of African people deported to the Caribbean in the 18th century. The drawings, with the look of masks or portraits, the seascape photographs and the imposing video and music installation shown here explore the tensions and emotions brought about by colonialism and the African slave trade. Today considerable feeling has been mobilized with the aim of reconciliation and redemption for the economic servitude and cultural oppression of peoples – whether aboriginal, the product of immigration or subject to current insidious forms of servitude. Fagen’s questioning of nationality and identity, however, is based on a particularly pertinent critique of the cultural and social heritage.

It was in sweet Senegal
That my foes did me enthral,
For the lands of Virginia — ginia O!
Torn from that lovely shore,
I must never see it more,
And alas! I am weary, weary O! […]

- Robert Burns, The Slave’s Lament, 1792

The installation entitled The Slave’s Lament refers to a song dating from 1792 attributed to the Scottish national poet Robert Burns, and it expresses Burns’s attitude toward slavery. Sung by the famous reggae artist Ghetto Priest to an accompaniment by members of the Scottish Ensemble, the song haunts us with its poignant melody and troubling tale of a Senegalese who, forced into exile and slavery, mourns the loss of his country. Fagen filmed the singer and instrumentalists in close-up, then divided the temporal sequence into pieces that he recomposed into an epic-style ode to the identity that we inherit, that is stolen from us or that we assume. The camera scrutinizes the gazes and gestures, lingering over certain details as if to track down a potential for authenticity and identity to be safeguarded and shared.

A publication about the exhibition will be launched later in the year.

The artist

Graham Fagen is one of the most influential artists working in Scotland today. His work mixes media and crosses continents; combining video, performance, photography and sculpture with text, live music and plants. Fagen’s recurring artistic themes, which include flowers, journeys and popular song, are used as attempts to understand the powerful forces that shape our lives.

Graham Fagen studied at The Glasgow School of Art (1984-1988, BA) and the Kent Institute of Art and Design (1989-1990, MA). He is senior lecturer at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee. 1999 Fagen was invited by the Imperial War Museum, London to work as the Official War Artist for Kosovo, and since then has exhibited widely both in the UK and abroad. In 2015 Graham Fagen was selected to represent Scotland at the 56^th Venice Biennale.

The several exhibitions he took part in include: The Mighty Scheme, Dilston Grove and CPG London, London (2016), GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art from Scotland, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2015), In Camera (with Graham Eatough), La Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille (2015), Cabbages in an Orchard, Glasgow School of Art (2014), Bloodshed, Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2004), Art of the Garden, Tate Britain, London (2004), Golden Age, Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1999) and Zenomap, Scotland + Venice, 50th Venice Biennale (2003). grahamfagen.com

The curator

Louise Déry (PhD Art History) is director of the Galerie de l'UQAM and associate professor in the Department of Art History at UQAM. Formerly a curator at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, she has curated numerous exhibitions, including Daniel Buren, Giuseppe Penone, Rober Racine, Sarkis, Nancy Spero, David Altmejd, Dominique Blain, Françoise Sullivan, Michael Snow, Stéphane La Rue, Raphaëlle de Groot, Artur Żmijewski, Manon de Pauw, and more recently Aude Moreau, to name just a few. She has presented some thirty foreign exhibitions of Canadian artists, including a dozen in Italy, as well as in France, Belgium, Spain, Turkey, the United States and Asia. She was curator of the Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale with a David Altmejd exhibition (2007). At the Venice Biennales of 2013 and 2015, she presented performances by Raphaëlle de Groot and Jean-Pierre Aubé. She is a recipient of the Hnatyshyn Award (2007) and the Governor General's Award (2015), and a member of the Royal Society of Canada.

Free activities

Artist talk by Graham Fagen
Part of the ICI : Intervenants Culturels Internationaux series

Wednesday, February 22, 2017, 12:45 – 1:45 pm
Université du Québec à Montréal
Pavillon des Sciences de la gestion, room RM-110
315 Ste-Catherine East, Montréal

AfroScots, a programme of film, video and sound work
Curators: Mother Tongue (Glasgow)

Artists: Rayanne Bushell, Irineu Destourelles, Kapwani Kiwanga, Maud Sulter, Tako Taal and Alberta Whittle

Saturday, February 25, 2017, 1 pm
CDEx
Université du Québec à Montréal
Pavillon Judith-Jasmin, room J-R930
405 Ste-Catherine East, Montréal

AfroScots is a programme of films and videos by Black artists who have – in the present and historically – lived, worked and studied in Scotland. The works are selected by Mother Tongue, is a research-led, independent curatorial practice formed in 2009 and based in Glasgow. Following the screening, the audience will have the opportunity to interact in a friendly atmosphere with the curators as well as with the artist Graham Fagen, who will be present.

Guided tour of the exhibition with the curator
Thursday, March 2, 2017, 12:45 – 1:45 pm

Talks by Charmaine Nelson and Jennifer Carter

Monday, March 27, 2017, 5 pm
Galerie de l’UQAM

Guided tours of the exhibition

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

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The educational booklet

The Galerie de l’UQAM and the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève are joining forces to present in Montréal a component of the Biennale of Moving Images 2016. This first collaboration is part of an international dissemination approach for this important event that distinguishes itself from most of the existing biennales by the fact that it is exclusively made up of new works, all of which are produced by the Centre and its partners.

