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Exibitions 2026

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Crédit photo : Andrea Calderón	Aïda Vosoughi From January 12th 2026 to November 2nd 2026 Aïda Vosoughi, lauréate de la résidence Intersections 2026 Aïda Vosoughi, laureate of the 2026 Intersections residency The Conseil des arts de Montréal, OPTICA, centre d’art contemporain and the École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’UQAM are pleased to announce that Iranian-born Canadian artist Aïda Vosoughi is the laureate of the 2026 Intersections residency. This residency offers professional support to the artist from the partners, in addition to a production grant and access to technical workshops and specialized resources at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’UQAM. At the end of the residency, the artist presents the results of his or her research in an exhibition at the OPTICA. Originally from Iran, Aïda Vosoughi has been based in Montreal since 2014. Her artistic practice consists of long-term projects at the intersection of contemporary art and the humanities. Inspired by literature, mythology, and the pictorial tradition of the region now recognized as the Middle East, Vosoughi has developed a metaphorical language that became central to her practice. The artist has been exploring the notion of landscape and its profound transformations from a historical perspective, linking it to issues such as economics and the environment, and adopting a decolonial approach. Her current research focuses on the border as an agent of landscape transformation, particularly through its dynamics linked to migratory movements and with a focus on its geopolitical dimension. As part of the Intersections residency, Aïda Vosoughi plans to adopt an experimental approach that is specific to the materiality of each project she undertakes. https://aidavosoughi.com/ The Intersections residency is a joint initiative of the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the Centre d’art contemporain OPTICA, and the École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l'UQAM. It is intended for artists from a cultural community who have graduated with a master's degree from the École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’UQAM.
Bé van der Heide, Pisces Pedic Pleasure Palace, 1978. Exposition et performance. Avec l'aimable permission des Collections spéciales et archives de l'Université Concordia, le fonds La Centrale. \| Exhibition and performance. Image courtesy of Concordia University Special Collections and Archives, La Centrale Fonds.	Elizabeth Chitty, Marie Décary, Johanna Householder, Kamissa Ma Koïta, Francine Larivée, Lise Nantel, Bé van der Heide Commissaire/Curator : Didier Morelli From January 16th 2026 to June 13th 2026 Street Actions : Women Performing in Montréal and Toronto (1970-1980) [Actions de rue : femmes en performance à Montréal et à Toronto (1970-1980)] Commented Visit by Didier Morelli Saturday, April 11, 3-4 pm Symposium around the exhibition - May 7, 2026 4TH SPACE, Concordia university 1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. West 10:30 am - 5:45 pm When artist Rita Letendre was interviewed on Radio-Canada about her practice as a muralist, having completed monumental works on buildings in California (Sun Rise, 1965) and Toronto (Sunrise, 1971), her street actions rather than the works themselves became the focus of the conversation: Letendre: For an outdoor mural, like the one I did in California in ’65 — that one, I did myself. It was twenty-one by twenty-four feet; I could control it. The other one was done by men who translated it, because it was sixty by sixty feet and two hundred feet above the ground…. Andréanne Lafond: Scaffolding for a woman, wow, you had to climb twenty-one feet; you did that yourself? Letendre, it seemed, was not expected to perform physical actions outside of the norms established by society. Street Actions: Women Performing in Montreal and Toronto (1970-1980) looks at how women in the 1970s laid claim to cities through a variety of performances and performatively informed gestures and actions. Resisting urban functionalism and the gender-based rationale of public and private spaces, they imagined alternate modes of embodiment in Montreal and Toronto. At both ends of the cultural spectrum, linguistically divided yet united by other causes, these artists shaped second-wave feminist discourse and activism or moved in parallel to it with their overt gestures. At the apex of the Canadian women’s movement, Street Actions explores how issues like representation, reproductive rights, gender-based violence, and environmentalism contributed to and was amplified by artists performatively inhabiting the margins of the city. In all the works on display—fragments of a pavilion built to expose women’s condition, movement-based performances, colourful banners carried in feminist street protests, or playful pillow-like feet appended to public art. Artists across disciplines generated a kinaesthetic vocabulary that diverged from social codes, established modes of artistic production, utilitarian models of urban thinking, and gendered spatial-identities. This exhibition features original artworks, documentation, and archives from seven artists, a fragment of a larger ongoing research project that includes many more. It also relies on supporting visual material from feminist organizations and the women’s movement as it was articulated through various pamphlets, journals, and the broader media ecosystem that captured women challenging societal norms with their bodies. In addition, it draws attention to how women were vilified by caricatures, newspapers, and other sources. Kamissa Ma Koïta’s contemporary restaging of an iconic image from the founding of La Centrale galerie Powerhouse, a seminal feminist artist-run-centre created in the mid 1970s, seeks to expand this archive and connect it to the present