Marie-Christine Dubé and John Boyle-Singfield, curators of the exhibition Harder, Better, Faster at Galerie Trois Points, set out to create a myth which “reinforces the empowerment of womenâ€s identities,” an ambitious aim that it achieved very well. As I made my way through the exhibition I wondered if this show did what it set out to do, or whether it simply, but fascinatingly, reflected the status quo. The first impression on entering the gallery was one of paradox; the sleek polish contrasting with the gritty and the rough. We are inducted into a realm of “projected images” which explore the representation of the self and the other through a primarily feminist lens, delving into the complex issues of gender and cultural identity.

The first encounter is with a video installation of young Montreal new media artist, Mégane Voghell, a piece called How to Remove a Lady from its Flesh. The video is projected on a board surrounded by a yellow rectangle which appears to be spray painted on the wall. Jutting out from the video presentation is a simple table decorated with various photos of other simple tables of its kind, some with happy and sad faces made up of crustaceans. The video is a non-linear collage of influences and impressions, itself seeming to question the oppressive implications of female self-representation in our society; images which range from a girl plastering on concealer, her image viewed only through a tablet computer to another woman draining a huge blister, a picture-within-a-picture surrounded by blurred faces and forms. Virtual reality collides with the camouflaged dimensions that we create for ourselves and are inundated with continuously. A womanâ€s world is a flood of images, expectations and ideals we are supposed to live up to. A nude pregnant woman sits in a bathtub outside while a toddler runs around, and she separates from a drawn image of herself, which seems to be a Photoshop filter. Digitally-created red hair forms a towering figure with a pornstarâ€s body. Similar to a computer game visitors can select from faces without hair and hair without faces, which can be selected and chosen at will to represent the self. Meanwhile words like “short memories and unsharp masks” flash on the screen. A yellow square follows a raw young womanâ€s practised smiles which belie the anxiety in her eyes: “Shy and daring at the same time.” This fragmented, repellant yet fascinating piece successfully subverts narrative expectations and usual space, bringing you into an alternate reality. It is quite a mature presentation especially for one of Voghellâ€s age, and it will be very interesting to see what she produces in the future.

Next are Stéphanie De Couto Costaâ€s three lovely stone lithographs, each showing a woman in a state of transformation, suspended in a void of white. De Couto Costa is a second generation immigrant artist who uses feelings of cultural dissonance to retell and thwart fairy tales in works on paper inspired by feminist writing and poetry. She says her series The Bitch and the Blond is “inspired by vanity portraits and the works of women storytellers.” Notions of transformation and duality wrestle with sensually-charged portraits, women caught in a morphological state, half-this and half-that. Road Kill shows a woman crawling seductively on all fours, howling from her wolf-head, her body bearing a shroud like a skin. Mimesis shows a raven-woman, head on backwards, back facing us. Which side is front? From which side of ourselves do we express and perceive? A long veil or train of feather-cloth trails down her front. Clothing, to De Couto Costa, seems to act not only as a decorative, protective layer but a psychologically protective one as well and a signifier of identity in transformation. Motherâ€s Ghosts is not an anthropomorphic transformation, rather it seems as if a tribal costume is in a state of becoming, or is perhaps overtaking the woman. Roots creep in, the figure is headless as she disintegrate into petals or into the earth, a state of disappearance. Feathers, braids and textures cluster in chaotic but elegant profusion and make me think of the disconnect many of us feel from our heritage, and particularly of the pain that must be felt by indigenous peoples. De Couto Costa works in multiples in her process-oriented printmaking practise, and seems to meditate upon ideas of replication—of story, identity and of people themselves, continuously birthed and passing on knowledge and problems.

Olga Chagaoutdinova, native to Russia, but educated in Montreal at Concordia, is a talented conceptual photographer who captures lives in countries caught in the awkward in-between state between communism and capitalism, Russia and Cuba specifically. This series of photographs of female prison inmates are intimate portraits taken after long discussions with each inmate. At first glance, it isnâ€t apparent that they are prisoners, as they are allowed to wear normal clothes, and their prison badges arenâ€t glaringly obvious; they simply look worn out by life, possibly former drug users. Knowing that the photographs were taken after what must have been an emotional interview adds poignancy and humanity to the grid-like portraits, which in their intimacy, also reveal the walls and defenses in their visage.