Among the 27 new works produced by the Biennale of Moving Images, the Galerie de l’UQAM chose the film installation Silent by Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, two artists based in Berlin. Presented in an impeccably white room, Silent is interested in the aggressive experience of being constrained to silence, and in silence as an act of powerful and performative resistance.

The exhibition

Silent starts with an interpretation of John Cage‘s score 4´33´´ (1952). The score is conceived for any instrument and instructs its performer not to play their instrument during the entire duration of the three parts of 30s, 2m 23s and 1m 40s.  In the Boudry and Lorenz installation, the musician Aérea Negrot performs the score on a rotating stage placed on Oranienplatz, a public square in Berlin where a refugee protest camp took place between 2012 and 2014. In a second part of the film, she performs a song, which has been composed for the occasion.

Dear President,
Your profile is vague,
You have no arms, no hair, no legs, and no sex
Your enemy is your lover
I need make-up, underwear and hormones!

- Aérea Negrot in Silent by Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz

Silence has been described either as a violent experience, as in being silenced, or as a powerful performative act of resistance, as it has been carried out by various disobedience movements around the world. Silent asks how both moments are intertwined. It focuses on the performance of a silent act, which might allow for agency, strength and even pleasure without erasing the traces of violence and vulnerability. The film suggests a dialogue between being silent and sounding rather than seeing them as mutually excluding.

The artists

Working as a duo since 2007, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz propose films and performances that revisit filmic and audio material from the past, excavating unrepresented or illegible moments of queer history. These works present a corpus capable not only of traveling across epochs, but also of imagining links between those epochs, so foreshadowing the possibility of a queer future. Their recent solo exhibitions include: Portrait of an Eye, Kunsthalle Zürich (2015), Loving, Repeating, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015), Patriarchal Poetry, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2013), Aftershow, CAPC, Bordeaux (2013), Toxic Play in Two Acts, South London Gallery, London (2012), Contagieux! Rapports contre la normalité, Centre d´art contemporain de Genève, Geneva (2011). Several catalogues have been published about their work: Temporal Drag, Hatje Cantz (2011), Aftershow, Sternberg Press (2014) and I Want, Sternberg Press (2016). The Montréal public has recently been able to appreciate their work in the solo exhibition To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse in the Spring of 2016. boudry-lorenz.de

The Biennale of Moving Images

Since its inception in 1985, the Biennale of Moving Images has provided a platform for art and ideas by surveying the ever-shifting territories of moving images while aiming to make sense of this extraordinary profusion of images that has progressively invaded all aspects of contemporary art. Organized by the Centre d’art contemporain de Genève, the 2016 Biennale of Moving Images featured, from November 9, 2016 to January 29, 2017, 27 new productions commissioned, produced and/or supported by the Centre d’art contemporain for the occasion. They were presented as installations, performances or films. Under the artistic direction of Andrea Bellini, director of the Centre d’art contemporain de Genève, the 2016 Biennale of Moving Images was curated by Cecilia Alemani, director and curator of the High Line Art (New York), Caroline Bourgeois, chief curator and conservator of the Pinault Collection (Paris) and Elvira Dyangani Ose, curator and lecturer in visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and member of the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada.

Free activities

Guided tours of the exhibition

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The educational booklet

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 stir 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

Claudia Almansa, Marie-Michèle Beaudoin, Céline Bellehumeur, Stéfanie Béland-Robert, Joan Berthiaume, Maude Bertrand, Béatrice Boily, Maxime Boisvert, Charles Bourbeau, Laure Bourgault, Julie Cantin, Jorge Oswaldo Carranza Sanchez, Nancy Charbonneau, Jonathan D’Amours, Luc Dansereau, Charlotte Desserteaux, Laurie Desloges Masson, Marly Fontaine, Richelli Fransozo, Marie-France Gagnier, Sophie Gauthier, Martine Gingras, André Girard, Andréanne Gouin, Marine Gourit, Baptiste Guilhempéré, Sarah Hadjou, Julien Houle, Florence Jacob, Alain Lalonde, Josèphe Landreville, Chloé Larivière, Claudel Lauzière Vanasse, Marilyn Leblanc, Marie-Ève Lemieux, Stéphanie L’Italien, Josée Marchand, Marc-Michel Martel, Gabrielle Morrisseau, Cyrille Pelletier-Lemay, Vivianne Proulx, Kathrine Rose, Sarabeth Trivino, Anouk Verviers

For a second year, the Galerie de l’UQAM is proud to take part in Montreal Museums Day on Sunday, May 28. On this occasion, the Galerie de l'UQAM is calling for an awakening of consciousness through three projects: a work by the Guerrilla Girls as well as the exhibitions of Gilberto Esparza and Charles-Antoine Blais Métivier. These artists, in their own way, analyze the contemporary world and propose new alternatives to rethink its structures and practices. At the Galerie, many mediators will allow the public, in a convivial atmosphere, to appreciate the richness and the complexity of the works presented.

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The ubiquity of tactile interfaces and the digitization of media contents are transforming our relationship to the consumption and production of visual objects. While the tactile commands of mobile devices adapt to images to grant them a material and usable property, the technological apparatus is for its part sublimated by the fluidity of the interface that hides its inherent materiality in favour of a relation that is increasingly attuned to its user. Objet de recherche is interested in the intimate relation between users and their mobile devices, as well as in the synesthetic perceptions acquired through an addiction to these personal interfaces. By way of a participative set-up, the exhibition seeks to reveal the cultural or even political conquests that the sensorial experiences of users are now the object of.