optica

2023 - 2024 Français

Programming

Rick, le 6e Backstreet boi
from September 6th 2024 to October 19th 2024

Cindy Dumais
from September 6th 2024 to October 19th 2024

Maria Hoyos
from September 16th 2024 to September 16th 2024

Rick, le 6e Backstreet boi
from September 26th 2024 to September 28th 2024

Résidence Intersections 2024 - Appel de candidatures
NOUVELLE DATE limite de dépôt : 1er novembre 2024
NEW DEADLINE: November 1st, 2024

from October 15th 2024 to November 1st 2024

Rick, le 6e Backstreet boi
from October 19th 2024 to October 19th 2024

Programme éducatif public| Public Education Program OPTICA 2024-2025
from October 20th 2024 to June 14th 2025

Rihab Essayh, Shaya Ishaq, Sarah E.K. Smith, Snack Witch/Joni Cheung & Brandon A. Dalmer, Jinny Yu
Commissaires / Curators : Amber Berson, Felicity Tayler

from November 2nd 2024 to December 14th 2024

Maria Hoyos
from November 2nd 2024 to December 14th 2024

Rihab Essayh, Shaya Ishaq, Sarah E.K. Smith, Snack Witch/Joni Cheung & Brandon A. Dalmer, Jinny Yu
Commissaires / Curators : Amber Berson, Felicity Tayler

from November 16th 2024 to November 16th 2024

Clara Gutsche
from November 27th 2024 to November 27th 2024

Alvaro Marinho
from January 15th 2025 to November 1st 2025

Thomas Kneubühler
from January 17th 2025 to March 29th 2025

Milutin Gubash
from January 17th 2025 to March 29th 2025

Milutin Gubash, Thomas Kneubühler
from February 8th 2025 to February 8th 2025

from March 1st 2025 to March 1st 2025

Leisure (Meredith Carruthers et Susannah Wesley)
from April 12th 2025 to June 14th 2025