moment. Mostly white, the women placing themselves on public display in Street Actions do not reflect the important presence of Black, Indigenous, and non-white women organizers which helped shape protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Koïta, intentionally anachronistic and also working within these lineages, reminds us that artists continue to use the street as a political place to engage with issues of agency, rights, and representation, creating friction against the architecture of the cities that contain them. Didier Morelli would like to thank the artists who made Street Actions possible, as well as the many contributing institutions that lent works, documents, and other exhibition materials. This project has received support from the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQSC), Concordia University Press, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). Material support was also provided by the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery and the CCA. OPTICA would like to thank Rian Adamian, Gregory Prescott et Natacha Chamko from Atelier Clark for the creation of platforms in the exhibition. PRESS RELEASE (pdf) PRESS REVIEWS DELGADO, Jérôme. «'Actions de rue': performer pour militer », Le Devoir, March 14, 2026. Mention Radio show Pénélope, "L’art et le sport Florence-Agathe Dubé-Didier Morelli," ICI Première, Radio-Canada, radio, March 26, 2026. Host: Pénélope McQuade. Link MAVRIKAKIS, Nicolas. « Que découvrir dans les centres et galeries d’art cet hiver?», Le Devoir, January 10, 2026. BOUCHARD, Karine. « Les débuts de 2026 en arts visuels», La Presse, January 10, 2026. Didier Morelli is a curator, performance and art historian, cultural critic and visual artist. His Fonds de recherche du Québec—Société et culture (FRQSC) Postdoctoral Fellowship (2022-2025), which he held at Concordia University and the CCA, examines how second-wave feminist performances subverted urban functionalism by imagining alternate modes of embodiment in Montréal and Toronto during the 1970s. Previously the associate editor at Espace art actuel, his writing has also been published in Art Journal, CTR: Canadian Theatre Review, C Magazine, CBC Arts, Esse Arts + Opinions, RACAR, Spirale et TDR: The Drama Review. Morelli was the curator of the 2026 MANIF, the Quebec City Biennial, which is titled “Briser la glace / Splitting Ice.” Elizabeth Chitty made artwork from 1975 to 2021 in Toronto, Vancouver and the Niagara region at the intersection of performance, video, sound, photography, dance, and community-based strategies for the gallery, stage and public realm. Her primary material was movement—of digital images, sound and the human body. Her final work was Power, a 15-minute three-video-channel and four-audio-channel installation addressing ecological remediation and decolonization through the Niagara River, the Treaty of Niagara, and three women walking. A versatile artist with a degree in communications, Marie Décary has shaped a career that combines craftsmanship and textile arts—notably, in collaboration with Lise Nantel—, documentary film and experimental video, cultural journalism, and children’s books. Whether through writing, sewing, or filming, having her say remains important. She enjoys sharing ideas, images, and feminist-informed stories that bring about change. Johanna Householder immigrated to Canada from the U.S. in 1975, and was one of many independent choreographers/dance artists who were nurtured at 15 Dance Lab in Toronto. As a member of the feminist performance ensemble, The Clichettes, she helped establish lip-sync as a viable medium for political critique. Her interest in how ideas shape bodies has led her often collaborative practice in performance art, video and choreography. Kamissa Ma Koïta is a Canadian-Malian visual artist and designer based in Montréal. Her transdisciplinary practice draws on West African archives, technologies, and knowledge, and unfolds through performance, image, poetry, and visual arts. She is particularly interested in vectors of social domination and historically marginalized groups, from a pan-African and decolonial perspective. She has presented her work at Dare-Dare (2018), Galerie de l’UQAM (2018) and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (2021). She also contributed to the co-creation and visual design of Survival Technologies, presented at the Festival TransAmériques in 2024. Francine Larivée was born in Montréal, where she lives and works. A graduate of the École des beaux-arts de Montréal, she holds a bachelor’s degree in art history and a master’s degree in art studies from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her sculptural practice has had a major impact on the arts in Québec, beginning with the installation La chambre nuptiale (1976), which challenged all the clichés about women’s identity. In the 1980s, in a spirit just as socially and politically engaged, she worked with “living” natural materials, notably installing Mousses en situation (1983) in the lobby of Place Ville Marie. Lise Nantel draws on everyday material to integrate knowledge related to housework, horticulture, ethnology, and art in her work. Her practice is an act of resistance, deeply rooted in a desire to identify obstacles to creativity, taboos, and the search for a language that expresses both what has been denied in history and the numerous layers of memory. Her desire to diversify the fields of artistic intervention has inspired her to create and disseminate often ephemeral works: research and publications on popular art, production of visual elements for political events, creation of spaces for meditation, co-founding of Éditions du remue-ménage, and teaching, among others. Bé van der Heide was born in the Netherlands where she went to art school, attending a four-year course in painting. Moving to Canada in 1960, she executed a large mural in the Dutch pavilion at Expo 67 during the world exhibition in Montreal.
