montréal 2023
exhibition + symposium
FABIANO KUEVA
Ecuador. Founder and curator of Archivo Alexander von Humboldt. Member of the collectives Películas La Divina (1992-1997), Centro Experimental Oído Salvaje (1996-2016) and Laboratorio Solanda (2016-). Projects in museums, public spaces and community contexts. Several albums, books and articles published. Radiodrama Award at the 3rd Latin American Radio Biennial (Mexico, 2000); Paris Award at the 9th Cuenca International Biennial (Ecuador, 2007); New Mariano Aguilera Award (Ecuador, 2015); Best International Feature Film Chiloé International Film Festival (Chile 2021); Acquisition Award 15th Cuenca International Biennial (Ecuador, 2021). Participant in the 10th Havana Biennial (Cuba, 2009), 2nd Montevideo Biennial (Uruguay, 2014) and 56th Venice Biennial (Italy, 2015). Artistic residencies at Apexart (New York), Villa Waldberta (Munich) and Lugar a Dudas (Cali); Prince Claus Fund Grant in 2010. Lives and works in Ecuador.
EMMANUELLE CHOQUETTE
Canada. Author, researcher and independent curator. She studied Art History and Visual and Media Arts at UQAM (Montreal). Her research focuses on the articulation of political, institutional, social and performative spaces within practices that critically examine exhibition formats and the preservation of tangible and intangible heritage. She is interested in the appropriation of archives that propose to rewrite hegemonic historical discourses. She has published in the magazines Espace art actuel, Vie des arts, le Sabord, Ciel Variable and esse art + opinions. She was co-editor of the publication Une bibliographie commentée en temps réel : l'art de la performance au Québec et au Canada (Artexte, 2019). Her curatorial projects have been presented at the Maison des arts Desjardins in Drummondville and at Artexte (Canada). Research residencies at Est-Nord-Est (St-Jean-Port-Joli, Canada) and at Laboratorio Arte Alameda (CDMX) in collaboration with OBORO. From 2013 to 2021, she was executive director of Arprim, where she coordinated an important exchange between Mexican and Canadian artists that resulted in exhibitions in both countries. Curator of the exhibition Alexandre de Humboldt Archive Montreal at OBORO (2023) and co-director of the Humboldt Effect Montreal (2023).
OBORO
Canada. Founded with the conviction that living transcultural artistic experiences contribute to the betterment of humankind, OBORO* is an artist-run centre that favors the development of art practices locally, nationally, and internationally. OBORO’s sphere of activity encompasses visual and media arts, performing arts, new technologies, and emerging practices.
OBORO’s more specific mandate is to support creation in various cultural practices; to encourage innovation, experimentation, the exchange of ideas, and the sharing of knowledge. OBORO’s objective is to promote awareness and dialogue within the art world and society at large and to contribute to a culture of peace.
SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art
Canada. Is a non-profit exhibition centre and public gallery in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyaang/Montréal, dedicated to providing a forum for artists, curators and cultural practitioners for projects that critically engage diverse publics with current issues in art, culture and society.
Our collaborative approach to cultural production runs through SBC’s distinct programme of exhibitions, events, research, public outreach activities and publications. We embrace different ways of making - making objects, making relations, making politics, making publics - to build relationships between practitioners, publics and institutions in order to foster a diverse and complex community.
TAMAR TEMBECK
Canada. She is an art historian with a professional background as a performing artist and exhibition curator. Before joining OBORO in 2018 (after many years of involvement with the organisation), Tamar held an academic appointment within an interdisciplinary university research hub in media studies. Tamar notably coedited the publications The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age (U. of Minnesota Press) and Conflict[ed] Reporting (Photography & Culture). With a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), she also led a research project on public art in hospitals. Tamar continues to be involved in both research and research-creation projects at the intersection of art and medicine, with collaborators stemming from diverse artistic and scientific disciplines. At OBORO, she has held the positions of General and Artistic Director (from 2018 to 2020) and Artistic Director (since 2020).
NURIA CARTON DE GRAMMONT
Mexico - Canada. PhD in art history (Concordia, 2012). Her research focuses on diasporic identities, participatory strategies and pluralization in the arts. She is currently director of the SBC Galerie d'art contemporain in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyaang / Montréal (Québec). She co-curated the exhibition Gilberto Esparza. Plantas Autofotosintéticas at Galerie de l'UQAM in 2017, and subsequently collaborated on Maria Ezcurra's installation Personal belonging/Objetos personales, presented in 2018 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. In January 2020, she curated the exhibition Uno, dos, tres por mí y mis compañeras at the OPTICA center.
She also has an extensive repertoire of publications, among them Politics, Culture and Economy in Popular Practices in the Americas, co-edited with Eduardo González Castillo and Jorge Pantaléon (2016). In 2023, she co-wrote with Laura Delfino "Un happening dans le Musée: pluralisation et appartenance institutionnelle", for Cahiers de l’OMEC.