Rick, le 6e Backstreet boi, All I have to give, collage numérique \| digital collage, 2021. Avec l’aimable permission de l’artiste. \| Courtesy of the artist.	Rick, le 6e Backstreet boi from September 6th 2024 to October 19th 2024 *I didn't want it that way* Opening Friday, September 6, from 5pm to 10pm - Rentrée de Gaspé! Between 6pm and 8pm, join Rick for a SuperNintendo game in the exhibition! Commented visits of the exhibition with Rick during the Galeries Weekend and the Journées de la culture 2024: Thursday, September 26th,3 pm to 4 pm Friday, September 27th, 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm Saturday, September 28th, 3 pm to 4 pm Everything Changed Around 1997 The Grunge years—defined as much by the alternative rock music as by its associated unkempt, everyday fashion style—were petering out and pop was reclaiming the spotlight with an irresistible deluge of boy bands that took over everything. 98 Degrees, NSYNC, The Moffatts, and Hanson were playing non-stop everywhere. Factory-generated boy bands, custom made to flourish in young girls’ secret gardens, as Take That, Boyz II Men, New Kids on the Block, and Jackson 5 had done for previous generations. In Quebec, it was the Backstreet Boys. We like to say that the phenomenon was born here and that the world tagged along. Commercial radio here was the first in North America to play their songs. MusiquePlus followed suit, and it was fans in Quebec that got the bandwagon rolling. There’s something very québecois in the BSB’s meteoric rise and dizzying progress. From the autograph signings in the Place Vertu shopping mall and at the Fuzzy night club in Laval in 1996 to the laid-back interviews with Sonia Benezra and chaotic visits to the MusiquePlus studios where strident shreeks drowned out the singing, Nick, Howie, AJ, Brian, and Kevin created an unprecedented commotion. The changing of the guard was confirmed when their single “We’ve Got It Going On” won over the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” on Combat des Clips, the weekly show hosted by a young Véronique Cloutier at MusiquePlus, during which two video clips compete for votes called-in by the audience members. The years of Rock had come to an end, and the boy band movement held sway. Such things rarely last. The media, sceptics, and naysayers predicted a flash in the pan for BSB. But a whole generation of admirers—preponderantly women—still idolize the group nearly 25 years later. The concerts are packed and boisterous, as the closed out shows of the 2022 DNA tour testified once again. Millennial nostalgia wins the day. The Backstreet Boys knew no back street other than the band’s name, despite a faint romantic aura of life on the fringes. Unless one counts Nick’s legal troubles over the years. The only group member really marginalized from the perfect existence of the sentimental quintet is Rick, the 6th Backstreetboi. A “tender-hearted little guy” hailing from Centre-du-Québec, a free-thinker the BSB recruited from off a beach in Florida in 1993 and then promptly dropped in 1995. A missed opportunity for the Backstreet Boys to add some depth to their art and to address, as Rick had wanted, such topics as rape culture and the toxicity of the industry. Rick always identified as a researcher—a charcheur (“chercheur”) as Rick puts it. One might think the divorce a painful one. Yet by turning toward fine arts institutions, and encouraged by their agent arkadi lavoie lachapelle, Rick’s quest for healing gave rise to a series of varied artistic interventions on the crossroads of elitist art and pop culture. By offering lachapelle’s protégé their own solo exhibition, I didn’t want it that way, OPTICA is allowing the “Wounded” Backstreetboi to conclude a healing cycle and is inviting the public not only to discover Rick’s universe, past and present, but also to reflect on the impact of boy bands on the collective imagination. With an array of derivative products cobbled together from the local drugstore and homemade video clips, Rick leaves the victimized stance behind, sets their own path to glory with their support community, and prepares the follow-up. A first solo album may be on the way, our sources tell us. Author: Marc-André Mongrain Marc-André Mongrain has been columnist, critic and active music journalist since 2002. An avid cultural observer, he is the founder and editor in chief of the arts and culture magazine Sors-tu? He also makes appearances on Radio-Canada and he sits on several juries in the music industry. For more information, please contact their official agent: arkadi lavoie lachapelle. PRESS RELEASE (pdf) PRESS REVIEWS TARDIF, Dominic. «Il restera toujours la culture», Ici Première, Radio-Canada radio, 19 septembre 2024. BOUCHARD, Karine. « Arts visuels, Rentrée culturelle, Direction les galeries et centres d’artistes », La Presse, Thursday, September 19, 2024. Rick, the sixth backstreet boi is a mushroom, an oyster mushroom, in fact. They escaped the greenhouse where they conceived to seek out a special sauce recipe, one that would best reveal his delicate, slightly licorice-y voice. Rick is an ear that cries underneath the willow trees. Seeking a new group with which they could sing, they invite us to think humbly about the industrialization of musical mycology, and about the ways in which we can create a world that is hospitable for all. In their quest, Rick wants to meet living archives, like Sonia Benezra, a woman who, through interviews with mycological celebrities, has been able to thwart our scandal-oriented monoculture and to rehumanize ‘objects’ constructed through the commodification of folklore. Stretching their foot towards other worlds, the little boi imagines that their road to recovery will inspire other living beings to sprout magnifically on the compost of their childhoods. Marc-André Mongrain has been columnist, critic and active music journalist since 2002. An avid cultural observer, he is the founder and editor in chief of the arts and culture magazine Sors-tu? He also makes appearances on Radio-Canada and he sits on several juries in the music industry.
Cindy Dumais, Quand je suis très seule (avec Clarice Lispector), 2021, détail, encre sur Phototex marouflé sur bois. Avec l’aimable permission de l’artiste. \| detail, ink on Phototex mounted on wood, Courtesy of the artist.	Cindy Dumais from September 6th 2024 to October 19th 2024 *Garder le contact* Opening Friday, September 6, from 5pm to 10pm - Rentrée de Gaspé! Commented visit of the exhibition by Cindy Dumais from 7:30 PM to 8:30 PM.! Cindy Dumais initiated an extensive artistic investigation in 2017 titled ENTRETIENS. In this project, produced in collaboration with artists and writers, Dumais deploys an array of installations to stage interdisciplinary dialogues. Drawing from the rough drafts of literary works, she is particularly concerned with the raw state of the text, with gesture and the materiality of writing, and engages them in a conversation with her art practice. The exhibition Garder le contact [Keep In Touch], while pursuing this investigation, opens up another avenue of reflection: how to engage in dialogue with the material itself? The invitation to “keep in touch” may appear contradictory, because it invites us to engage in a dialogue at the very moment it has ceased to be. Yet, this apparent contradiction underlines the fact that distance is a prerequisite for dialogue. Engaging in dialogue is also to maintain a solitary distance that makes it possible. The material existence of the pieces brought together in this body of work is enabled by the dialogue. What appears in Dumais’s works corresponds to a certain exigency. It is not a matter of representing a dialogue that the artist has conducted with others, but of mobilizing the materials of the dialogue: the traces of the distance, of an encounter that silently endures the gap that separates one from the other all while maintaining the relationship. If matter itself comes to speak, it is to say that it cannot do otherwise but remain silent, that it secretly prefers to keep at a distance. Garder le contact is not just a metaphor. Giving spatial actuality to narratives, encounters, and dialogues requires work. Though it makes an unassuming appearance, as does everything to do with the working world, the theme of work in this collection showcases the demands of human relationships and creative work. Keeping in touch requires time and occupies a space, whether mental or physical. Dialogue involves activity, along with an attention to that which is striving to be expressed. Dumais, though her works, invites us to not lose sight of ourselves, to keep listening, and to maintain the existence of the plurality of voices, narratives, and encounters traversing the extant materiality that bears witness to them. The presented objects, like accumulated memories, bring to imminent awareness the possibility of future encounters. Be they in the form of a book or a page, of fabric or the billowy surface of a pillow, these installations appear at the junction of a narrative space and a material space. Rather than distinguish between them, the artist’s work invites us to consider these objects’ dual status, giving rise to a dialogue in which each thing exists both alone and solely in coexistence. As evinced in the quote from Clarice Lispector: “I exist only in dialogue.” In dialogue, solitude is not obliterated in the collectivity. On the contrary, each element of this body of work is presented in its dismemberment, in parts, as if it were open and awaiting a response. Neither symbol nor raw object, their materiality, crisscrossed by signs, brings to the surface the forms and narratives of society that cannot be reduced to symbols. Thus the importance given to the objects’ plastic dimension, which does not contradict their conjured textuality. A