Montreal artist Dominique Sirois†installation, Mimesis Trinyty, a conceptual space set in a fictional world of finance, is a video on a screen of a digital woman with a certain likeness to Uma Thurman from Pulp Fiction, reciting a computer generated text which combines the writings of André Orléan and Flaubertâ€s Madame Bovary. Round, dark pillows scatter the floor and there is a leaking of boundaries of sound and matter around the gallery as oddly-shaped sculptures are scattered sparingly from room to room and the bland computer voice echoes soft words in French. Nub-shaped polystyrene sculptures with the appearance of concrete are piled on top of each other, forming lines of replication with a few tiny indeterminate objects resting on them. A small workout weight rests on an amorphous sculpture. The wall behind the video is papered with black and white simplified womenâ€s faces, another nod to replication and feminine identity. Sirois frequently works with ideas of finance, and this installation is no exception. This financial world opens with a desk, the seat of power of a company perhaps, and the text speaks of muscular training. Merged with Madame Bovary, one cannot help but think of the role of women as property throughout the ages, their lives of increasing free agency and their current role in the financial world. We gain more power and “muscle”, but what have we got ourselves into? A complex world where we must flex our power even more dramatically to keep up. Harder, better and faster. The interpretation is left open and curious, which is part of what makes the piece a success.  The virtual reality/alternate reality presented here is a reflection of our own world, another quantum possibility. There is a sense of being trapped, as Bovary was, by her finances and need to spend to fill a void.

Olivia McGilchrist is a photographer and video artist of Franco-Jamaican origin, whose work has largely dealt with post-colonial white identity in a predominantly black culture, and her sense of marginalization. She often takes this challenging subject for her lovely portraits, and her street nickname “Whitey” has formed what has become a recurrent character in her work, the artist appearing in a white mask. McGilchrist considers whiteness to be a mental construct as much as a physical one. This immersive video installation, From Many Sides, is a departure from that theme, a side step, and it seems the artist has dealt with her issues of being an outsider for now, here merging myth very successfully in a beautiful piece. We encounter the River Mumma, or river mother/mermaid figure, a black woman swimming in the ocean, wearing a white mask—but she isnâ€t Whitey. The white-masked black figure also occurs in the Jamaican folk dance, Jankunu, so McGilchrist is exploring not only her personal identity but a cultural and mythical one as well. In this installation, lucid colours and multiple tracks blend from one to the other, with a soft, dreamy soundtrack of birds, whispers and lapping waves. We feel connection rather than dislocation. We see girls walking down an overgrown road, a family gathering at a grotto, a girl in white shorts gathering water with crockery in a river. We feel the thick haze of colour and lush emotional states. Crashing waves, pure beauty, a magical invocation on a primordial, sleepy island. It is an overwhelmingly lovely mosaic of overlaying ripples, forms and reflections. The pervasive sense of place gives you a feeling of the power of nature upon the culture. McGilchrist deals with collective and intimate memory and as well as identity in a postcolonial landscape very effectively here.

The finely curated works in Harder, Better, Faster serve to question and illuminate the often dark and oppressive spheres of influence, self-censorship and self-representation—mirrored in those processes by the other or the powers that be— as well as the passing on of ideas, of mimesis, of cultural connection and disconnection.

Approaching SBC Galerie dâ€art Contemporain, words of love in French echoed softly through the halls. Upon entering the gallery, I was struck first by a video of a person kissing a wall with intent tenderness in closeup.  A large projection the dim city streets of Paris, clearly older footage, filled the back wall. Then I noticed to my right, images of a war-torn country in the Middle East. Initially, this juxtaposition was discordant, confusing. Yet this first impression also set the stage for the proposition of the exhibition. Sitting down to listen and watch brought me deeper into the experience and revealed a sensitively curated exhibition layer by layer.