Marie Décary, Lise Nantel, Les chevalières des temps modernes, 1980 Bannière, textile, jute, rubans, festons, plastique, bois 175 x 133 x 7 cm, 227 x 133 x 7 cm (avec sa base) Don de Marie Décary et de Lise Nantel Collection Musée de la civilisation, Québec 2000.134 Avec l’aimable permission des artistes	Atelier de médiation à OPTICA From January 16th 2026 to June 13th 2026 OPTICA invite le public à réactiver les mémoires féministes dans l’espace public At OPTICA, we believe that contemporary art must be experienced, touched, and discussed. Our cultural mediation program creates spaces for engagement between you, the artworks, and the artists, whether you’re a student, a senior, a curious visitor, or an art enthusiast. Workshops for general public As part of the exhibition Street Actions: Women in Performance in Montréal and Toronto (1970-1980), OPTICA's educational program is organizing participatory workshops open to the general public by reservation that extend the questions raised by feminist performances of the 1970s: how do bodies inhabit public space? How can collective creation become an act of resistance? The workshop Nos corps, nos rues: mémoires féministes de Montréal [Our Bodies, Our Streets: Feminist Memories of Montréal] invites participants to reactivate their memories. Through a guided tour of the exhibition followed by a circle of testimonials, participants will collectively create a textile banner inspired by the works of Marie Décary and Lise Nantel. This workshop transforms oral memory into a living, material archive. This event continues OPTICA's commitment to making contemporary art accessible and participatory by inviting audiences to become co-creators of meaning. Active Tours Tours that focus on dialogue and the shared construction of meaning. We take the time to observe, ask questions, and make connections. Every voice counts; every interpretation enriches the encounter with the artwork. Workshops for young children Contemporary Labs. for 4- to 5-year-olds: “Little Knights and Ladies of the City” workshop Because young children understand with their whole bodies, we offer them a space where they discover contemporary art through movement, the senses, and hands-on exploration. We don’t simplify art; we approach it differently. This workshop uses the creation of a puppet to introduce the concepts of feminism and performance art. School Groups: “Our Modern Knights” Workshop Customized programs for elementary and high school students, developed according to the group’s level and objectives. Students explore feminist practices and create collaborative character banners. They actively engage with contemporary art through observation, inquiry, and creative activity. Action Research Project: “My Visit, My Perspective” (Longueuil) A long-term cultural mediation project designed for French-language immersion classes, combining French language development, arts education, and cultural citizenship to help students develop their perspective as visitors. FREE / Reservation Workshop by reservation. If you have any questions or have specific needs, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Charlotte Noël: mediationoptica @ gmail.com or 514-874-1666. Accessibility OPTICA pays particular attention to providing everyone an optimal and successful visit. With a constant desire to improve matters of inclusion and accessibility, the Centre steers its efforts toward responding in the best possible way to the challenges posed by contemporary issues. OPTICA is committed to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment. An access ramp is located at the north-side entrance, at 5455, avenue de Gaspé. If you have any questions or have specific needs, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.
Crédit photo : kimura byol lemoine	Nuit Blanche 2026 à Montréal_28 février_19h-22h Helena Martin Franco 3 ateliers sur réservation : 19h, 20h et 21h 3 workshops on reservation: 7 pm, 8 pm and 9 pm From February 28th 2026 to February 28th 2026 Ateliers Le corps-monument : danser pour se réchauffer Reservations requiry throught this email : mediationoptica @ gmail.com On the occasion of the Nuit Blanche 2026, OPTICA is delighted to open its doors to the general public and offer an evening of artistic discovery and creativity in a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere. The center welcomes multidisciplinary artist Helena Martin Franco to lead workshops. Through movement games and simple gestures, participants will explore the political dimension of the body in urban space, then translate their reflections into visual creations (drawing, collage, models). Three workshops will be offered at the following times: 7 p.m., 8 p.m., and 9 p.m. The exhibition Street Actions : Women Performing in Montréal and Toronto, 1970-1980 will be open to the public! Helena Martin Franco was born in Cartagena. She lives and works in Tio'tia: ke-Mooniyang-Montréal since 1998. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the blending of different artistic processes and the hybridization between traditional and new technologies. Helena creates autofictions in which she explores the permeability and boundaries between cultural, national, and gender identities. Her artistic practice invites dialogue about gender-based violence, immigration and artistic censorship. From a feminist perspective, she builds relationships between collectives and cultural organizations to promote encounters and exchanges of artistic practices, particularly between Canada and Colombia. She is a member of several feminist contemporary art collectives, including L’Araignée (founder, collective of diffusion of contemporary art), La Redhada (network of women artists from the Colombian Caribbean), CAVCA (Community of Visual Artists of Cartagena and Bolivar) and Las meninas emputás! (Feminist collective, anti-colonial activist from Cartagena). Winner of the Powerhouse Prize in 2018, she holds an MA in visual and media arts from UQAM. Her projects have been presented in the Dominican Republic, Spain, New Zealand, Colombia, Argentina, Cuba, and Canada, among others.