question remains to rekindle the dialogue: What kind of society, what kind of Us transpires from this dialogue with the material? Those willing to do so can, in silent, distant complicity, become guardians of the contact. Author: Émile Lévesque-Jalbert Translator: Ron Ross PRESS RELEASE (pdf) BOUCHARD, Karine. « Arts visuels, Rentrée culturelle, Direction les galeries et centres d’artistes », La Presse, Thursday, September 19, 2024. Cindy Dumais' research focuses on the transposition of language into material, questioning identity and reference through the experience of the body. Excerpts from literature and philosophy, recorded in her notebooks, are part of a process of questioning artistic production itself, in a dialogical form. She has presented around fifteen solo exhibitions and participated in nearly fifty group exhibitions in Canada and abroad, the most recent of which was at Das Esszimmer (Bonn, Germany) in May 2024. Her works have been acquired by private and public collections, including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the Loto-Québec Collection. She was selected for a residency at Annandale Artist Residency (Prince Edward Island) in June 2023. In 2021, she received the Creator of the Year Award for Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean, awarded by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. She has held the dual role of author and publisher since 2005 with LaClignotante and has also co-founded AMV/Art-Mobilité-Visibilité. Émile Lévesque-Jalbert is a PhD candidate at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. His research focuses on ecological thinking, literary arts, and contemporary French and French-speaking literature. His writings have been published in Québec, France, and the United States.
Maria Hoyos, Trabajador cortando caña de azúcar [Travailleur coupant la canne à sucre], Villa Rica, Cauca, 2024. Image extraite d'une séquence vidéo. \| Image extracted from a video sequence. Courtesy of the artist.	Maria Hoyos from September 16th 2024 to September 16th 2024 En conversation avec Maria Hoyos, récipiendaire de la résidence intersections 2023 - en français LUNDI 16 SEPTEMBRE 2024, 12H45 À 13H45 UNIVERSITÉ DU QUÉBEC À MONTRÉAL PAVILLON JUDITH-JASMIN, LOCAL J-7130 (SITUÉ AU 7E ÉTAGE) 405, RUE SAINTE-CATHERINE EST (ANGLE ST-DENIS) H2L 2C4 L’artiste Maria Hoyos s’intéresse aux questions historiques et culturelles en lien avec ses origines colombiennes. Marquée par l’exploitation sucrière qu’elle a connue enfant, elle aborde les relations de pouvoir et les abus d’un passé colonial qu'elle projette dans le présent. L’espace d’exposition devient le réceptacle d’une mémoire, à la recherche d'une réconciliation et d'un apaisement. Au cours de cette conversation, elle fera part de sa démarche artistique et de la recherche qu’elle a réalisée pendant sa résidence au centre OPTICA. Elle s’entretiendra aussi sur sa production effectuée dans les ateliers de l’École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’UQAM. La discussion sera animée par Romeo Gongora, professeur à l’École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’UQAM, et Marie-Josée Lafortune, directrice du Centre d’art contemporain OPTICA. Une période de questions suivra sa présentation avec le public. Programme de résidence artistique Intersections : La résidence Intersections de recherche, de création et de diffusion récompense des artistes émergent.es, issu.e.s de l’immigration (de première ou de seconde génération), qui sont membres des minorités ethniques ou visibles et diplômé.e.s de la maîtrise à l’École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’UQAM. Ce programme vise à offrir un soutien aux artistes de la diversité en leur donnant accès à un accompagnement professionnel, complémentaire à leur formation universitaire dans le milieu artistique montréalais. Pour de plus amples informations, consulter : http://intersections.uqam.ca// La résidence Intersections est une initiative conjointe du Conseil des arts de Montréal, du Centre d’art contemporain OPTICA et de l’École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’UQAM. Columbian artist Maria Hoyos lives in Abya-Yala and also on the unceded territory of the TiohtiÃ¡: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.
Rick, le 6e Backstreet boi, Backstreet Gars : The inner artist coloring book, 2024. Avec l’aimable permission de l’artiste. \| Courtesy of the artist.	Rick, le 6e Backstreet boi from September 26th 2024 to September 28th 2024 OPTICA is opening its doors for the 2024 Gallery Weekend Montreal and Journées de la culture! OPTICA is opening its doors for the 2024 Gallery Weekend Montreal and Journées de la culture. Audiences are invited to gather round the works of Rick, the sixth backstreet boi (official agent: arkadi lavoie lachapelle). Start off by discovering Rick’s fascinating, pop-culture-infused universe, while sipping a glass of chocolate milk and munching on bowl of squeaky cheese! Rick will be there! After perusing their digital collages, you can help solve a puzzle and fill out colouring pages right in the gallery. With a little luck, you can even join Rick in a video game! In the centre’s mediation centre, we also invite you to create a colouring book. Inspired by Rick’s colouring pages on display in the gallery, create your own using images culled from magazines and the Internet, or use those from your personal collection. Have fun! Schedule Creative workshop: Thursday, September 26, 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Friday, September 27, noon to 7 p.m. Saturday, September 28, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, September 29, noon to 5 p.m. Guided tour with Rick: Thursday, September 26, 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Friday, September 27, 5:30 p.m to 6:30 p.m. Saturday, September 28, 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. For more information, please contact their official agent: arkadi lavoie lachapelle.
Maria Hoyos, Trabajador cortando caña de azúcar [Travailleur coupant la canne à sucre], Villa Rica, Cauca, 2024. Image extraite d'une séquence vidéo.	Résidence Intersections 2024 - Appel de candidatures NOUVELLE DATE limite de dépôt : 1er novembre 2024 NEW DEADLINE: November 1st, 2024 from October 15th 2024 to November 1st 2024 Appel de candidatures (French only). Intersections - Résidence de recherche, création et production 2024-2025 / Partenariat entre le Conseil des arts de Montréal, l’EAVM et OPTICA, centre d’art contemporain Appel de candidatures -> NEW DEADLINE: November 1st,2024 Le Conseil des arts de Montréal (CAM), le Centre d’art contemporain OPTICA et l’École des arts visuels et médiatiques (EAVM) de l’UQAM lancent un appel de candidatures pour les artistes issu.e.s de l’immigration (de première ou de seconde génération) qui sont membres des minorités ethniques ou visibles. Les candidat.e.s éligibles sont diplômé.e.s de la maîtrise à l’EAVM. Ce partenariat vise à offrir un soutien de recherche, de création et de production à un.e artiste en lui donnant accès à un accompagnement professionnel, complémentaire à sa formation universitaire dans le milieu artistique montréalais. Ce projet prend la forme d’une résidence en vue de la réalisation d’une œuvre qui entre en dialogue avec des archives (fonds documentaire du centre d’art contemporain OPTICA ou autre, en fonction de la recherche de l’artiste). À la fin de la résidence, OPTICA présentera une exposition de l’artiste sélectionné.e. Le lauréat ou la lauréate tiendra aussi une présentation publique sur sa pratique artistique au centre. Un accompagnement par l’EAVM et OPTICA sera fourni dans le cadre du projet d’une durée d’un an. Conditions d'admissibilité - être un.e artiste issu.e. de l’immigration (de première ou de seconde génération) membre des minorités ethniques ou visibles; - être un.e artiste professionnel.le en arts visuels; - être diplômé.e du programme de maîtrise à l’EAVM; - être citoyen.ne canadien.ne ou résident.e permanent.e du Canada à la date de dépôt de la demande; - être domicilié.e sur le territoire de l’île de Montréal depuis au moins un an; - être disponible pour toutes les activités incluses dans le cadre du projet. Soutien offert - trois mois de résidence de recherche à l’hiver 2025 (janvier – mars) au centre d’art contemporain OPTICA incluant un espace de travail et un accès aux équipements de bureau, aux archives et à la documentation; - un studio pour la création et la production, ainsi qu’un accès aux ateliers techniques spécialisés de l'EAVM, « sous toute réserve» en raison des travaux en cours ou pour d'autres impondérables à l’UQAM, pour une durée de 8 mois; - un accompagnement professionnel totalisant 60 heures par OPTICA (30h) et l’EAVM (30h); - des frais de recherche conditionnel aux disponibilités financières et en collaboration avec La Faculté des arts de l’UQAM (max. 1 500 $); - un cachet de production (4 375$), d’exposition (2 380$) et de présentation publique (125$); - une plage d’exposition ou de diffusion du projet final dans la programmation d’OPTICA et une présentation publique au cours de l’année 2025. Veuillez noter que nous ne prenons pas en charge les frais d’hébergement ou de transport. Le calendrier et les conditions de travail peuvent être modifiés en fonction des disponibilités financières des partenaires. DOSSIER de candidature - une lettre de motivation décrivant le projet de recherche proposé, les objectifs prévus, l’échéancier pour les trois mois de la résidence et sa pertinence pour la démarche artistique (max. 400 mots); - une démarche artistique (max. 500 mots); - un curriculum vitae (max. 3 pages); - 10 images maximum au format JPG d'un poids maximal de 1Mo par image et/ou extraits vidéo et audio (5 minutes maximum, par hyperliens) avec une liste descriptive des images et/ou des extraits audiovisuels; Le dossier de candidature doit être soumis dans un seul document PDF (taille maximale du fichier de 15 Mo) et envoyé au plus tard le 1er novembre 2024 à minuit à l’adresse courriel: intersections@uqam.ca Seuls les documents exigés seront transmis aux membres du comité d'évaluation. Il n'y aura pas de commentaires du jury. Pour plus de renseignements, vous êtes invité.e à participer à la séance d'information virtuelle qui aura lieu le mardi 24 septembre à 10h via ce lien : https://uqam.zoom.us/j/82546397978 Vous pouvez également consulter notre site web à l'adresse suivante : www.intersections.uqam.ca Pour plus d’information sur les termes utilisés, consulter le Glossaire du Conseil des arts de Montréal: https://www.artsmontreal.org/glossaire/