Does the Oyster Sleep? raises questions of the relationship between love and activism, intimacy and community, self and other, and the complex ways in which we engage in the world. The evocatively titled exhibition takes its cue from a passage in Clarice Lispectorâ€s Àgua Viga, with a lemon-juice dripped oyster representing “anxiety and transcendence”. Lispector says “I donâ€t like when they drip lemon upon my depths and make me contort all over. Are the facts of life like the oyster? Does the oyster sleep?” The implication thus seems to be that the “facts of life” such as the state of the world, politics and the difficulties of interpersonal relationships are the juice dripped on us which causes us to wake, contort, and tear ourselves free, and then experience union with the other, part of the cycle of life.

The first video in this exhibition was From Beirut with Love (2005) by Waël Noureddine of Lebanon.  We are confronted by images of Beirut suffering the consequences of civil war, soldiers with guns on the street and vigilantly watching the populace from buildings riddled with holes from mortar shells. We hear a constant buzzing and see the blank and exhausted faces of the populace, shown silent and in intimate groupings, facing the camera. We encounter militia with concealed handguns and their families. Young men squeeze fresh lemon juice into spoons filled with heroin, then shoot up. The lemon echoes the subject of the exhibition. Is heroin that which wakes these men, or what puts them back to sleep, to journey to a world less painful and dangerous?

We encounter another silent film in Un Chant dâ€amour (2004) by Silvia Gruner of Mexico. The title and action take their theme from Jean Genetâ€s groundbreaking bold film—the only one he ever produced—which deals with frustrated homoerotic desire as well as surveillance and interference by authority, and also the erotic domination by said power. Grunerâ€s piece focuses on the seminal scene of Genetâ€s film, where one prisoner passes smoke through a wall to the object of his desire with help of a straw. The Genet scene is intensely erotic and full of powerful longing and passion. Grunerâ€s piece is more tender and subtle, yet also deals with issues of gender, as the roles flip among three partners, two men and a woman, in this film, gender is hard to identify and seem to be irrelevant. Tender, ardent kisses are pressed to the wall, and mouths approach the straw, accepting hot, white smoke. It is a worthy homage to Genetâ€s powerful piece.

Sophie Bissonnetteâ€s documentary work, A Wives†Tale (1980) is what one encounters next on this journey, a film which recognizes the role of the wives of miners in an historic strike in Sudbury, Ontario in 1978-1979. They organized and raised money while their husbands were on strike, thus acting as the backbone of the effort, enabling them to support their families and gain their demands. Labour of love.

The short film by Marguerite Duras, Les Mains negatives (1979) was a treat. I admired her writing when I encountered it for the first time in university and was pleased to find it again here. The blueish street scenes brought to mind being alone in a taxi, gently, then fiercely longing, feeling a stranger in a city teeming with people about to wake. The words resounded and repeated with great tenderness that transcended the personal and extended to all who would listen.  The title of the poem, and the film, Les Mains negative, originates from the prints of hands painted on cave walls many thousands of years ago. Hearing Duras†speak her poem in French was something special and the rhythm and subtlety of her words in French cannot be duplicated in translation.

“Je suis celui qui appelle
Je suis celui qui appelait qui criait il y a trente
mille ans

Je tâ€aime

Je crie que je veux tâ€aimer, je tâ€aime

Jâ€aimerai quiconque entendra que je crie”

The feeling is transformed from lonely longing for personal love, the stranger in a strange land, to an intimate yet “indefinite” love for all of humanity, which embraces the lover as well, who becomes pure love.

The next piece, proceeding counter-clockwise around the gallery, was the award-winning The Future My Love (2012), the first feature film by the fast-rising artist and filmmaker Maja Borg of Sweden. The film was a mixture of aesthetically interesting scenes of Borg musing on the difficulties of a romantic relationship alternating with documentary style interviews and scenes with now 100 year-old Jacques Fresco, explaining his Venus Project, an incredibly ambitious and poignantly concerned enterprise in which he built model ideal structures on 22 acres for a burgeoning populace which he saw coming to a scarcity crisis. The public blends smoothly with the private with Borgâ€s voice-overs as her train of thought is influenced by Frescoâ€s ideas and her travels. Issues of freedom and responsibility come up in both streams. The idea of doing away with money by doing away with scarcity with the help of machines kept arising both with Fresco and a group he was associated with for a time, Technocracy.