Marie Décary, Lise Nantel, Les chevalières des temps modernes, 1980 Bannière: textile, jute, rubans, festons, plastique, bois 175 x 133 x 7 cm, 227 x 133 x 7 cm Archives Marie Décary et Lise Nantel. Avec l'aimable permission des artistes.	Autour de l'exposition éponyme / Around the eponym exhibition Commissaire \| Curator : Didier Morelli From May 7th 2026 to May 7th 2026 OPTICA X 4TH SPACE / ACTIONS DE RUE : FEMMES EN PERFORMANCE À MONTRÉAL ET À TORONTO (1970 - 1980) COLLOQUE May 7, 2026, 10:30 am – 5:45 pm 4th Space, Concordia University J.W. McConnell Building 1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. West Room LB-103 Montreal, H3G 1M8 Guy-Concordia Metro Station Free entrance Live streaming availble Join online by registering for the Zoom meeting at this LINK or on Youtube Download the program in PDF format. This one-day symposium builds on the key elements of the exhibition Street Actions: Women Performing in Montreal and Toronto (1970-1980). This includes moving geographically between Toronto and Montréal, as well as linguistically across French and English ; focusing on the importance of dance, movement, and the kinesthetic in shaping experimental practices of the 1970s; looking at questions of changing feminisms as they evolved in public and cultural spaces; and attesting to historical and current practices by artists infiltrating outdoor and institutional sites with their bodies. By bringing together different generations of artists, curators, and cultural workers, this day of conversation and exchanges aims to acknowledge and record the past while making room for new and intersectional conversations. Didier Morelli SCHEDULE 10:30 Opening Welcome 10:40 Experimental Performance and Dance in Toronto, the 1970s Moderated by Marie Claire Forté with Elizabeth Chitty, Johanna Householder In English 1:15 pm Art and Feminism in Québec, from the 1970s to today Moderated by Analays Álvarez Hernández with Rose Marie Arbour,Marie Décary, Lise Nantel, Women with Kitchen Appliances In French 3:00 pm Infiltration based art practices, Furtive Actions Moderated by Po B. K. Lomami with Kama La Mackerel, Kamissa Ma Koïta, Map In English and in French 5:45 pm Closure OPTICA would like to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, as well as the artists and partner institutions involved in the exhibition Street Actions de rue : femmes en performance à Montréal et à Toronto (1970 – 1980), and 4TH SPACE and the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art as partners in the symposium. Analays Álvarez Hernández is an Associate Professor of Art History at the Université de Montréal. Her research interests include public art, diasporic arts and practices, and alternative exhibition venues. She is the author of Climbing Aboard: Havana Apartment-Galleries and International Art Circuits(2023) and co-editor of the volume Diffracting the North: Contemporary Latinx Canadian Experiences and Practices in Film, New Media, and Visual Arts (2025). As an independent curator, Álvarez Hernández has organized exhibitions in Toronto and Montreal, including The Recipe: Making Latin American Art in Canada and On Americanity and Other Experiences of Belonging. Rose Marie Arbour an art historian, was a professor at UQAM from 1969 to 1999. Part of her research and teaching focused on the contribution of women artists to modernity in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. She was the guest curator of the exhibition Art and Feminism (1982) at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Elizabeth Chitty made artwork from 1975 to 2021 in Toronto, Vancouver and the Niagara region at the intersection of performance, video, sound, photography, dance, and community-based strategies for the gallery, stage and public realm. Her primary material was movement—of digital images, sound and the human body. Her final work was Power, a 15-minute three-video-channel and four-audio-channel installation addressing ecological remediation and decolonization through the Niagara River, the Treaty of Niagara, and three women walking. A versatile artist with a degree in communications, Marie Décary has shaped a career that combines craftsmanship and textile arts—notably, in collaboration with Lise Nantel—, documentary film and experimental video, cultural journalism, and children’s books. Whether through writing, sewing, or filming, having her say remains important. She enjoys sharing ideas, images, and feminist-informed stories that bring about change. Marie Claire Forté is compelled by the relational, experimental and joyous potential of dance. Friendship is one of her artistic bents. Based in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang, she dances, choreographs, translates, writes, teaches and supports. Her child is a clarifying force. Her career has been nourished by long-term collaborations with artists from different generations and aesthetics, sharing a love of process, rigour and exploration. She creates art—in choreography, language, video and sound—and works with artists she respects. She is currently working on a book with Peter Boneham on his teaching practice. Johanna Householder immigrated to Canada from the U.S. in 1975, and was one of many independent choreographers/dance artists who were nurtured at 15 Dance Lab in Toronto. As a member of the feminist performance ensemble, The Clichettes, she helped establish lip-sync as a viable medium for political critique. Her