Vente d'échantillons par Rick, le 6e Backstreet boi /Sample Sale by Rick, le sixth Backstreet boi Design : Rick, le 6e Backstreet boi	Rick, le 6e Backstreet boi from October 19th 2024 to October 19th 2024 Sample Sale by Rick, le sixth Backstreet boi On Saturday, October 19, starting at 3 p.m., join us for Rick's sample sale! Welcome to the closing event of Rick, the 6th Backstreet boi’s exhibition! Attendees can buy samples from the exhibit to help fund three organizations that support the resistence and survival of people brutally impacted by colonialism. In a guided tour before the sale, Rick will present the significance of the samples—and explain why you’re paying more than the drugstore cost value of Rick’s derivative products. This is both a fund-raising activity and a ritual of closure: no more victimhood for the 6th Backstreet boi! Make way for excitement and adventure: In Search of Lost Rick! Bring friends and family! There’ll be chocolate milk and cheese sticks for all! SCHEDULE 3pm Welcome 3:30 pm Rick, the 6th Backstreet boi, speaks 4pm Guided tour of samples by 4:30 pm Sample sale begins Accessibility info@optica.ca PRESENTATION OF THE ORGANIZATIONS RAVEN raises legal defence funds to assist Indigenous Peoples who enforce their rights and title to protect their traditional territories. https://raventrust.com/ https://www.instagram.com/raven_trust/ Crips for eSims is an initiative co-created by @pipagaopoetry, @disability_visibility & @thellpsx, to send eSims to Gaza so people there can communicate with each other and the world. https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/.../crips-for.../ https://www.instagram.com/disability_visibility/ https://www.instagram.com/thellpsx/ https://www.instagram.com/pipagaopoetry/ REMAN (Réseau des Migrant-e-s d'Afrique Noire au Liban)is a group of African migrants in Lebanon, are coordinating an emergency response to support the migrant women and their families in the face of the crisis in Lebanon. https://www.gofundme.com/.../please-help-migrant-workers... https://www.instagram.com/remanorganization/ Rick, the sixth backstreet boi is a mushroom, an oyster mushroom, in fact. They escaped the greenhouse where they conceived to seek out a special sauce recipe, one that would best reveal his delicate, slightly licorice-y voice. Rick is an ear that cries underneath the willow trees. Seeking a new group with which they could sing, they invite us to think humbly about the industrialization of musical mycology, and about the ways in which we can create a world that is hospitable for all. In their quest, Rick wants to meet living archives, like Sonia Benezra, a woman who, through interviews with mycological celebrities, has been able to thwart our scandal-oriented monoculture and to rehumanize ‘objects’ constructed through the commodification of folklore. Stretching their foot towards other worlds, the little boi imagines that their road to recovery will inspire other living beings to sprout magnifically on the compost of their childhoods.
Programme éducatif public 2024-2025, détail. Graphisme : Tamzyn Berman, Pastille rose. \| Public Education Program 2024-2025, detail. Design: Tamzyn Berman, Pastille rose.	Programme éducatif public\| Public Education Program OPTICA 2024-2025 from October 20th 2024 to June 14th 2025 Public Education Program \| Fall - Spring 2024-2025 OPTICA’s public education program proposes various creative workshops and interactive tours for audiences of all ages, from 4 and up. Daycare centres, public and private, elementary schools, high schools, colleges, universities, retirement homes and community organizations can all participate in our activities. These ones place in an atmosphere conducive to discussion and reflection, in order to learn more about current creative production. All our activities are free! To schedule a guided tour and/or to take part in a workshop, simply book an appointment with the Public Education Program Coordinator Anne St-Louis: mediationoptica @ gmail.com or call us at 514-874-1666. CONSULT OUR 2024-2025 ANNUAL PROGRAM IN PDF FORMAT
Jinny Yu, Rolodex, 2024. Rolodex, circa 1980, provenant du Département d’arts visuels de l’Université d’Ottawa, où l’artiste travaille, 20 x 12.5 x 20.5 cm. Avec l’aimable permission de l’artiste et du Département d’arts visuels de l’Université d’Ottawa.\| found at the Department of Visual Arts, University of Ottawa where the artist works, 20 x 12.5 x 20.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and the Department of Visual Arts, University of Ottawa.	Rihab Essayh, Shaya Ishaq, Sarah E.K. Smith, Snack Witch/Joni Cheung & Brandon A. Dalmer, Jinny Yu Commissaires / Curators : Amber Berson, Felicity Tayler from November 2nd 2024 to December 14th 2024 Educating Our Desires, equity-deserving action within artist-led spaces Opening: November 2nd, 2024, from 3 pm to 5 pm. Round table : November 16, 2024, from 3 pm to 5 pm Futurisms: Retraining Our Dopamine Hits Description below: A timeline, objects, and documents. In this exhibition, we highlight historical instances of equity-seeking action within artist-led spaces, and how the resonances of these actions are indexed in this contemporary moment of digital futurisms. Contemporary works are framed as expressions of desire for alternative futures, “educated” by the actions of the past. Library of Infinities by Shaya Ishaq is a web platform for and by Black and Afro-diasporic communities, and a growing database of books by authors of the afro-diaspora. Canadian BIPOC Art is a personal project of Rihab Essayh to enrich the knowledge of BIPOC artists across Canada. Jinny Yu’s Canadian BIPOC Rolodex Project mimics an analogue “Rolodex,” referencing ways in which BIPOC artists have been historically known through personal and artistic networks rather than through institutions. Drawing on a 1987 Independent Artists’ Union panel, Sarah E.K. Smith presents historical instances of subjective resistance to dominant structures of power in the arts through union structures identifying artists as equity-deserving workers, as reflected in fair wages for their work. Amber Berson shares a historical yet timely conversation between a variety of positions in cultural advocacy, acknowledging trends in equity in the arts and the disagreement around timelines and intensity for demands. Hosted by the Women’s Art Resource Centre in 1994, this conversation is a scathing analysis of gender, race, and culture at the time, and viewers are invited to update the calls to action and complaints of the video via annotations. With Cycling Intentions, Snack Witch/Joni Cheung and Brandon A. Dalmer conducted a consultation process compiling timeline data of equity-seeking events from disparate sources. The timeline circles in a maelstrom formation, as intersectional alliances shift in and out of view. There is no linear progress in this formation, rather we are swept up in the shared experience, and intergenerational transmission, of memory and cyclical forgetting. The title, Educating Our Desires, comes from scholar Ruth Levitas, who uses it as part of her utopian methodology. In short, she tells us, if we want to create change, we need to look back to the past to understand how we created our current set of circumstances and we then need to take the time to educate our desires for what a future for this issue could be. Applied to equity in the arts, we see a constant cycling of conversations and themes stifling actual advancement and we desire that some of these new projects can advance change. The exhibition builds on the curators and artists lived experience in artist-led milieus, and individual artistic and curatorial research around the cultural histories of artist-led communities from the 1970s onwards. In their research, both curators noted a historical bias to isolate the shared histories of equity demands across marginalized identity groups in the arts. This division of interest mirrors the current situation where artist-led engagements toward equity conjure feelings of frustration, dissatisfaction, and anxiety. The inherited circumstances leave few involved feeling good. By highlighting these historical expressions of desire as events that cycle through space and time through a process of “education,” the exhibition makes the argument that the milieu learns from itself through conscious and subconscious cyclical processes. An awareness of this process can propel collective actions toward hopeful repetitions. Aesthetic practices educate our desires to be the drive that moves us towards seemingly impossible horizons. In spite of dreaming about an expansive exhibition that equitably treats these complex histories and compensates the labour of those involved in the project, the curators would like to acknowledge that this project did not receive Council funding from provincial or national sources. The modesty of this endeavor therefore reflects the austerity of our current situation in the arts. The curators would like to thank the artists who participated; the gallery for hosting; Deanna Fong, Literary Editor at the Capilano Review and BJJ badass; many