Borg began her journey to understand the politics of her estranged lover, who appears as a statuesque and idealistic woman in black, a shadow in her hijab, which she erotically removes, taking her hair down when she comes into a private space. Borg says: “You demand nothing and all is yours.” Then: “Look at the wars. If we could do so much damage, we could do so much good. And I thought to myself, if you could bestow me such pain imagine what pleasures you could cause me.”

Interestingly, Fresco does not object to machines or computers, on the contrary, he believes we need more of them, as well as more education in order to reach our full potential. Fresco: “Many people donâ€t entertain dreams because they only earn minimum wage. They canâ€t afford dreams.”

Of the Borg scenes, the most memorable to me was Borg in a wedding dress contrasting sharply with her black-clad lover, both women veiled, in a loverâ€s embrace. We have a love affair with capitalism, a bad relationship we just canâ€t quit, an addiction, a folie à deux, is the implication as we cut back and forth to Borgâ€s musings. “These institutions also exist inside me” we hear the artist say, and this film, a sort of waking dream, ends as Borg moves forward with her life, divorcing her lover in her mind, while Fresco closes his Venus Project headquarters due to lack of funds.

Passing into a nook of the gallery towards the last film, I encountered the muted colours and smooth lines of an anonymous coastal town, viewed through the eyes of Sara Eliassen in A Blank Slate (2014), which has been played extensively at film festivals around the world. The artist also seems to be a stranger in a new town, nearly deserted, or returning to her hometown perhaps. She watches the life that goes on there but barely interacts. She voyeuristically puts herself into the conversations of others; when a man approaches a girl in a café, she answers for the girl in her head, and then two well-dressed and furred older women critique her performance on video as she looks on with them in a postmodern twist. She arranges and rearranges her things in a sparsely furnished hotel room, looking at a carnival across the street. Later she enters the quiet place of diversion, and as she is raised to the top of the ride, it pauses and she watches a man in her hotel room, then sees herself, roughly taken by the stranger. Fantasies of intimacy and the longing for contact and connection resonate through this work, in an engagingly experimental, haunting style.

The aim of this exhibition was to present the role of Eros in politics today, politics being broad in scope from world affairs to personal, me vs. you, self vs. other, at two poles. Eros is what brings together what is perceived to be opposite, finding the points where they meet, and discovering the symbiotic relationship inherent.

As the camera pans over rows of airplanes, zooming in and out on nondescript white wing after white wing, over dusty patches of grass and empty patches of sky, the monotonous quickly shifts to unsettling. That is exactly how Nelly-Ève Rajotte curated her video installation, Claustrophobia of Open Spaces, to be.

“Otherwise peaceful places are seen as becoming somehow twisted, with anxious minds interpreting them as being surprisingly hostile,” reads the CIRCA exhibition’s accompanying text. A low-frequency buzz permeates the gallery. It appears to be part of the first video, connoting the wind tunnel in the small space between the jet bridge and the airplane, or the invisible roar that emanates as the plane ascends. Walking into the next room is troubling because the sound remains, while the image is replaced by scenes of sublime nature.

Water hits the rocks in slow motion and waterfall footage is played in rewind. Rajotte plays with nature enough so that it is recognizable but not enough to still make sense. The crashing water is sloth-like and powerless, and the waterfall is now receding into itself.

Unease and anxiety is heightened by investigation of the gallery space itself. The meta element is an effort to force out a consciousness in the viewer of the distance between themselves and the subject, and the distance between what is represented and how this representation is sought. Here in the Belgo Building, we are far from the scenes on the screen; an edited video of nature is far from nature.