DAVID BLANKENSTEIN
Germany. He studied Art History in Berlin and Museology in Montreal. His areas of research include museum history, artistic transits and 19th century art history. He curated the exhibition on the brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt in Paris in 2014. He is the curator of the exhibition on the same subject for the German Historical Museum in Berlin; as well as a permanent exhibition on Alexander von Humboldt in Havana Cuba, both opening late 2019. He also curated the exhibition Alexander von Humboldt Archive Berlin at the Humboldt Forum (2019). Since 2020, he serves as researcher, curator and author at Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss.
Photo: Soany Guigand
MARION PFAUS
Germany. Aka Rigoletti is a German artist. Born in 1966, she has lived in Berlin since 2000. Marion Pfaus refers to her work as Despecialised Media Art. She makes short films and radio plays, writes texts, runs websites, and performs in her own live comedy show. She has received grants and awards for her work, for example the Berlin Senate's Literature Scholarship, the Berlin Senate's Female Artist Scholarship for Video Art. She was nominated for the German Radio Award 2022. Marion Pfaus studied at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.
EDUARDO KOHN
Ecuador - Canada. He is an anthropologist, researcher and environmental activist linked to the native peoples of the Amazon, one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on Earth. He is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University (Canada). His book How the forests think? (UCP, 2013) won the 2014 Gregory Bateson Award and has been translated into several languages. His work aims to imagine better ways to coexist with the living world, so that this world can guide our behavior. That is, it involves a fundamental rethinking of anthropology and "the human" so that we can learn to "green" our ethics. To this end, he has developed a solid set of conceptual tools and a series of alternative ethnographic methods based on semiotics - the study of signs - to understand this kind of thinking beyond the human and its relation to human thought.
GENEVIÈVE CHEVALIER
Canada. Visual and media artist, independent curator and adjunct professor at the École d'art de l'Université Laval, Québec, Canada. She holds a PhD in artistic studies and practices from the Université du Québec à Montréal (SSHRC 2010-2013) and a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University. She completed a post-doctoral internship in museology (FRQSC 2014-2016) on the question of artists' interventions in museum collections as part of the activities of the research and reflection group Collections et impératif événementiel/The Convulsive Collections (CIÉ/CO).
Photo: Guillaume D. Cyr
BARBARA CLAUSEN
Canada. Dr. phil. Barbara Clausen is a professor at the Art History Department and Associate Dean of Research and Creation at the Faculty of the arts at UQAM, as well as an independent curator, living and working in Tiohtia:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Since 2000 she has lectured and written extensively on the historiography and institutionalization of performance-based art practices and the discourses surrounding the politics of the body, the exhibition and the archive. From 2017-2021 she was the Curatorial Research Director of the Joan Joans Knowledge Base in collaboration with the Artist Archives Initiative in New York. She is the author of Babette Mangolte. Performance zwischen Aktion und Betrachtung (Edition Metzel, Munich) and co-editor of the monograph Joan Jonas. next move in a mirror world, (Dia Art Foundation & DAI New York) both published in 2023.
ÉMILIE MONNET
Canada. A committed interdisciplinary artist, she founded Onishka Productions in 2011 in order to forge links between artists from different Aboriginal communities, regardless of their discipline. Since 2016, she has presented Indigenous Contemporary Scene / Scène contemporaine autochtone, a nomadic platform for the dissemination of Aboriginal performing arts. Five editions have been created to date. She is currently completing a three-year residency at the Centre du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui where she will present her next creation Marguerite, after Okinum (2018) and Kiciweok: Lexique de treize mots autochtones qui donnent un sens (2019). As the Associate artist at the Théâtre de la Ville in Longueuil, she will also be the next artist in residence at the Espace Go theatre. Émilie is of Anishnaabe-Algonquin and French descent and currently lives between the Outaouais and Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyaang / Montreal.
JOANNA PAGE
United Kingdom. Professor of Latin American Studies and Director of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. Between 2014 and 2018 she directed the Centre for Latin American Studies at Cambridge. Her research interests are linked to the relationship between science and culture in Latin America, but she has also worked on issues of memory, modernity, capitalism, posthumanism, new materialism, decoloniality, ecology and environmental thought. She has published several monographs, most recently: Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art (UCL Press, 2021, open access) and Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art (Open Book Publishers, 2023).
MÉLANIE BOUCHER
Canada. She is professor of museology at the Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO). As an art history specialist in her department, she is regularly asked to comment on issues related to art museum practices. From 2003 to 2013, she held various positions in the field of conservation and research, in addition to working as an independent curator in large, small, and intermediate museum institutions. She has extensive knowledge of the intrusive strategies used by museums to occasionally introduce contemporary artworks into their historical collections. One of her main concerns is the reinvention of contiguous spaces to undermine predictable art historical associations and engage viewers in new ways.