other invisible contributors through time who nourished our thinking around this; the currently Jellofied, formerly Centre de recherche urbaine de Montréal (CRUM); SSHRC for supplementary material support; and our families for loving kindness. Projects Description Amber Berson A continuous screening of a recording of a 1994 panel discussion hosted by the Women’s Art Resource Centre (Toronto) at the National Gallery of Canada in the Fall of 1994. The original panel was moderated by Fay Cromwell-Tollenaar and featured Edythe Goodridge from the Canada Council for the Arts; Angela Lee, a Toronto-based researcher working in theatre and community arts; then-Equity Officer at the Canada Council LeeAnn Martin; independent curator Sylvie Fortin; Janice Seline of the National Gallery; artists Jane Ash Poitras and Wilma Needham; and Linda Abrahams of WARC. The panel was a scathing analysis of gender, race, and culture at the time, and it is troubling to observe how relevant the issues raised then remain today. Participants both on the panel and in the audience commented over and over again on how slow change was, and how important affirmative action could be in getting people into the room. They demonstrated a relatively sophisticated understanding of the interrelations between class, race, and gender in their discussions. Artist-run centres are stuck in a feedback loop of continually revisiting the same questions. Poor documentation, impossible access to documentation, or little time and resources to properly process documentation causes amnesia, forcing us to spend our time rehashing the past instead of imagining a future. In addition to screening the film, we will host an activity for annotating the transcript. Together the curators and the public will update the calls to action and complaints of the video, visualizing the progress of the last thirty years and pushing the discourse further instead of further into a spiral. Rihab Essayh Inspired by vernacular architectures from Norther African regions, this textile work is suspended in space as a reminder that it is possible, and desirable, to build worlds from local materials and with anti-colonial knowledges. In these building traditions new materials may be tried but they will not endure unless they soften into the land and the environment in which they are grounded. Older styles persist in relation to the stressors of the environment; just as newer, imported technologies may fail, unless they adapt to the atmospheric conditions and the desires of the inhabitants of the villages in which these structures are built. As a metaphor for the social media platforms of digital spaces, we can apply similar principles to the information architecture that structures the representation of artists and their work on the Instagram account. Shaya Ishaq Library of Infinities is a digital space that celebrates the diversity and creativity of the Black imagination through literature, film, and music. As a web platform we invite people to add to a growing database of books by authors of the afro-diaspora. This space invites people to leave their mark for future visitors of this user generated archive where we can share and learn from each other's perspectives. As a digital library, we value sharing and aim to provide work and resources for deepening our understanding of the work featured on this platform. Library of Infinities strives to be a portal of connection on a shared respect and love for Black and afro-diasporic literature. Shaya Ishaq began the Library of Infinities through exhibitions in artist-led spaces Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax, 2017) and SAW Gallery (Ottawa 2021). As this project continues to evolve through physical and digital spaces, questions that drive Ishaq include: How can a web platform be a generative space for learning and sharing? What does collaboration look like in this digital realm? How can the Library of Infinities facilitate dynamic ways of storytelling? Sarah E.K.Smith The precarity and inequality of cultural labour is increasingly recognized, yet the history of artists’ efforts to understand and organize to improve their conditions are not well documented in Canada. This project surfaces historic efforts to advance equity in the art world, focusing on initiatives in Ontario in the 1980s that contributed to subsequent federal cultural policy changes. Addressing an event recording from the Condé Beveridge fonds at the Queen’s University Archives, this work presents a transcript of a 1987 panel discussion organized by the Independent Artists’ Union in partnership with A Space Community Arts, hosted at the A Space artist-run centre in Toronto. Titled Working Odds - A Forum on Issues of Race in the Arts System, the panel addressed equity in the arts, featuring Beatrice Bailey, Clifton Joseph, Richard Fung, Midi Onodera, and Chet Singh. A frank discussion of the challenges faced by BIPOC artists, as well as artists who faced discrimination due to other intersectional identity positions, this conversation offers significant insights into the challenges and structures of the Canadian art world. Presented over three decades later, the discussion resonates with ongoing barriers faced by living artists today, raising the question of progress with respect to reducing discrimination and improving access in the arts. Jinny Yu The Canadian BIPOC Rolodex Project was started by professors Jinny Yu and Celina Jeffery (from the University of Ottawa) and Ming Tiampo (from Carleton University) at a time of racialized tension on campus. The project is a searchable database of Canadian BIPOC artists, which facilitates and encourages research, teaching, and exhibitions on BIPOC artists, who continue to be underrepresented in publications, exhibitions, and curricula. Mimicking an analogue “Rolodex,” the database references the ways in which BIPOC artists have been historically known through personal and artistic networks rather than through institutions. It seeks to increase accessibility to BIPOC artists during first-phase curatorial and art historical research and subsequently increase their representation in curriculum, publications, and art institutions. It is conceived of in equal measures as a curated platform, digital humanities project, and advocacy work. Snack Witch/ Joni Cheung & Brandon A. Dalmer Cycling Intentions For over 60+ years, conversations around equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility have flickered in and out the consciousness of Canadian cultural institutions, artist-run-centres, and artist-led milieus. How can studying the work of those before—reflecting on successes, the things that fell apart, those that have reappeared, and what has been transformed—spark potential for pathways forward? We gather to host conversations and questions: How can we move in time with the intergenerational knowledge and collective work of past and current artist-led unions? Do all our movements need to be forward in order for change to occur? Is there something fruitful in taking steps back: through repetition, examining in between the lines of recurring historical and contemporary patterns. November 16, 3 pm - 5 pm Description,round table: Futurisms: Retraining Our Dopamine Hits Online and in presence, in English, translation available in realtime The conversation, which features Jinny Yu (Canadian BIPOC Artists Rolodex), Rihab Essayh (@canadianbipocart), and Shaya Ishaq (Library of Infinities), is facilitated by Felicity Tayler and focuses on artist-led spaces as they share a method of reaching towards possible horizons of sustainable ways of living and creating. We will have an open-ended discussion about the work of digital networks and databases as mediums for representation, for articulating a way towards liberation. But these projects and practitioners are also acutely aware that the digital archival space they are creating works within constraints which are not inherently progressive. The social and economic conditions producing this archival space do not get better. Instead, they are engaged in a cycle of renewal and repeated engagement that links the calls to equity from the past to those of the future. It has been long recognized that digital spaces replicate real-world oppression, and do not inherently produce liberation, equity, or inclusive practices. And yet, artist-led spaces have consistently engaged with networked relational forms and practices of lists and directories, exploring the body and identity as circumscribed by grids and systems. In racialized and otherwise marginalized communities these modes build internal capacity and enact mutual aid to counter hostility produced by bad actors and structural inequities. The work of aesthetics is not only to shift the mind to new ways of thinking, but also has the power to retrain our dopamine hits to new neural pathways (Sylvia Wynter). Authors: Amber Berson, Felicity Tayler PRESS RELEASE (pdf) Dorian Fraser, « Educating Our Desires, equity-deserving action within artist-led spaces », paru dans Espace art actuel, Montréal, 2025. Amber Berson Executive Director of The Visual Arts Centre in Montreal (CA), Amber Berson is a writer, a curator, and an Art Historian. She holds a doctoral degree from Queen’s University where her SSHRC-funded research examined artist-run culture and feminist, utopian thinking. She is also an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, in Montréal, where she is working on a long-term research project on the history of equity-seeking artist-run centres tentatively titled Parallel. In her spare time, Berson works on knowledge equity projects, especially with the Art+Feminism Wikipedia project, where she worked in various capacities for a decade and now sits on the Board. In addition to her curatorial work, Berson’s writing has been published in a variety of