interest in how ideas shape bodies has led her often collaborative practice in performance art, video and choreography. Kamissa Ma Koïta is a Canadian-Malian visual artist and designer based in Montréal. Her transdisciplinary practice draws on West African archives, technologies, and knowledge, and unfolds through performance, image, poetry, and visual arts. She is particularly interested in vectors of social domination and historically marginalized groups, from a pan-African and decolonial perspective. She has presented her work at Dare-Dare (2018), Galerie de l’UQAM (2018) and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (2021). She also contributed to the co-creation and visual design of Survival Technologies, presented at the Festival TransAmériques in 2024. Kama La Mackerel is a multilingual writer, visual artist, performer, educator, literary translator, and ritualist whose work is rooted in a deep commitment to love, justice, and collective empowerment. Drawing on research into insularity, oceanic memory, trans poetics, créolité, and decolonial ecologies, her interdisciplinary practice reconfigures dominant artistic structures, creating space for decolonial and queer/trans vocabularies to emerge where they have historically been erased or silenced. By crossing and reshaping forms, she engages interstitial spaces as fertile ground for community-building, resistance, and healing. Her work has been presented in galleries, theatres, and universities across Canada and internationally. She is the author of Indrazaal et la quête de l’océan (Éditions KATA, 2023) and ZOM-FAM (Metonymy Press, 2020). Originally from Mauritius, she lived in Pune, India, and Peterborough, Canada, before settling in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal in 2012. Po B. K. Lomami is an indisciplinary artist-researcher, teacher, and community organizer. They are a Congodescendant from Belgium currently based in Tiohtià:ke-Mooniyang-Montréal since 2017. Exploring rage and failure, Lomami’s art practice revolves around the displacement of work, the becoming of their subjectivity, and the possible collective futures with black, crip, and Afrofeminist perspectives. They question people, institutions, and themself through affection, force, absurd, and the everyday. Lomami holds a bachelor’s degree (2011) and a master’s degree (2014) in Business Engineering from the University of Namur, a Graduate Diploma in Communication Studies from Concordia University (2022), and an MFA degree in Studio Arts - Intermedia from Concordia University (2025). However, their interventionist practice hasn't been developed within an institutional educational context. Map is an artist-researcher and founder of DC-Art Indisciplinaire, an artist-run center dedicated to deaf and disabled art. They holds a master’s degree with honors in research-creation (UdeM). They complete training in Québec Sign Language-French interpretation, with a view to rethinking the functions of the art world. Their work has been presented in Tiohtiàke, Wôbanakiak, Nitassinan, Tkaronto and Szczecin. Performative in nature, their practice of creating situations transforms the state of (im)material environments through an arrangement of particular moves, where their movements are their materials as they engages them in the strangeness of their own neuroqueer processes. Lise Nantel draws on everyday material to integrate knowledge related to housework, horticulture, ethnology, and art in her work. Her practice is an act of resistance, deeply rooted in a desire to identify obstacles to creativity, taboos, and the search for a language that expresses both what has been denied in history and the numerous layers of memory. Her desire to diversify the fields of artistic intervention has inspired her to create and disseminate often ephemeral works: research and publications on popular art, production of visual elements for political events, creation of spaces for meditation, co-founding of Éditions du remue-ménage, and teaching, among others. Women With Kitchen Appliances (WWKA) are three, four, five, or six… Interchangeable. Disposable. And deadly serious. They are a performance collective, a band, a cacophony, a cabaret show, a recipe, a synchronized routine for rubber gloves, a barbecue chicken washer, a Christmas jingle for confectionery flour, and a kitchen certification service. Since its inception in 1999, more than fifty anonymous feminist artists have participated in the WWKA collective project. They have performed on stages and on lawns, under a big top, on the radio, on TV, in lofts, lounges, galleries, grocery stores, white cubes and black cubes, bars, festivals, theaters, and in people’s homes, in their kitchens. Didier Morelli is a curator, performance and art historian, cultural critic and visual artist. His Fonds de recherche du Québec—Société et culture (FRQSC) Postdoctoral Fellowship (2022-2025), which he held at Concordia University and the CCA, examines how second-wave feminist performances subverted urban functionalism by imagining alternate modes of embodiment in Montréal and Toronto during the 1970s. Previously the associate editor at Espace art actuel, his writing has also been published in Art Journal, CTR: Canadian Theatre Review, C Magazine, CBC Arts, Esse Arts + Opinions, RACAR, Spirale et TDR: The Drama Review. Morelli was the curator of the 2026 MANIF, the Quebec City Biennial, which is titled “Briser la glace / Splitting Ice.”