The ambiguity of the sound and image centralize individual reaction and experience, and the space becomes a fluid sculpture that sees a range of reactions, a diversity perhaps not always produced by the traditional still image.

Christina Battleâ€s piece, Skolâ€s feature for ‘La Mois de le Photoâ€, “The people in this picture are standing still on all that remained of a handsome residence” uses glitching and datamoshing to transform videos of a tornado in Edmonton into colorful abstractions. Since the images occur on several screens simultaneously, the viewer feels placed within the disaster scene but in a warped, almost dreamlike way. In her interview for ‘Mois de la Photoâ€, Battle, a Canadian who lives in works in the United States, mentions that only 5% of Americans have actually witnessed a natural disaster whereas the internet and the proliferation of ‘disaster porn†creates the illusion that we know what one looks like.

When Battle manipulates these images of a disaster, they immediately register to the viewer as intentionally abstracted, altered or somehow ‘wrong†in their depiction of a disaster. However, it is this very sensation that Battle is trying to invoke in order to cause the viewer to question his or her knowledge of what a natural disaster is ‘supposed†to look like.

Thus, Battleâ€s work speaks to the post-photographic condition in that it questions photography as a memetic mode of representation. Since the photograph is often considered an objective and therefore somehow more ‘accurate†depiction of reality, Battleâ€s deliberate manipulation of this convention is simultaneously unsettling and fascinating.

The title of the work also speaks to the installation itself in addition to the subject it is depicting. The viewers are standing in the midst of the proverbial wreckage, among the remains of something of unknown. Since photographic media and technology have been used to capture and disseminate these images, it is both ironic and yet appropriate that these same technologies can be used to warp these images and, in turn, our perception of what they seek to represent.

Battleâ€s work presents us with more than a simple questioning of ‘disaster porn†in terms of why we are fascinated by it, but what it actually is in the first place. Her work is calling us to question the reality of these images of disasters by presenting us with a visual version of a disaster narrative that has so clearly been deliberately tampered with. Furthermore, in this way, she gives us a sense of the artistâ€s hand, a human touch in medium that can sometimes feel almost clinical in its disembodied depersonalization.

A wall of flickering images depicts the many details of multimedia artist Paul Wongâ€s daily life. Each image is visible for no more than half a second. The viewer is struck by the overwhelming quantity of content, and by the obsessive collecting that allowed its creation. Some of the GIFs include: geometric abstractions, a blooming rose, an iPhone message asking for confirmation to delete a photo, and a naked backside seen under a Pop Art filter. The personal mixes with the public, the figurative with the abstract, and the amateur with the professional. The images burn with the intensity of the everyday.

Capturing and exploring identity through digital imagery has always been an integral part of Wongâ€s practice. As one of Canadaâ€s most respected, and prolific, artists he investigates what it is to be oneself in a society where itâ€s easy to be engulfed by overwhelming external influences and perspectives. Throughout his 40-year career, Wong has seen different technologies come and go. For many years, he carried two heavy cameras everywhere he went – one for video, and one for still photographs. Nowadays, his kit is much lighter. At a talk to open his exhibit Multi-Verse at Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal (MPM), he explained how smart phones have revolutionized his practice, saying, “Since I got the iPhone 6, itâ€s all I carry.”

This new media aspect of Wongâ€s works allows it to speak to what MPM curator, Joan Fontcuberta, identifies as the establishment of a “new visual order”. As one of the biennialâ€s key conceptual frameworks, this idea incorporates the notion that societyâ€s relationship with the image is fundamentally changing. Nowadays, images are: largely digital, readily available, and easily transmissible. Their now ubiquitous nature means individuals communicate via images on a day-to-day basis. Wong presents four pieces as part of the exhibit. Each work offers us a glimpse into the artistâ€s world, and most are an expression of his identity as seen through his social media. One piece is an outdoor video installation, and the remaining three are presented at Galerie Joyce Yahouda.