Canadian and international publications. Felicity Tayler Felicity Tayler’s research interests include metadata modeling, data visualization and the print culture of literary and poetic community. She is the Outreach Director of the Data Literacy Research Institute and a Research Associate of the Humanities Data Lab at the University of Ottawa. Currently a co-applicant on the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb Partnership, which foregrounds a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study and digital development, with diverse collections of spoken recordings from across Canada and beyond. As a member of the Digital Research Alliance RDM National Training Expert Group, she was the lead author on the bilingual OER, Data Primer: Making Digital Humanities Research Data Public / Manuel d’introduction aux données : rendre publiques les données de recherche en sciences humaines numériques. Also a visual artist and curator, she has produced exhibitions and published scholarly writing exploring co-publishing relationships in literary and artistic communities. Rihab Essayh Rihab Essayh was born in Morocco and raised in Montreal. Essayh is an interdisciplinary artist whose large-scale, immersive installations emerge as supports for the conditions of "radical softness" – an idea that suggests that showing emotions and vulnerability is a political gesture in a society that prioritizes intellect and indifference. Essayh uses lightness and delicacy, which is the cumulative effect of the constructed landscape as a vision of a soft futurism; an imagined future, a hopeful new space that is de-centering, intersectional, inclusive, and radically soft. Her research considers issues of isolation and disconnection in the digital age, imagining futurities of soft-strength and social reconnection by proposing a heightened attunement to colour, costume, tactility and sound. She completed her MFA at the University of Guelph in 2022. Her work has been shown at the festival ARTCH (Montreal), La Centrale Powerhouse Gallery (Montreal), Never Apart (Montreal), the plumb (Toronto), the Art Gallery of Guelph (Guelph), Union Gallery (Kingston), Arsenale (Toronto), and Mcbride Contemporain (Montreal). Shaya Ishaq Shaya Ishaq is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and writer currently based in Portland, OR. Her research interests in her art practice are engaged in craft, diaspora, design anthropology, and afrofuturism. She obtained a BFA in Fibres & Material Practices from Concordia University where she minored in Anthropology and has previously attended NSCAD University. Shaya has pursued her research as a fellow of the Textiles + Materiality Research Cluster, a branch of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology where she was awarded an undergraduate research fellowship. Additionally, she was the inaugural Black Perspective Research fellow at Concordia University in 2022. She has pursued residencies at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Maine, USA), Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (Maine, USA), and the Arquetopia Foundation (Puebla, Mexico), among others. She has exhibited her work at venues including SAW, Patel Brown, Khyber Centre for the Arts (Nova Scotia), Ottawa Art Gallery, and Art Gallery of Burlington (Ontario). She has also given presentations on her art practice and research at places such as the NIA Centre, NSCAD University, and Concordia University, and the School of Art at the University of Manitoba. Her writing has been featured in Canadian Art, Studio Magazine, and Public Parking. Shaya has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and was a recipient of the William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists (2023). Sarah E.K. Smith Sarah E.K. Smith is a scholar whose research examines visual art, creative labour, and cultural diplomacy. She has curated exhibitions of contemporary art for the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Museum London, and the Carleton University Art Gallery. Sarah holds the Canada Research Chair in Art, Culture and Global Relations at Western University, where she is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies. She is interested in the ways that artists advocate for change and is currently writing a book about the Independent Artists’ Union with Greig de Peuter. Jinny Yu Jinny Yu is an artist and educator. Her artistic practice is an inquiry into the medium of painting as a means of trying to understand the world around us. Her work presented during the 56th Venice Biennale addresses themes about migration, which resonate with larger political concerns globally. Yu works simultaneously to scrutinize conventions and to explore new possibilities within the medium of painting, oscillating between the fields of abstract painting and the object. Her work has been shown widely, including exhibitions in Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy, Portugal, South Korea, UK and USA. Snack Witch/ Joni Cheung & Brandon A. Dalmer Snack Witch/Joni Cheung is a Canadian-born Hong Kong-Chinese anglophone, queer woman. They are a certified Sculpture Witch with an MFA from Concordia University. A wicked #magicalgirl eating art + making snacks, her interdisciplinary practice investigates the relationship between objects↔place↔migration↔identities, always with humour, sometimes with food. Brandon A. Dalmer explores image generation and technology through fabrication, generative processes, and robotic assistance. His open-source painting practice contextualizes unseen processes and serves as an archive. Dalmer has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. He lives in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal.
Maria Hoyos, Trabajador cortando caña de azúcar [Travailleur coupant la canne à sucre], Villa Rica, Cauca, 2024. Image extraite d'une séquence vidéo. Avec l'aimable permission de l'artiste. \| Image extracted from a video sequence. Courtesy of the artist.	Maria Hoyos from November 2nd 2024 to December 14th 2024 La zafra Opening: November 2nd, 2024, from 3 pm to 5 pm Artist Talk : December 14 2024, 3PM-4PM Transdisciplinary artist, Maria Hoyos ((laureat of the Intersections Residency 2023-2024) infuses her Columbian heritage throughout a production that includes themes of identity, memory, and ritual. Hoyos studied various forms of artistic creation and art education in Spain, Colombia, and Cuba, furthering her extensive training in Montreal since relocating in 2002. She earned a master’s degree in 2023, showcasing her graduate work at UQAM’s art gallery, participated in numerous group exhibitions, was awarded prizes and distinctions, is a member of the Intervals Collective, and divides her time as an artist and educator. Growing up surrounded by sugarcane plantations in Santiago de Cali had a profound impact on Hoyos’s sensibility. Since its cultivation in the Americas and Caribbean during colonisation, hunger for sugar shaped global history, trade, and geopolitics, propelling a nefarious industry tainted by power and labour exploitation. At OPTICA, Hoyos presents the culmination of a corpus confronting the abuse, violence, poverty, and discrimination endured by workers, both past and present, alongside damaging environmental consequences. Motivated by an urgency to expose these tribulations, she draws on the symbolism within circles to express her angst. At the entrance, a crown of sugar-coated barbed wire hangs from the ceiling, supporting strings of beads. These hover above a mound of dirt serving as an homage to untainted soil and an appeal to appreciate the earth. The gestures of creation involved in generating this artwork are vital to its intention. Shaping spiked wire is painful but humbling when evoking the cane cutters’ acute suffering. Manipulating earth denotes sustainable farming. Modelling clay into rosary beads is meditative and repetitive, a sacred act performed with women united in a circle. Echoing the artist’s participation in rituals in Columbia, including prayer circles, reciting the rosary, and cacao ceremonies - all paramount in shaping Hoyos’s identity - the circular formations comprising this work reveal the power of community and prayer in a quest for spiritual appeasement. Low-lying circular containers are physical and conceptual enclosures, embodying Hoyos’s plea to end global cycles of corruption pervading industries, by confining and preventing dispersal of their contents. Dried sugarcane implanted in earth highlights soil degradation and loss of fertile land, amplified by the recording of a cane cutter’s testimonial. Water represents the need for abundant irrigation while receptacles with ashes and burned sugarcane reference air pollution resulting from the burning of fields before harvest. These fires facilitate manual cutting, but they also emit harmful pollutants that adversely affect the workers’ health and populations nearby, covering the region with dust and ash. Hoyos’s documentary video depicts corteros* - Colombia’s sugarcane cutters - hacking at stalks in scorched fields. Inspired by artist Raphaëlle de Groot’s Dust Collection (2000-2001) and the concept of artists as anthropologists, ethnologists, and archaeologists elaborated upon in her thesis, Hoyos enacts the role of scientist for an installation featuring charred pieces of plants and ash. She collected samples while visiting Cali during field burning, each carrying material evidence of the detrimental process that produced them. Through her resolve as an artist seeking to reconcile with and negate their destructive energy, she displays these scientific specimens in Petri dishes, and by isolating them in sterile environments, she honours and purifies these particles, transposing them into offerings. Hoyos thus imbues her works with curative properties. In her tribute to Indigenous and African slaves, to the corteros, and to oppressed workers worldwide, she exorcises the layers of agony embedded in collective memories and provides a haven for purification and solace. OPTICA becomes a sacred space, a temple for reflection and a place to gather and heal communally. And to consider alternatives aimed at respecting human needs and environmental wellbeing in commerce driven by capitalism. Iris Amizlev PRESS RELEASE (pdf) The Intersections residency 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. 