The Little Prince Exposition 2024

THE LITTLE PRINCE AMONG MEN Exposition

Le Petit Prince Parmi Les Homme

May 1 - June 30, 2024

At Place Bonaventure

Everyone knows the book The Little Prince, but do you know the man behind this work?

Discover the fascinating life of the book's author Antoine de Saint Exupéry who was not only a writer, but also an aviator, postal worker, poet and philosopher. The exhibition highlights one of the best-selling works in the world through animated images, as well as by portraying the author's destiny and his fascination with planes. It includes film projections, audiovisual montages and testimonies from the writer, his family and his friends, as well as many other documents.

The life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry fascinates as much as the literary character of the Little Prince he created in his book. Between his birth on June 29, 1900 and his death on July 31, 1944 when he perished in a fatal plane crash, the French writer lived an intense and even a hectic life.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry's life is portrayed and explained to visitors through 32 exhibition stations which the public visits one by one. All the stations are explained by the audio guide given to each visitor at the entry to the exhibition.

It would take approximately one or one and a half hours to visit the exposition. But it might take longer if one intends to closely read and examine various documents in many displays protected under the glass.

Visit Montreal, Place Bonaventure, for an experience that is both quite interesting and enriching.

FREE for children aged 4 and under.

More information here.

Click on images to enlarge them.

All Photos @ Nadia Slejskova

This article's dedicated internet address, or also click on the title above the very first photo in this article.

 

Blue Metropolis 2023

BLUE METROPOLIS 2023

INTERNATIONAL LITERARY FESTIVAL
25th EDITION

PROGRAM UNVEILING

March 16, 2023

Online from April 12

Special event with Margaret Atwood on April 17

The future of the planet, of democracy and identities, of languages and people, and of our imaginations: this is the theme of the 2023 edition of the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, gearing up to celebrate 25 years. It all kicks off online starting April 12, and culminates in a massive in-person program from April 27 to 30 in Montreal, at beautiful Hotel 10. What will the decades to come hold for our communities, our literature, our freedoms and aspirations? Festivalgoers will have a chance to look ahead with a staggering range of author events and performances in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and other languages such as Welsh, Ojibway, ancient Greek, and Innu-Aimun, and featuring over 200 Quebec, Canadian, and international writers, thinkers, and artists converging on Montreal. Not to miss is a pre-Festival live event with Margaret Atwood on April 17.

"We are thrilled and honoured to offer such important authors and thought-provoking events for this special 25th anniversary edition of the Festival. We now reach beyond Montreal with our extensive online programming, and eagerly anticipate the buzz of in person gatherings and lively discussions. This year, our illustrious invited writers look to the future, I can't wait to join them and share their gaze."– Marie-Andrée Lamontagne, Director General, Programming and Communications, Blue Metropolis

Leading voices from here and abroad

This anniversary edition shines a bright light on Montreal’s thriving literary communities, and features local writers alongside nationally and internationally acclaimed authors.

As a very special pre-festival event, on April 17 at St. James United Church, Margaret Atwood is in conversation onstage talking about Old Babes in the Woods, her latest collection of short stories. The Festival’s illustrious April 27-30 program includes a packed lineup of storied writers—Duncan Mercredi, the 2023 laureate of the Blue Metropolis First Peoples Prize; 2023 Azul Prize laureate Lina Meruane; British author Philippe Sands; Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Paul Harding; American-Canadian novelist Rivka Galchen; Israeli writer Yaël Neeman; French travel writer Sylvain Tesson; and 2022 Governor General-winning Anishinaabe author Eli Baxter, among many more. Michael Ondaatje, internationally acclaimed author of Warlight and The English Patient, will be recognized for his body of work with the 2023 Blue Metropolis International Grand Prize.

Not to be missed is a conversation on Leonard Cohen at the Congregation Shaar Hashomayim with writer and international law expert Philippe Sands, along with cantor Gideon Zelermyer; and a sci-fi retelling of the Haudenosaunee confederation story from Mohawk multimedia artist Skawennati, among other Indigenous events and many highlights. The Festival also presents a special evening with Blue Metropolis founder Linda Leith, a big night for the Atwater Poetry Project, local favourites Dimitri Nasrallah, Christopher DiRaddo, and Daniel Allen Cox on how Montreal is evolving, and an intimate conversation with most recent Blue Metropolis/Conseil des arts de Montréal New Horizons Prize laureates Tawhida Tanya Evanson (2022) and the 2023 winner, whose name will be unveiled on April 29^th during the Grand Prix award ceremony. 