In #LLL, Looking, Listening, Looping (2014), Wong covers a wall of the gallery with 40 tablets – each screen plays GIF animations on a continuous loop. Like much of his recent work, it was created and edited entirely on a smart phone. Each of the GIFs and videos were initially shared with his social media community through free apps like Vine, Snapchat, Instagram, and GIF Boom. He said that at the time he didnâ€t give much thought as to what he may do with the images, and certainly didnâ€t plan to present them in a gallery one day. Their sole context was to be shared with his community of followers, online. The GIF and video content is varied, and ranges from selfies to more abstract imagery. In total, Wong presents 75 minutes of work, the equivalent of a feature length film; he said he considers each GIF as a scene from his life.

Standing in front of the installation, itâ€s difficult to focus on any one tablet. However, to see each image within a GIF, it needs to be watched through at least a few repetitions. There is a sensation of distracted attentiveness that feels similar to being overwhelmed by online images, or scrolling through a Facebook feed. The feeling of being inundated by multiple photos, by the sheer quantity of content, is an integral part of Wongâ€s work. It raises the question: what is the point of all these images if itâ€s not possible to interact meaningfully with them?

Wongâ€s outdoor video installation, Year of GIF (2013), was created from the content he generated during his first year of GIF-making. Originally constructed as a site-specific piece for the Surrey Urban Screen, it was adapted for projection onto the brick wall outside Montrealâ€s Saint Laurent metro station. The work is a five-minute loop of 350 GIFs, all made on a smart phone. The content ranges from selfies, photographs featuring technology, individual portrait studies, art references, artworks, travel images, and architecture.

At his exhibit launch, Wong described how there is an interesting, yet tragic, link between his fascination with GIFs and his family life. Wongâ€s mother, who currently lives with him, suffers from dementia. In describing the situation, he said she lives in a “magical, abstract world” of non-linear time. Adding that her memory can play in constant loops, replaying certain events, while completely losing others. The poignant link between the nature of GIFs and his motherâ€s memory is not lost on the artist himself.

Wongâ€s third work, Solstice (2014), is a 24-minute video, which captures an infamous Vancouver street at intervals over a 24-hour period. Made using the pixel motion filter tool in After Effects, it evokes surveillance imagery, and shows the comings and goings of an area known as “Crack Alley” – a popular place for drug consumption and trafficking. The pixel motion filter makes it seem as though figures are continuously appearing out of, and then disappearing into, thin air. They materialize as if conjured by some external force.

Finally, Wong also presents Flash Memory (2010-2015), a four-channel video showing the iPhone photos he took over a four-year time period. Each channel is divided by year: 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. The channels scroll through each image at a rapid pace like when uploading photos from a cell phone onto a laptop. Wong said he came across the idea by accident when he was watching an upload onto his own computer. He added that he finds the way we look at images now, the way we scroll through them rather than closely examining each file, is very different from in the past. All images – good, bad, different, useful and not useful – are merged together chronologically, and awarded equal value in terms of the space they occupy in our mental memories, and in our digital memory systems. This complete blurring of amateur, professional, personal and public, is something Wong wants to convey with the work. The excessive accumulation of images is also a key idea explored by other artists involved in the biennial.

Wong is based in Vancouver, and works as a practicing artist, and curator. He is also the co-founder of several artist run organizations, and the director of On Main Gallery, which has been operating since 1985. His work is included in public exhibits at the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and the Canada Council Art Bank. His current exhibit, Multi-Verse, will be on display until October 10, 2015, at Galerie Joyce Yahouda.

What role are we playing in these exchanges? Why do many encounters remain static, identical, leaving no space for thought or connection? Days can play out like a formula repeatedly entered into a spreadsheet – CTRL+C, CTRL+V, CTRL+C, CTRL+V.

Les Territories, is currently presenting the work of two emerging artists, Maria Meinild and Émilie Franceschin, who both explore life and societal norms as purely a performance. By examining the daily behavioral patterns that are embedded in our notion of normalcy, the artists allow the questioning of these ideas.

Maria Meinildâ€s video, Curtain, explores life as a staged presentation of our expectations and preconceived ideas of what life is, and what it should be. Incorporating elements from both theatre and film, and expressed as a dialogue with slight variations and repetitions, she forces the viewer to question the theatrics of daily life, and how necessary the performance is to maintain oneâ€s identity.