Richard Max-Tremblay	Offre d’emploi / Job Offer From August 6th 2026 to September 28th 2026 Responsable des communications, du développement des publics et des archives Deadline for applications: September 28, 2026, 11:59 p.m. Start of employment: October 13, 2026 Job Call, pdf version Centre d’art contemporain OPTICA is seeking a motivated individual for the position of Head of Communications, Outreach Development, and Archives. The successful candidate must have 3 to 5 years’ experience managing communications in a cultural organization or artist centre or have gained relevant experience through their studies and possess a good understanding of the current art scene. About OPTICA Located in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, OPTICA was among the first artist-run centres in Canada. The centre has promoted Canadian art since its inception in 1972, seeking to raise public awareness about the issues driving discourses and art practices in the visual arts through a varied program of exhibitions, publications, residencies, and critical and educational activities. Responsibilities Job description: Answering to the executive director, this individual will carry out the following duties: • In charge of gallery hosting; • Draw up a communications plan and implement strategies for outreach development that include under-represented groups; • Promote the centre’s activities in the newsletter, on the OPTICA website, on social networks, and among college and university communities and under-represented groups; • Manage media relations; • Optimize OPTICA’s online presence on social networks (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Linktree); • Manage advertising placements; • Assist in writing and submitting grant reports and applications; • Coordinate calls for proposals in the program; • Take part in centre activities: openings, launches, and participation is such public events as the Journées de la culture and Nuit blanche à Montréal. Archives and publications • Manage and organize the repositories of the OPTICA Archives, housed at Concordia University Records Management & Archives; • Supervise internships • Coordinate the process of digitizing OPTICA publications; • Ensure the distribution of the centre’s publications, including magazines on consignment for sale at OPTICA; • In charge of writing and monitoring copyright and reproduction license agreements. Ideal candidate profile • Have a university degree in a relevant discipline: communications studies, art history, visual arts; • Three to five years’ experience in communications management for a cultural organization or artist centre; • Knowledge of contemporary art and of its main systems of dissemination in Québec and Canada; • Ability to have a general view of contemporary art communications strategies; • Ability to plan and organize while adapting to changing contexts, and to work both on their own and in a team; • Show initiative and versatility; • Ability to maintain positive and supportive relationships; • Excellent communication, writing, and public speaking skills; • Ability to work in a Mac environment and familiarity with applications: Microsoft Office (Word, Excel), the Adobe suite (Indesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Acrobat), social networking platforms (Facebook, Instagram, etc.); • Attention to detail, methodology, discipline; • Excellent fluency in French and knowledge of English, both written and oral. Conditions of employment: • Permanent position • Open work contract • 4 days, or 28 hours, per week, Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. • Salary: $27.31 per hour, $39,000 annually • Start of employment: October 13, 2026. Benefits: • 2 weeks paid leave during the Holiday season • 4 weeks paid vacation per year Place of work OPTICA, centre d’art contemporain 5445 avenue de Gaspé, local 106, Montréal, Québec H2T 3B2 514 874-1666 www.optica.ca On-site work, pleasant environment, a lively team, good work-life balance, and a venue known both locally and nationally for its contemporary art productions. Interested candidates are kindly requested to submit their curriculum vitae, together with a covering letter, no later than September 28, 2026, 23:59 p.m., to the attention of Marie-Josée Lafortune, executive director: mjlafortune@optica.ca. Please include the title of the position in the subject line of your email: Head of Communications, Outreach Development, and Archives We extend our warmest thanks in advance to all those who apply. However, we will communicate only with those selected for an interview. We place great value on cultural diversity and encourage candidates to mention if they are of an immigrant or Indigenous background or members of a visible minority.
Autoportrait, 2026.	Nouvelle responsable du Programme éducatif/New Head of the Educational Program From August 8th 2026 to November 30th -0001 Bienvenue à Éléonore Servantie Passionate about the arts in all their forms and their transformative power, Éléonore Servantie is dedicated to leading socially impactful artistic projects. After earning a Master’s degree in Cultural Policy from Sciences Po Aix in France, her journey has taken her across diverse artistic fields, working with a wide range of audiences: at the Louvre Museum with community groups and youth in social integration programs; in music with individuals experiencing socio-economic precarity; and in contemporary dance with school audiences of all ages. Today, she brings her core values of inclusion, knowledge sharing, and co-creation to the heart of OPTICA’s educational program, harnessing art as a catalyst for collective empowerment.