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.  Of Columbian origin, artist Maria Hoyos holds an MFA (2022), BFA, and Bachelor of Art in education from the École des arts visuels et médiatiques at UQAM. Deeply attached to her home town, Santiago de Cali, she has always been interested in video, exploring the moving image throughout her studies in Bogota, Madrid, and Havana. Hoyos discovered a passion for installation art at the El Instituto Departamental de Bellas Artes. Immigrating to Québec in 2002 where she completed her studies, Hoyos exhibited at the Maison de la culture de Rosemont, Maison de la culture de Verdun, and Galerie de l’UQAM. She also curated the El Barrio, Tu Barrio* project as part of the Mois de l’héritage latino-américain (Latin American Heritage Month) in Montreal and participated in the exhibition Mi-lieu, at the Écomusée du fier monde, a partnership with the UQAM arts department. Since 2023, she has been teaching visual arts in adult education centres and in French-language welcoming classes in the Jeanne-Mance and Pierre-Laporte high schools. Hoyos lives on the generous land of Abya-Yala, which, in the Kuna language, denoted the North-American continent before European colonization, and on the un-ceded First-Nations territory of Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Iris Amizlev is Curator of Special Projects at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She has a doctorate in Art History and Anthropology from the Université de Montréal and has curated numerous exhibitions in various institutions on her fields of expertise, including contemporary, Pop and Land Art.
Shaya Ishaq, Library of Infinities Ephemera (Documents éphémères de la Bibliothèque des infinis), 2022-2024. Avec l'aimable permission de l'artiste \| Printed matter. Courtesy of the artist.	Rihab Essayh, Shaya Ishaq, Sarah E.K. Smith, Snack Witch/Joni Cheung & Brandon A. Dalmer, Jinny Yu Commissaires / Curators : Amber Berson, Felicity Tayler from November 16th 2024 to November 16th 2024 Educating Our Desires; Round table, Futurisms: Retraining Our Dopamine Hits November 16th, 2024, 3 pm to 5 pm Online and in presence, in English, translation available ZOOM LINK The conversation, which features Jinny Yu (Canadian BIPOC Artists Rolodex), Rihab Essayh (@canadianbipocart) and Shaya Ishaq (Library of Infinities), is facilitated by Felicity Tayler and focuses on artist-led spaces as they share a method of reaching towards possible horizons of sustainable ways of living and creating. We will have an open-ended discussion about the work of digital networks and databases as mediums for representation, for articulating a way towards liberation. But these projects and practitioners are also acutely aware that the digital archival space they are creating works within constraints which are not inherently progressive. The social and economic conditions producing this archival space do not get better. Instead, they are engaged in a cycle of renewal and repeated engagement that links the calls to equity from the past to those of the future. It has been long recognized that digital spaces replicate real-world oppression, and do not inherently produce liberation, equity, or inclusive practices. And yet, artist-led spaces have consistently engaged with networked relational forms and practices of lists and directories, exploring the body and identity as circumscribed by grids and systems. In racialized and otherwise marginalized communities these modes build internal capacity and enact mutual aid to counter hostility produced by bad actors and structural inequities. The work of aesthetics is not only to shift the mind to new ways of thinking, but also has the power to retrain our dopamine hits to new neural pathways (Sylvia Wynter).
Couverture, Clara Gutsche Portraits d'enfants. Children, 2024, graphisme \| graphic design: Dominique Mousseau.	Clara Gutsche from November 27th 2024 to November 27th 2024 NEW PUBLICATION Launch of the monograph Clara Gutsche. Portraits d’enfants. Children Wednesday, November 27, 2024 6 pm to 8 pm At Le port de tête bookstore 222, avenue du Mont-Royal Est Montréal, QC H2T 1P5 514.678.9566 Publisher OPTICA, centre d'art contemporain Montréal, 2024 Authors Diane Charbonneau Marie-Josée Lafortune Foreword by Zoë Tousignant Softcover printed book 26.6 cm x 20.6 cm 180 pages / color and B&W ill. Text in FR and EN ISBN 978-2-922085-16-7 [$50] Launch price: $45 10% discount This book brings together portraits of children from the series "Siblings and Singles", Clara Gutsche’s most recent body of photographic work, produced over the last fifteen years. In these images, Gutsche explores the themes of childhood and intergenerational relations and continues her reflection on the photographic medium, time, and representation. This abundantly illustrated book illuminates her engagement with the photographed subject through a practice that has spanned five decades since the 1970s, and has left its mark on the imagination and history of Canadian photography. For press copies please contact: Esther Bourdages communications@optica.ca Distribution: OPTICA Review « Les textes abordent, d’une part, le militantisme de l’artiste et, d’autre part, sa pensée photographique. Comme quoi art et engagement politique peuvent aller de pair.» DELGADO, Jérôme. « 5 ouvrages sur les arts visuels qui ont marqué l’année », Le Devoir, 14 décembre 2024.
Alvaro Marinho, GRU-YUL#5, 2024, acrylique sur papier Bond, 45,72 X 60,96 cm. Avec l'aimable permission de l'artiste. \| acrylic on Bond paper, 45,72 X 60,96 cm. Courtesy of the artist.	Alvaro Marinho from January 15th 2025 to November 1st 2025 Alvaro Marinho, Recipient of the Intersections Residency at OPTICA The Conseil des arts de Montréal (CAM), Contemporary art centre OPTICA, and UQAM’s École des arts visuels et médiatiques (ÉAVM) are very pleased to announce that Alvaro Marinho is the recipient of the Research, Creation, and Production Intersections Residency 2025. A Brazilian-born designer, visual artist and video maker, Alvaro Marinho completed his Master's degree at l'École des arts visuels et médiatiques at UQAM in 2023. His interests include the appropriation and diversion of images in printmaking, through the hybridization of silkscreen, stencil painting and stamping techniques.
Thomas Kneubühler, Rezovo, impression chromogène, 2025. Avec l’aimable permission de l’artiste. \| Rezovo, chromogenic print, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.	Thomas Kneubühler from January 17th 2025 to March 29th 2025 The Dividing Line “If we make mistakes with our border controls, it will hurt Bulgaria” reads the sign next to a painted border guard, armed with an AK 47 and a dog, looking off into the distance as the white plaster crumbles around him, revealing a ruddy brick wall beneath. In Thomas Kneubühler’s new exhibition The Dividing Line, this messiness of the Bulgarian borderscape comes into sharp relief. The past and present comingle. Walking through the gallery space, cut apart by a 30 foot long cold steel fence, we see crumbling Soviet walls juxtaposed with modern surveillance technologies. These contradictions between history and memory, innovation and contestation are common across the world’s borders, ever more so as border control is increasingly mechanized and automated. I have spent the last 6 years trying to understand this precise interplay between old and new, resulting in a book called The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence(1). Drones, robo-dogs, and artificial intelligence now bolster the already violent border regimes that separate families, push people into life threatening terrain, and even result in loss of life. Indeed, 2024 was the deadliest year on record for people on the move seeking safety. What will 2025 bring? Writer Harsha Walia reminds us that in this time of great division, “it is very important to hold the states accountable, instead of narratives where migrants are blamed for their own deaths: ‘They knew it was going to be dangerous, why did they move?’”(2). Dangerous routes and growing surveillance dragnets are not a deterrent when the alternative is watching your family starve. Yet in this time of dehumanization and political wrangling, Canada proudly announces that it will be spending $1.3 billion dollars to appease the incoming Trump administration and avoid a threatened 25% tariff(3). How do we find our way past these politics of difference, a way back to one another? Art can help us unearth power hidden structures. What choices are made at the border? Who is allowed in and why? And what logics animate the turn to more and more technology – technology that excludes, hurts, and even kills? One way to fight against dehumanizing narratives is to commit to not being afraid to make our interventions in the world personal. Because indeed, personal connections bind us to our work and to one another– whether it is a Bulgarian partner (like in Kneubühler’s case), a memory from childhood, or even some connection too ephemeral to grasp right now that will hit us like a brick wall when we least expect it. The choices to use a particular word, or to press the shutter at a precise moment to capture an image are always personal - and always political. Socially engaged art! Because as much as our perennially online world would have us believe, we do not exist in isolation. Instead, we reflect and refract what came before within our new techno-realities, a dizzying confluence which can be both dystopic but also transgressive and even hopeful, if we allow it to be. Author: Petra Molnar 1. Petra Molnar, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, (The New Press, 2024) 2. Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket, 2021. 3. Catharine Tunney, Ottawa proposes 24/7 surveillance of Canada-U.S. border, new ‘strike force’ to stave off tariff threat, CBC News, December 17, 2024. PRESS RELEASE (pdf) PRESS REVIEWS Kira Storch, "Unseen barriers, exploring borders and migration through art", The Concordian, February 11th, 2025. Born in Solothurn, Switzerland, Thomas Kneubühler graduated with an MFA from Concordia University, Montreal in 2003. Since then, Kneubühler has pursued a research-based art practice including fieldwork in remote locations and on sites where access is restricted. Addressing questions of power, the exploitation of natural resources, or the effects of new technology on society, his work has been presented widely, among others at the Centre culturel canadien, Paris, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Videonale.15 at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, and at Les Rencontres International in Paris and Berlin. He received the Swiss Art Award in 2012, and was a research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2018. Petra Molnar is a lawyer and anthropologist specializing in border technologies. She co-runs the Refugee Law Lab at York University and is a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She is the author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, which was a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Awards in Nonfiction.
Milutin Gubash, Menta Forte, image tirée de la vidéo, 2024. Avec l’aimable permission de l’artiste.\| image taken from video, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.	Milutin Gubash from January 17th 2025 to March 29th 2025 *Theodysseylysystratagilgameshwaspsbookofthedeadgoldenassgolemmarquiseofo* The artist Milutin Gubash and his practice have always been shaped by a family history marked by uprooting: in the early 1970s, the Gubash family fled the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia for Canada. While Milutin Gubash still seeks to create a link with his homeland, his work also reflects on perceptions of cultural, political and social identity. His multifaceted practice offers a critique of political and economic systems that generate injustice and humiliation, within a comprehensive logic of the ancient and modern world. Theodysseylysystratagilgameshwaspsbookofthedeadgoldenassgolemmarquiseofo exploits the mediums of video and sculpture to evoke the idea of a journey punctuated by struggles, sometimes marked by success and sometimes by failure, in the quest to make sense. From an encounter with Gramsci... In a video work, two migrants of different origins wander through the winding streets of the Eternal City, ending up in Rome's Non-Catholic Cemetery. The first visits the tomb of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci and leaves a mint; the second then goes and eats the candy. Who or what needs “freshening up”? Among Gramsci's better-known theories, cultural hegemony describes the maintenance of power and wealth by the state and the dominant capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – through the imposition of an ideology dictating the social norm. In the same way that mint invades fertile ground, dominant ideology infiltrates the minds of the masses, both having harmful repercussions on diversity. Gramsci's writings are currently being reinvested as the theoretical framework for a reflection on (im)migration, which considers the ways in which migrants can question the hegemonic order and contribute alternative visions for a refreshed society. Alliance and solidarity, theorized by the philosopher in the perspective of the southern question, hold transformative potential in this respect. ...to shame as transformative solidarity A sculptural element made of pots and pipes accompanies the video work. The nature of the objects chosen by the artist in no way evokes the fortunes of the bourgeoisie, who, in addition to controlling the means of coercion, owns the capital and means of production, but rather the condition of the working class it exploits. From time to time, the sculptural element shakes a little, “mints” a chocolate loonie and throws it at a prostrate figure's behind. Why this humiliation? Too often considered solely for its negative effects, humiliation can foster an awareness of behaviors that perpetuate the relations of power and domination underlying capitalism. This awareness can be the tipping point between a false alliance, which reinforces the hegemonic structure, and the development of genuine transformative solidarity, which questions it. While a new space of solidarity may open up, the responsibility for progressive change lies with the most vulnerable, whether (im)migrants or artists. So how to create a rupture? Theodysseylysystratagilgameshwaspsbookofthedeadgoldenassgolemmarquiseofo can at once be the promise of a better future, or, as its title suggests in the form of a juxtaposition of ancient and contemporary stories, the warning of a future reconducting the errors of the past. Author: Jessica Minier PRESS RELEASE (pdf) Canadian. Born in Novi Sad, Serbia. Lives and works in Montréal, Canada. It is impossible identify Milutin Gubash’s work with a specific medium as his highly multidisciplinary practice plays with narrative codes of video, sculpture, photography and performance. Gubash does not hesitate to alter a fact in order to make the underlying reality of his subjects and themes more credible, understandable. The artist exacerbates the issues of memory by deploying a set of family stories that constantly intertwines facts and fiction, past and present, idealization and historical acuity, building over time a real, serious and amazing saga. Having immigrated to Canada as a young child, Gubash has continued to build a relationship with his native country, expanding stories of his family’s life in Yugoslavia, with intensive research, and his own imaginings to fill in the gaps. With humour and intelligence, the artist addresses ideas of authenticity and perceptions of cultural, political and social identities. He highlights the contradictions of our capacity to construct a sense of identity whether it is through his large scale black and white photographs of Monuments to Communists, his “lamps-sculptures” created in collaboration with his family still in Serbia, or through the episodes of the DIY sitcom soap-opera reality show Born Rich Getting Poorer, which predicted by a couple of years our current culture of continuously updated autobiographical constructions. Laureate of the Prix Louis-Comtois for the City of Montreal in 2019, and recipient of numerous grants, awards, and international residencies, Milutin Gubash’s work has been widely exhibited throughout Canada, United States and Europe since 2000. A Canada-wide series of unique exhibitions in six prominent institutions was held between 2011-2013, surveying various aspects of the first ten years of practice. Jessica Minier is coordinator of the Galerie UQO and a lecturer in museology at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. She is also pursuing her doctoral studies, which focus on collaborative collecting practices in art museums that challenge proprietary logic.
Milutin Gubash, Menta Forte, image tirée de la vidéo, 2024. Avec l’aimable permission de l’artiste. \| image taken from video, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Crédit photo : Paul Litherland	Milutin Gubash, Thomas Kneubühler from February 8th 2025 to February 8th 2025 Guided tours of the current exhibitions with Milutin Gubash and Thomas Kneubühler Saturday February 8, 3 - 5 pm OPTICA organizes guided tours of the current exhibitions with the artists in order to explore aspects of the programming in greater depth. This convivial context encourages exchange and discussion with the artists. Saturday February 8, 3 - 5 pm Meet the artist & Guided Tour Schedule 3 pm: Visit the exhibitions & Meet the artist 3:30 pm: Tour through the two exhibition with Milutin Gubash & Thomas Kneubühler 4:30 pm: Apéro with bulgarian and italian treats
	from March 1st 2025 to March 1st 2025 Nuit Blanche à Montréal 2025 7PM - 11PM Objects Transformed: Making Lamps with Milutin Gubash Workshops at OPTICA FULLY BOOKED ! On the occasion of the Nuit Blanche 2025, OPTICA is delight to to open its doors to the general public and to offer a night of artistic and creative discovery in a warm, relaxed setting. With family, friends, or on your own, come meet Milutin Gubash and get to know his practice in the framework of a lamp-making workshop. Please note that the three workshops are fully booked. However, we invite you to visit our current exhibitions: Thomas Kneubühler, The Dividing Line et Milutin Gubash,Theodysseylysystratagilgameshwaspsbookofthedeadgoldenassgolemmarquiseofo To keep in touch with the center's mediation activities, follow the educational program on Instagram. Consult the 2024-2025 ANNUAL PROGRAM IN PDF FORMAT 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.
	Leisure (Meredith Carruthers et Susannah Wesley) from April 12th 2025 to June 14th 2025 Chrysalis and Butterfly Leisure is a collaborative art practice founded in 2004 between Montreal-based artists Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley (1976). Their research-based practice explores subjects such as feminist cultural history, working in friendship, and children's right to creativity—particularly as an antidote to climate anxiety.