Mariaâ€s short video features two main characters, at times reading from a script and at times speaking naturally. The female character repeats the phrase, “It takes solid preparation to provide spontaneity,” at different speeds and intonations – like sheâ€s practising a line. Someone is introduced into the video as a “stranger” in the same way characters can be announced in theatre. The woman repeatedly corrects herself like sheâ€s made a mistake on a line and is restarting the scene. Artificial visual creations scatter the set; there are oranges, skewered with cocktail umbrellas and arranged on a table. At Les Territories the video is projected onto a round surface that feels almost like youâ€re looking through a telescope or a pair of binoculars.

Émilie Franceschinâ€s series, Secrets, is presented in an adjacent room to Mariaâ€s work, and is more tactile and tangible in its exhibition. It includes an assortment of objects, images and a video, which all culminated in a performance on Saturday June 20. The act called, Iâ€ll Be Back Soon, saw the artist invite attendees to step into her journeys to understand her repeated struggles, real and imagined.

The objects created in advance of the performance are on display at Les Territoires for the duration of the exhibition. Her photographs, drawings and artifacts interact to reveal the work behind her performance, during the conception and before the execution. These objects offered audience members a new way of approaching the performance, which ultimately must be experienced. Viewers entered the act having seen these tangible materials and with a deeper understanding of the history and motivations that have driven the artistâ€s work. Émilie explores the body, its visceral quality, and intimate relationships with its surroundings. The performance, like a secret, is something that canâ€t be spoken – it must be experienced for it to become real and tangible.

The interactions between these two artists in the Les Territoires space is a fascinating one in that both approach this idea of life as performance in particularly unique, and moving, ways. Émilieâ€s idea draws its power from her very personal selection of artifacts, and her moving live performance. Mariaâ€s approach is impactful by forcing a sense of detachment and unreality between the characters in her video. Additionally, her piece is scripted and produced in a way that presents many layers for audience interpretation.

Both exhibits are on display at Les Territoires in the Belgo Building until July 4, 2015.

Maria Meinild

Maria completed an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen; she has also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Working primarily in video, but also extending to photo, collage, and installation, she has exhibited at New Jörg and Kunstverein Das Weisse Haus in Vienna, at Fauna in Copenhagen, and at ReMap4 in Athens. She was born in Karlshamn, Sweden, and lives and works between Copenhagen and Vienna.

Émilie Franceschin

Émilie is a graduate of the Toulouse School of Fine Arts, and has presented at performance festivals in France, Italy, England, Belgium and Germany. She has also participated in residencies at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, and in Dusseldorf. Recently she participated in the European Museums Night at the Calbet Museum in France. She lives and works in Toulouse.

CURTAIN
Maria Meinild

In Maria Meinildâ€s practice the staging of life, behavioral patterns and the scripts that seem imbedded in our notion of normality are combined with a strong interest in theatre and film methodologies. Through a continous loop of repetitions and variations, Curtain investigates the constant restaging and confirming of certain gestures we perform to maintain a notion of who we are. A broad fabric of film and theatre reference form a unique tapestry as the work enters a dialogue with its own conditions and simltaneously explores which relations are produced in and outside this controlled framework.

Les Territoires is proud to announce two special exhibitions of emerging artists. The Swedish artist Maria Meinild will present a video installation in conjunction with the Celeste Prize, an international contemporary art prize awarded by Celeste, a networking platform for arts professionals. In addition, the French artist Émilie Franceschin will offer a view into the mechanics of her performance work by exhibiting a selection of photographs, drawings and artifacts, followed by a performance.

SECRETS
Émilie Franceschin

John Player
Nouveaux tableaux

Michel Huneault
10 Minutes à Tohoku

Pierre-Francois Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by John Player in parallel with a projection of 10 Minutes at Tohoku, a documentary video by photographer Michel Huneault.