Claudia Goulet-Blais, Sans Titre IV \| Untitled IV , de la série \| from the series Entre tes mains \| In Your Hands, 2026 Impression par sublimation thermique sur tissu \| Dye-sublimation print on fabric 228,6 x 190,5 cm Avec l’aimable permission de l'artiste.	Claudia Goulet-Blais From September 11th 2026 to October 24th 2026 *Entre tes mains (In Your Hands)* --->Public Presentations at OPTICA Saturday, September, 12 2026 3pm to 4pm Claudia Goulet-Blais’s sensitive and evocative project, Entre tes mains (In Your Hands), offers an immersive and performative approach to photography and its installation, presented across media including ceramics and textiles. Her work takes place in the sphere of familial intimacy, reflecting on often invisible sites of care and relationality that are foundational to lived lives: lives of wonder, compassion, and world-making. These relationships most often begin in the hands of the mother. Where present, maternal care offers a first orientation to the world, the first place in which we come to know ourselves, or indeed, that we come to be a self at all. As philosopher Sara Ahmed notes, this orientation is the origin of our selfhood, “To be orientated is … to be turned toward certain objects, those that help us find our way … Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as ‘what‘ we direct our energy and attention toward.”1 What does care mean in the framework of 21st-century economies that value productivity and labour primarily in terms of capital? How do the relationships that shape our lives appear within such a superstructure? Goulet-Blais’s autobiographical project supersedes minimizing terms such as the reputation economy and its ideas of personal capital to re-endorse the complexity and luminescence of love as a formulating architecture for the human and more-than-human world. Maternity, and by extension care, has the distinction of being placed at the nexus of utility, capital, and cosmology: what makes the world, what makes us who we are, and what makes the world worth living in? Goulet-Blais’s work provides a form of resistance and calls attention to intergenerational and cross-relational forms of care, beginning with the 19th-century “hidden mother” phenomenon, which may be seen as a literal transcription of maternal appearance and utility. In emergent forms of neo-liberalism, begun in the 19th century, the mother’s body is only useful as a support to the child’s entry into utility—that is, to becoming a worker, if a male child, or a mother herself. Goulet-Blais connects the historical uses of photography from the 19th century to the present, its documentation of family life and labour, and its material processes, including layering, transparency, and time-lapse conditions, to evoke the tensions and joys of negotiating these relations through change, over time and distance. The interplay of fabric, with its associations of swaddling and shrouding, set alongside the durational quality of porcelain, provide locations to consider the vulnerability of both relationships and photography to change, disappearance, and re-inscription. These various forms of encounter implicate the gallery’s architecture itself as a site of passage. Gesture is key to Goulet-Blais’s project. Within this series, objects and subjects are choreographed in slow-time. The results are an archive of movement and an orientation to the unique nuances of a specific site. Working in collaboration with her mother, and staged in domestic interiors as well as landscapes, Goulet-Blais’s project offers a sense of mitochondrial earth-time and the evolution of familial bonds. Her work reveals the capacity of a single hand to afford understanding and to communicate across experience, inviting the viewer to explore their own capacities for intimacy and engagement. Author: Lisa Baldissera 1. Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. (Duke University Press: London and Durham, 2006), 1-2. Claudia Goulet-Blais (b.1996) completed her MFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2025, receiving the prestigious ECUxGriffin Graduate Residency Award for her thesis project. Her photographic work focuses on intergenerational kinship through collaboration and performance, incorporating found archival photographs alongside analog photography. Recent exhibitions include the Capture Photography Festival, FOFA Gallery and Gallery 881. Lisa Baldissera has worked in curatorial roles in public art galleries in Western Canada since 1999, including Senior Curator (Contemporary Calgary), Chief Curator (Mendel Art Gallery) and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. She has produced more than seventy exhibitions of local, Canadian, and international artists and holds MFAs in Creative Writing (The University of British Columbia), Art (University of Saskatchewan) and a PhD in Art Writing and Curating (Goldsmiths College). She has worked with public and private Canadian collections across the country. Previous curatorial projects include the solo exhibitions, Stan Douglas: Allegories of the Present and William Kentridge: The Colander, as well co-curating as the international exhibition, residencies and conferences, Worldings and Future Worldings, which brought together South African and Canadian artists, curators and organizations in 2021 and 2024. Baldissera has served on contemporary art juries across Canada and internationally, including the Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize (The Doris and Jack Shadbolt Foundation), Canada Council for the Arts, Saskatchewan Arts Board, Royal Bank of Canada Canadian Painting Competition, the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Awards, the Sobey Art Award, British Columbia Arts Council, Prix Pierre-Prince-de-Monaco jury and as a guest of the British Arts Council outreach program. Her doctoral thesis examined writing as an approach to vulnerability in the public sphere, and included exhibitions, a short story collection and critical evaluations of Canadian and American writers including Emily Carr, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Lisa Robertson, Chris Kraus, Christina Sharpe and Claudia Rankine. She is currently the Director of Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver, British Columbia. OPTICA and Claudia Goulet-Blais would like to thank Atelier Clark for their assistance with production.