Photo: UQO-Sarah Scott
MICHÈLE MAGEMA
Democratic Republic of the Congo - France. Interdisciplinary artist who works mainly with video, performance, photography and drawing. Her work focuses on articulating an ongoing exchange between individual stories, collective memory and history. Straddling personal experience and shared collective anxieties, she draws on her own stories and memories to address themes such as feminism, sociology, politics and mythology. Her exploration of her feminine identity, displaced through time and memory, reflects the image of a woman completely detached from any historically imposed exoticism. She often resorts to historical facts, which she reinterprets through a frontal mise-en-scène and various metamorphoses. Michèle Magema is a PhD student at UQAM- École des arts visuels et médiatiques, where she also teaches.
WAIRA NINA JACANAMIJOY MUTUMBAJOY
Colombia. An interdisciplinary artist, writer and cultural policy advisor for the Inga nation in the Caquetá region of the Colombian Amazon. She is heir to the traditional Ambiwaska ceremonies taught to her by her grandparents, and possesses a wealth of knowledge that has contributed to the official recognition of the Inga territories and the creation of a pan-Amazonian radio network thanks to the experience of Ingakuna community radio producing soundscapes in the Inga language.
She is also communications and culture coordinator for the Tandachiridu Inganokuna association and advises the educational processes of the Yachaikury School. As a leader, she has worked for the recognition of her community's cultural richness, education and rights.
She has received official recognition for her leadership from the National Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon (OPIAC) and the municipal government of San José del Fragua.
(LabARD)
Founded in 2020, is an interdisciplinary research and creative entity affiliated with the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Its fundamental mission is to explore and promote decolonial approaches within artistic, scientific, cultural and educational fields. LabARD is particularly dedicated to highlighting marginalized narratives and historically neglected perspectives, revealing voices and experiences that are obscured by hegemonic discourses.
Through research-creation, LabARD aims to dismantle power structures, challenge pre-established norms and stimulate critical reflection on the mechanisms of colonization and decolonization. LabARD actively engages in interdisciplinary projects, collaborating with researchers, artists and students from a wide range of backgrounds, engaging fully in research initiatives, exhibitions, workshops and public events. These approaches aim to encourage dialogue and deep engagement with decolonial issues within the academic community.
SANDRA ROZENTAL
Mexico. She holds a PHD in Social Anthropology from New York University. M.A. in Latin American Studies, Georgetown University and M.A. in Social Anthropology, New York University. She received her B.A. degree from Georgetown University. She has published articles and book chapters on social relations around heritage, with a focus on the extraction of archaeological artifacts from communities in the Valley of Mexico. She co-directed the feature documentary La Piedra Ausente (2013) with Jesse Lerner in co-production with the Mexican Institute of Cinematography. She has curated exhibitions in several museums and has collaborated with artists such as Mariana Castillo Deball, Joachim Koester, Jorge Satorre, Eduardo Abaroa and Pablo Vargas Lugo. She is currently a professor-researcher in the Department of Humanities at UAM-Cuajimalpa and her new research project focuses on urban utopias and the physical, social and cultural residues of Lake Texcoco and she is working on a new documentary project on the emergence of the Paricutín volcano.
TANIA MANCHENO
Germany - Ecuador. Tania Mancheno is an affiliate researcher at the Research Center for Hamburg’s (Post)Colonial Legacy at the University of Hamburg. She teaches in the field of social sciences on postcolonial theory and decolonial thought in political sciences and geographie. Her research is focused on urban space and violence, colonial history, and the analysis of its local and transnational consequences from a feminist perspective from the Global South. Currently, Dr. Mancheno is a member of DAICOR and of the German-American Working Group on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Her recent publications are the article Beyond coloniality in world heritage: Countermapping the colonial amnesia in Parisian landscapes and her book Ma(r)king the Difference Multiculturalism and the Politics of Translation.
MÉLANIE O’BOMSAWIN
First mother, then daughter and granddaughter, Mélanie O'Bomsawin is also an editor, videographer and new media artist. Born to a W8banaki (Abenaki) parent and a Quebecker parent, she uses video in all its forms to explore her links with those who came before her and those who will come after. In her practice, she is interested in questions of identity, tradition, memory and the transmission of knowledge through our relationships. Interested in new technologies, she is constantly on the lookout for new ways to tell stories. The narrative sovereignty of the first peoples is at the heart of her reflections, and it is for this reason that Mélanie hopes to create the archives of the future and recreate the pixels of the past. She creates for past and future generations. Mélanie is a member of the Odanak Abenaki community and currently lives in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyaang / Montréal.