Mutual futures

Lina Choi is a Montreal-based artist who majored in sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London (UK). In her current artistic research, she explores aural imagery through performance and installation, focusing on creating sound. She seeks immersive sensory, and meditative projects that encourage audiences to interact with her work. She also tries to understand how the identity of individual humans is located in societies. She will be participating in an artist residency at Est-Nord-Est in 2023, and also showing a sound installation for her solo exhibition Flotter dans les Profondeurs at Atoll Art Actuel in 2024. Her sound project Under the Waves has been presented at Sporobole in Sherbrooke with the PIVOT program curated by the Canadian League of Composers. In 2022, she presented her sound performances at OBORO and RIPA in Montreal and her sound installation was exhibited for Poste Audio at Centre Clark in Montreal.

Laurence Beaudoin Morin's practice is concerned with the territory, and seeks to assemble visual poems by displacing the elements of the landscape that create it. Performance and video are the means she uses to recount her experience of space, as well as our own. Through this combination of gestures, the aim is to reveal and even suspend the creative process, in order to structure time and draw the eye to the barely visible. The random, the accidental, the dangerous, the catastrophic are staged, suggesting and implementing movement. These circumstances evoke the premises, expectations and results of a dynamic process that sometimes seems to defy the laws of physics. Something has happened, is happening or will happen in these landscapes. As a result, these events are part of improbable and absurd narratives, challenging both our society of spectacle and our world marked by the ideology of progress and the quest for achievement.

Sarah Johnson is a young graduate from Rosemère who has just arrived in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her valley girl looks only appeal to those who only know her on the surface. Barely a caricature, underneath this facade lies a Super Reporter who is uncompromising about prejudice by day, but leads a hard life by night in the hot downtown spots. She literally draws her daring from the canons of gritty art: Erin Brockovich, Campus Bunny, Cindy Campbell, Isabelle Huppert in "Elle", Kimberly Hart, not to mention Thelma and Louise, to name but a few. Although she's slowly taming her body and her new role as a reporter, she's not above attracting attention in order to get what she's after. That's why, faced with the rise of the disguised Conspiracist Servatrice and the late Rats-Bougris against Lheure Ducompte, Sarah Johnson refuses to "do nothing" and "remain silent". Microphone and form in hand, she goes in search of facts and feelings.

Sarah Naomi Zakaib is a multidisciplinary visual artist that works in sculpture, drawing, painting, etching, sound art and performance. She works and lives between Montreal, Quebec and Rome, Italy. She completed a BFA at Concordia University in 2009. A Montrealer with Italian and Lebanese roots, she has participated in a number of groups and solo exhibitions, as well as performance art events, and has coordinated a variety of shows and artistic events. Her practice is rooted in an exploration of the lived experience of the body and its relation to the outside world. Recurring questions are linked to the lived experience of the artist and are often taken directly from her personal life. For the last four years, she has been working from stories that are given to her by others, responding to the story with a work of art.

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Écritures publiques

Jenny Cartwright explores themes of self-determination and inequality through topics such as gentrification, activism, work and poverty. It is through this bias towards the marginalized that she attempts to combine poetry and manifestos. While she constantly questions the way she tells stories, moving from classical to experimental film and from installation to sound creation, her practice remains resolutely documentary.

fernando belote is a bixa, multidisciplinary artist and vice-president of the DC-Art Indisciplinaire (artist run center for artists de la diversité capacitaire). Fern’s artistic practice is strongly expressed through their life experiences as a neurodivergent individual and survivor of domestic violence. The resulting objects are reactions to the massifying and dehumanizing power of capitalism and aims to reframe everyday phenomena within differentiated ethical propositions: beesha ethics, contra-colonial perspectives and anti-fascist struggles. Currently involved in collaborative research and conceptual-oriented projects that channel the manifestation of the P(B)ajubá, Fern investigates ways to confront the naturalization of the cis-heteronorm by disturbing our common use of language. The goal is to revive dissident uses of language and re-structure meaning in a way to liquidate narcissistic colonial bonds that sustain concealed logics of oppression within our communities.

Originally from Abitibi, virginie fauve lives and works in Montreal. A fickle literary spirit in poetry and prose, in magazines and fanzines, sometimes as events or performances. She is particularly interested in women's literary history, independent publishing and the printed arts. La poussière nous cerne parce qu'elle nous resembles, her first collection of poems, was published by Lézard amoureux in 2022.

Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas | Martica Minipunto (Cuba, 1991) is a writer and performer who studied at the Universidad de las Artes, ISA. Her practice is developed in permanent research on transdisciplinary processes, with an emphasis on poetry, archives, and micropolitic devices. She has published « Días de hormigas » [Ants days] (Ed. Unión, 2018), « Los vegueros »  [The tobacco planters] (Sureditores, 2019) and « La puta y el hurón »  [The Whore and the Ferret]  (Editions Fra, 2020; Caballo de Troya, 2023). She has participated in artist residencies and festivals as La Serre Art-Vivans (Montreal, 2018), Young Curators Academy (Berlin, 2019), Watch and Talk (Zürcher Theater Spektakel, 2020), Festival Poesía en Voz Alta (México, 2021), La Caldera (Barcelona, 2022), and Per°Form Open Academy (Singapore, 2023), among others. Her performance « No soy unicornio » [I’m no unicorn] received the award ZKB Acknowledgement Prize-2022 in Zürcher Theater Spektakel. She is the founder of the independent publisher Ediciones sinsentido and coordinated a scenic laboratory called Laboratorio Escénico de Experimentación Social, LEES, from 2016-2020.

Devora Neumark and Jennifer Van de Pol’s artistic collaborations make visible their processes and responses to the most resonant questions they’re asking themselves, and each other. These inquiries are experiments into what it means to listen into and feel deeply to their inner experiences and the world around them. In their respective non-art-related work, they regularly convene and hold space for dialogue between individuals and groups who have differing perspectives on complex issues, including decolonization, environmental justice, and cultivating joy as radical practice. They are committed to mindfully co-creating space/s for relationship-building that nourishes the growth of meaningful and equitable futures. Devora is based in Iqaluit (“place of plenty fish” in Inuktut) in Inuit Nunangat and Jennifer is based in Victoria BC (“place to smoke herring” in Lekwungen), the traditional lands of the Lekwungen speaking people.

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Critical Thinking Residency (guest researcher)

Daniel Fiset  is a curator, researcher, author and cultural worker based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. He holds a doctorate in art history from the Université de Montréal, which focuses on the relationships between artistic photography and amateur digital practices, which he examines through the philosophy of technology. His recent research focuses on the intersections of artistic, critical and pedagogical practices in Quebec. His writings have appeared in esse arts + opinions, Spirale, Vie des arts, Ciel Variable and ESPACE. He currently holds the position of Assistant Curator for Engagement at the Fondation PHI pour l'art contemporain.