Major event series

Blue Met is back with its always special series programming.

The regularly sold-out Jerusalem of the Mind event returns featuring Israel author Maya Savir and Palestinian filmmaker Rami Younis, with Montrealers Carlos Fraenkel and Ehab Lotayef. This year’s panel sparks questions like: What is an activist’s role? A writer’s? How does the current political situation affect literature in Palestine and Israel? Expect another packed Almemar series.

Meanwhile, the Book under Pressure series addresses current issues in the literary world and the book industry, while the popular Azul series features acclaimed authors Jorge Carríon, Cristina Morales and Carol Bensimon. Worth noting is the LGBTQ+ series, featuring a special Violet Hour reading event and numerous queer and trans authors, including Su J. Sokol, Festival spokesperson Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay, Laura Doyle Péan, Jen Currin, and 2023 Blue Metropolis Violet Prize laureate, playwright  Michel Marc Bouchard. The Festival’s series on sci-fi and fantasy draws readers into lesser-known, strange, and stimulating worlds-- queer speculative fiction, hope punk, Afrofantasy and graphic video books. The NEXT series is the most ambitious emerging artist programming yet. It focuses on English-language talent from underrepresented communities, offering workshops, carte blanche events, and podcasts featuring community leaders.

Get Your Festival Pass and rebates

The Festival Pass is back with a twist. For $25, festivalgoers have access to the Festival’s bountiful program, along with a special $25 rebate on books at Paragraphe Bookstore, the Festival’s official bookseller, which will be setting up shop at Hotel 10 from April 27 to 30 inclusively.

The future is online too

The Festival’s virtual program is really hitting its stride, with three events starting April 12: a tribute to Innu poet Josephine Bacon, winner of the First Peoples Prize; a conversation between Gioconda Belli and Claudia Piñeiro; and a discussion on capitalism and literature. The online programming kicked off in late February with the Tio’tia:ke/Montréal literary walking tour, a Strides podcast series that takes a decolonial look at Montreal. Tune in as well for a literary look at green Montreal with the Montréal vert walking-tour podcast series on April 23, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Plenty for kids and families

Presented in over 50 libraries, schools, Greater Montreal bookstores, and about 40 daycare centres across Quebec, the TD–Blue Metropolis Children’s Festival is an every-green, year-round affair. This spring’s activities will take place between April 21 and 30, with a full slate of events for the whole family on both weekends, and events exclusively for school groups during the week.

BLUE Metropolis AT A GLANCE

The Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival is one of the largest multilingual literary events in North America. For several days each year, writers from Quebec, Canada, and around the world converge on Montreal. Attendees are treated to live interviews, round-table discussions, public readings, debates, masterclasses, readings, and writing workshops. Every year, the Festival is built around several strong themes that bear witness to a keen social awareness and a passion for literature in all its richness.

Established in 1997, the Blue Metropolis Foundation is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to bring together people from different cultures to share the pleasures of reading and writing and encourage creativity and cross-cultural understanding. The Foundation presents the annual Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival and offers a wide range of educational and social programs year-round in classrooms, libraries, and online, using writing and reading as therapeutic tools, to encourage students to stay in school, and to combat poverty and exclusion.

Printable program available.

For more information, visit the festival's website

McGill Library 2020: Greetings that Pop

SEASON'S GREETINGS THAT POP

The McGill University's Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC) has a fast number of books with cut out images inside them that pop out when you open the page. This season, the McGill Library's RBSC is bringing into focus three festive pop-up scenes from the Sheila R. Bourke Collection that consists of over 2000 items and is rich in the “golden age” of book illustrations from the 19th and to the mid-20th centuries like chapbooks, “toy books” as well as deluxe gift books. Watch the following video.

McGill rare pop up remix video

You can read about the McGill Pop-Up collection here.

