Maryam Eizadifard is a graduate of the Faculty of Arts and Architecture at the University of Teheran (2007). Having left Iran in 2011 in order to pursue graduate studies in visual arts, Eizadifard now holds a master’s in visual and media arts from UQAM (2018). She focuses on the ephemeral nature of spaces and their influence on memory and the body.

“The influence of intimate and private environments is key to my understanding women’s condition. What makes me a woman? By analyzing these spaces, I explore the tensions between emptiness and the occupation they convey. When the human being is absent, is this private space truly empty?”

These experimentations fuel the concept of “city-body” that she has developed.

maryamizadifard.com

PRESS RELEASE (pdf)

PRESS REVIEW

WILKINSON, Jayne. “ Natural Causes,” Artforum, October 20, 2021.

NESBITT, Sarah. “ 'Sensing Nature / Quand la nature ressent' 17th MOMENTA Biennale de l’image Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montréal,” Flash Art, October 20, 2021.

ALLARD, Alexe. Interview with Esther Bourdages. Café - Ckut radio, 90.3 FM, October, 1, 2021.

MORELLI, Didier. “ MOMENTA 2021 Centres Indigenous and Nonhumanist Notions of Nature,” Frieze magazine, September 30, 2021.



BUSH Gallery: Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (Métis, born in Comox, Canada; lives in Vancouver, Canada), Peter Morin (Tāłtān, born in Telegraph Creek, Canada; lives in Victoria, Canada), and Tania Willard (Secwépemc, born in Kamloops, Canada; lives in Chase, Canada) form this deployment of BUSH Gallery, a space created by an Indigenous-led collective of artists centred on Indigenous territory, experiences, and rights. BUSH Gallery explores ways in which art—its institutions, disciplines, and histories—can be modulated by centring Indigenous life, knowledge, traditions, and cultures.

Stefanie Hessler is a curator, writer, and editor. Her work focuses on ecologies, technology, and expanded definitions of life and non-life from an intersectional feminist perspective. Hessler is the director of Kunsthall Trondheim in South Sápmi, Norway.

Camille Georgeson-Usher is a scholar, artist, and arts administrator from Galiano Island, British Columbia, which is the land of the Pune’laxutth’ (Penelakut) Nation. She is writing on ontologies of gathering and how protocols from different nations intersect in urban centres.

Maude Johnson is a curator and writer who lives and works in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal. In her explorations of performative and curatorial practices, she probes methodologies, mechanisms, and languages in interdisciplinary works. She is the executive and curatorial assistant for MOMENTA Biennale de l’image.

Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She thinks through ecological loss, and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the healing power of performance and the radicality of love.

Leyla Majeri lives in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyaang / Montréal where she was born. Her work has been shown notably at CIRCA, Galerie de l'UQAM, Arprim, Parisian Laundry, Eastern Bloc, Paved Arts (Saskatoon), and Est-Nord-Est (Saint-Jean-Port-Joli) where she has completed a research residency in 2017. At L’imprimerie artist’s center, she is currently revisiting artisanal practices and organic processes that she will adapt to her installations. From this research, she envisions a garden of tinctorial plants that she will annex this summer (2022) to the centre. In 2023, she will present a new exhibition at the Skol, Montreal. Leyla Majeri holds a master's degree in Visual and Media Arts from UQAM and is a recipient of project grants from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Maryam Eizadifard holds a master’s in visual and media arts from UQAM (2018). She focuses on the ephemeral nature of spaces and their influence on memory and the body. Fragment-s de silence I is part of the Intersections residency for research, creation and dissemination, carried out by Eizadifard in 2021-2022 at the Contemporary Art Center OPTICA and l’École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’UQAM in partnership with the Conseil des arts de Montréal.

Maryam Eizadifard is part of the CODE BLANC collective composed of My-Van Dam and Stanley Février, which uses cultural institutions as a tool for reflection and creation to raise issues of equity and inclusion in the visual arts. The members draw on the existing skills and resources of the milieu, including museums, galleries and artist- run centers, and call on economic, cultural and social actors to contribute their reflections on the issues of cultural diversity.

The Intersections residency for research, creation and dissemination, is an initiative of l’École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’Université du Québec aÌ€ Montréal in partnership with the Conseil des arts de Montréal and OPTICA.

Catherine Barnabé is a freelance curator, author and translator. Her work has been presented in Canada, the United States (New York) and Europe as part of exhibitions or residencies.

Holding a master’s in visual and media arts from UQAM (2018). Maryam Eizadifard is interested in notions of space and time inherent to immigration and uprootedness. She explores the ephemeral nature of places and their impact on memory and the body. As part of her residency, Eizadifard intends to pursue reflections on migratory movement and the status of immigrants inspired by explorations into the psychology of both the body in its relation to space and the body as an inhabited and geographically perceived space. In 2022, with the collective CODE BLANC, she took part in the group exhibitions Le ministère at the center articule, Montreal, and the Musée d’art contemporain / Département des invisibles (MAADI) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Maryam Eizadifard is part of the CODE BLANC collective, also composed of My-Van Dam and Stanley Février, which uses cultural institutions as a tool for reflection and creation to raise issues of equity and inclusion in the visual arts. The members draw on the existing skills and resources of the milieu, including museums, galleries and artist-run centers, and call on economic, cultural and social actors to contribute their reflections on issues of cultural diversity.

The Intersections Residency for research, creation and dissemination is an initiative of l’École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’Université du Québec à Montréal in partnership with the Conseil des arts de Montréal and OPTICA, A Centre for Contemporary Art.

Columbian artist Maria Hoyos lives in Abya-Yala and also on the unceded territory of the Tiohtiá:ke First Nations. Deeply attached to her home town of Santiago de Cali, she has been interested in video from the start, exploring the moving image throughout her studies in Bogota, Madrid, and Havana. She discovered installation art at the El Instituto Departamental de Bellas Artes in Cali, as well as a passion for working with materials. Immigrating to Quebec in 2002, she obtained an MFA from the École des arts visuels et médiatiques at UQAM (2022) and a bachelor in education in visual and media arts from the same university.

Abya-Yala. Self-designation in the Kuna language: Mature land, living land, flowering land, land of blood.