John Player’s work presents a restrained and detached view of surveillance culture. Endless defense from an unknown but constant threat is unveiled in appropriated images from mass media, newspapers and archives found largely on the Internet. The imagery shares a kind of aesthetic of power and control, now commonplace and even expected, as well as a paradoxical inertia. Dominant culture’s obsession with speed and control is confronted with the slow read of painting; the banality and distraction of technology challenged by painterly care.

Michel Huneault’s 10 minutes at Tohoku is the video component of Post Tohoku, a transmedia art documentary project, bringing us to Japan one year after the 2011 tsunami hit the region. On March of that year, the Tohoku coast of Japan was devastated by a triple catastrophe: earthquake, tsunami, nuclear incident. 15 880 deaths, 2694 missing, 128 931 buildings destroyed. Michel Huneault travelled to Tohoku a year after the event with these questions in mind: How to represent the long term physical and psychological impacts of such a catastrophe, the trauma, the void? How to make sense of it while avoiding disaster porn? How to live near or in this scarred landscape for the years to come? Will Tohoku rebuild, physically and in our minds? 10 minutes at Tohoku is the resulting meditative video, shot along 250 km of the affected coast, from Fukushima to Kesennuma.

(Text: Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain)

More info: www.pfoac.com

May 16, 2015
Curated by Mirna Boyadjian
in collaboration with ELEKTRA 16: POST-AUDIO, and the 1st edition of the International Sound Art Biennial.

Journée Paroles et Manoeuvres

In the spirit of exchange and reflection, Skol invites the public to participate in Journées Paroles et Manœuvres. A cross-disciplinary meeting of interventions, conferences, performances and discussions, this event aims to inverse roles, to encourage collaboration between different types of expertise and to support hybrid forms of communication. Journées Paroles et Manœuvres is an opportunity to take time, together, through various forms and ideas.

Program: Sound Art, War and the Arab World

– 2pm: Sound piece by Mazen Kerbaj, Starry Night, 2006.

A 40-minute improvisation recorded by Mazen Kerbaj in Beirut on the night of 16th/17th July 2006, in which Kerbajâ€s trumpet ‘duets†with the sound of Israeli bombs.

(The piece is presented in the gallery with earphones).

 - 2:30pm: Performance by Mirna Boyadjian and Raïa Haïdar, Une nuit, 2015. 

A visual and sound performance that speaks of war through the narration, both recorded and live, of the experience of a night during the Libanese civil war.

- 3pm: Conferences and discussions

Samir Saul – The Arab World in Turmoil: Points of Reference
Monia Abdallah – The War Regime in the Silence of Peace. Reflections on a Selection of Contemporary Artworks.
Serge Cardinal – Stereophony of the Syrian Conflict

 - 5pm: Short films by Abounaddara collective.

Emergency cinema that gives a voice to Syrian citizens.

- 5:30: Live music by “Jerusalem In My Heart”.

An experimental approach to Arabic music.

With: George Barber, Catherine Elwes, Nicky Hamlyn, Barbara Hammer, Simon Hartog, Ian Helliwell, Kurt Kren, Rosalind Nashashibi / Lucy Skaer, Grace Ndiritu, Jayne Parker, Laure Prouvost, James Richards, Chris Saunders, John Smith, Stephen Sutcliffe, Peter Todd, Vision Machine Film Project, Cerith Wyn Evans

SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, in association with LUX, presents The Short Form, a selection of short films drawn from the LUX archive compiled by the artists Sarah Pierce and Gerard Byrne.

The Short Form
Using simple search criteria of LUXâ€s film and video archive, the Dublin-based artists Sarah Pierce and Gerard Byrne chose an elemental, structural way of sifting through the inventory and of selecting films rather than sorting according to key words or themes, era, artists or genre.

The resultant program, The Short Form, presented at SBC, escapes the curatorial ‘thesis†approach that typically bonds artworks, in order to think of the works as singular, detached, and irreconcilable. More

Sarah Pierce & Gerard Byrne in conversation
May 23, 2015, 3pm

(text: SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art)
More info: www.sbcgallery.ca