Sara A.Tremblay et Anne-Marie Proulx, Autoportrait dans les jardins de Carrollcroft, Stanstead, 25 mai 2024 impression à jet d’encre/inkjet print 40,64 x 49,28 cm, 2026 Avec l’aimable permission des artistes \| Courtesy of the artists	Sara A.Tremblay, Anne-Marie Proulx From September 11th 2026 to October 24th 2026 *Fleurs coupées* --->Public Presentations at OPTICA Saturday, September, 12 2026 4pm to 5pm Fleurs coupées [Cut Flowers] is a collaborative process engaged by Sara A.Tremblay and Anne-Marie Proulx in which the trajectories of their distinct approaches to the medium of photography come together in an assemblage of their living environments. With their long-standing respective practices of rigorous attention to imaging processes and to the pictorial rendition of natural forms, the artists explore how landscape imagery becomes a carrier of memory, relation, and encounter. The shared experiences underlying their lived contingencies become intertwined with the temporality of photography as a practice of being-with. In so doing, they break through the limits of photographic indexicality toward a photographic relationality, constructing a triangulated encounter in which their positioning in relation to the lens, the frame, and the medium activates questions of intersubjective relations. The garden, which reframes their photographic movement from exposure of the fields toward contained enclosures, holds symbolic ground for their relational kinship within the sheltered boundaries of the self by way of introspective reflections on care, vulnerability, and regeneration. Synchronizing with the instantaneity of the shutter, Fleurs coupées holds the tension between cutting as severance and as a disposition toward recapturing, recollecting, and reassembling. Marking a horizon line across the gallery space, the background prints trace a lineage of individually encountered places, projecting fragments of visual memories foregrounded through their convergence in coming together. Through the loosened grip on the shutter cord as an apparatus of photographic relation, the self-portraits in this series become testimonial moments, questioning the positionality of the imaged self. They bear witness to the artists’ mutual presence, shared through the mediated image and fixated in its gestural orientations. This self-reflective process is duplicated as both artists take on the dual role of photographer and photographed subject, revealing how the self is performed through and against the mechanics of the camera. In this setting, the bodily positioning and posing involved in each photographic encounter give the image a particular performative dimension and affective fixity. Aware of the situatedness of the gaze, the photographic arrangement in the exhibition expands these positionalities by further emphasizing the presence of the camera through its subversion. The enlarged image of the camera is positioned and levelled along the imagined perspective of the duo, in and against their encounter with the foregrounded scenery. It inversely repositions the viewer in front of the camera, replicating the reversal of positions enacted by them. In turn, in their regenerative approach to photography, the artists observe their relationship through the viewfinder, invoking questions of how relationality is projected into the image and reflected back in the act of viewing. Guided by reciprocity from the outset, Fleurs coupées emerges from the co-creative practice of Sara A.Tremblay and Anne-Marie Proulx within a feminist ethos in photography, in which looking and being looked at become transformative, a reflexive engagement with the problematics of presence and absence within the photographic frame. Their process remains open to the past and future of the images, attending to their latency in what remains, what returns, and what comes into view. Author: Nima Esmailpour Drawing on our conversations with territories and our relationships with language, Anne-Marie Proulx creates poetic worlds that question both the individual and collective links that we maintain with our environments. Her photographic work often enters into dialogue with text, sound, or video, and is displayed in immersive installations and in the more intimate form of the book. Her current projects are rooted in her consideration of the mutual bonds that must be formed and maintained with other beings and with our natural environments, which has stemmed from the exchange of ideas and perspectives through various collaborative approaches. Friendship is at the heart of her approach, and many of her works emerge from conversations, affinities, and various forms of complicity. Anne-Marie Proulx presented exhibitions at VOX, Musée Colby-Curtis, Galerie des arts visuels, Vaste et Vague and YYZ, among others, as well as in the Manif d’art 9 and MOMENTA biennales. Her photobook Le jardin d’après was published by Éditions Loco in 2021. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Hydro-Québec, Méduse, and the City of Montreal. She is a recipient of the Prix du CALQ – Artiste de l’année en Chaudière-Appalaches (2025) and of the MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award (2025). She lives and works between Saint-Roch-des-Aulnaies and Québec City, along the great river by which she grew up and whose shores have been visited for millennia by the Wendat, Wolastoqiyik, Innu, Abenaki, and Atikamekw peoples. Sara A.Tremblay is an artisan of the image who documents the transformations of her life and environment through objects, gestures, and interventions tied to everyday experiences, natural phenomena, and materials. In recent years, her photographic practice has broadened to include forms of sculpture and performance marked by a continual exploration of the stages of the image’s appearance—of the layers and materialities that give it body. Her cumulative and maximalist approach, shaped by a close connection between life and art, follows the intertwining traces of the visible and invisible as she constitutes an immense collection from her personal life in which experience itself becomes artistic material. Until recently based in the Estrie region, Sara A.Tremblay now lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her works have been presented, among other places, at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, as winner of the 2023 MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award, Colby-Curtis Museum, galerie B-312, the Maison des arts de Laval, the Guido Molinari Foundation, and YYZ Artists’ Outlet. Nima Esmailpour is an art historian, writer, and curator who lives and works between Toronto and Montreal. He has contributed essays to various art publications and platforms across Canada and internationally.
	Pôle de Gaspé From September 11th 2026 to September 11th 2026 Rentrée de Gaspé 2026 The Regroupement Pied Carré invites you to celebrate the cultural season at this not-to-be-missed event bringing together the art centres of Pôle de Gaspé: Atelier Circulaire, Centre CLARK, daphne, Dazibao, Diagonale, ELEKTRA, Occurrence, OPTICA, perte de signal, TOPO; the cultural magazines Ciel Variable, ESPACE art actuel, ESSE arts + opinions, art actuel, Le Sabord, Spirale, Tristesse, and Vie des arts; as well as Céline Bureau and the Regroupement des centres d'artistes autogérés du Québec (RCAAQ). The evening will feature gallery openings, art publications, drinks, snacks from Che Churros, and more! Friday, September 11, from 5 p.m. until late More info