The following two videos might also be of interest to you:

McGill rare wintry remix

A Rare Wintry Martlet Remix

 

CCA 2019: Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark
Out of the Box

June 7 - September 8, 2019

The Montreal's Canadian Center for Architecture is dedicating its 2019–2020 Out of the Box exhibition series to the works of a trained architect and conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark. The items on display were all donated to the CCA by the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark in 2011.The donation consisted of Matta-Clarke's archives: his professional works such as writings, photographs, films, correspondence, and select artworks that were produced between 1969 and 1978.

Though Matta-Clark had a rather short life (he died at age 35, 1943-1978), he is best remembered for his monumental deconstructive pieces, the bold artistic statements created inside and out of the condemned masonry soon to be demolish. In one such case, the area was zoned for the future iconic building of the Paris' Pompidue Center.

This exhibition is the first part of the study of the CCA Matta-Clark archives, that will be presented to the public in three acts. To explore Gordon Matta-Clark’s critical practice within the architectural scene of the time, the CCA has invited for this series of exhibitions three guest curators from different curatorial backgrounds ranging from contemporary art, film and archival research, to social practice studies.

This first series is curated by Yann Chateigné. It reflects on Gordon Matta-Clark’s material thinking as deducted from his highly diverse personal library. It classifies the books into four main categories of his reading interest: Alchemy, Gravity, Networks, and Inner Spaces. 

The exhibition reveals lesser-known references in Matte-Clark's work that artist expressed during the decade of his artistic practice.

Click on images to enlarge them.

Hover over images for description and credits.

Additionally, the Gordon Matta-Clark Collection can be studied online. Visit the online finding aid for personal reference.

To find more about this exhibition and other projects exhibitions, visit the CCA website.

Salon du livre 2018

Le Salon du livre de Montréal

Montreal Annual Book Show

41st Edition

November 14-19, 2018

Comme des géants 
Maison d'édition jeunesse

This Montreal's annual book faire, always held at Place Bonaventure, is extremely popular with Montrealers, especially with children. Loads of school buses bring children to the show, they crowed various kiosks, look through the books, and ask writers present at the show to sign the books they have just purchased.



I was gifted with a book by Nadine Robert, the editor of the publishing house Comme des géants, and I would like to bring it to your attention. The book Elsi was actually written by the editor herself, and it was skilfully illustrated by Maja Kastelich. Those are just the types of illustrations I remember in my own books when I was a child. It brought back the memories of my childhood and the delight I had to read and leaf through such books and to look at the attractive illustrations which made the book story come alive, bringing me right into the imaginary world created by the author.

The Christmas is fast approaching, so do not hesitate to visit this book show, and to purchase just the right book presents either for your child or any other children you might know and would like to bring some happiness to during the winter holidays.

The show presents a huge amount of books of any kind covering an immense array of subjects. One can find books not only for one's own reading pleasure but also for the friends and family.



Click on images to enlarge them.

You can read more about the show in my other article here.

Visit the Salon du livre  website.
Visit Comme des géants website.

MMFA 2018: Book of Hours

RESPLENDENT ILLUMINATIONS

BOOK OF HOURS FROM THE 13th TO THE 16th CENTURY IN QUEBEC COLLECTIONS

September 4, 2018 – January 6, 2019

  

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) for the first time presents Books of Hours, conserved in seven Quebec collections. This exhibition is a result of an extensive research. It represents a unique opportunity to admire works primarily from illuminated manuscripts – the priceless legacy of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Europe.

Books of Hours were works of private devotion that first appeared in the 13th century. They were the most popular prayer books made for the laity and were used as primers for learning to read. Often given as wedding gifts, they were “bestsellers” until the 16th century. Over time, they evolved in a variety of ways both textually and iconographically, adapting to the regional differences in devotions, languages and artistic styles of European Christianity.

The 59 artefacts presented for the first time belong to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, McGill University, the arts library of the Université du Québec à Montréal, the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, the Archives of the Jesuits in Canada, to Concordia University and the Musée de l’Amérique francophone in Quebec City.

The works on display show the exquisite elegance of some Gothic and Renaissance illuminations from France, the Southern Netherlands, Italy and Southern Germany, as well as other contemporaneous expressions of popular piety. These small images, featuring decorations similar to decorative folk art carved into wood or painted, were probably produced for clients of more modest means. Seven books come from the early days of printing. The books illustrate the development of woodcuts and metal cuts that gradually replaced the art of illumination.

 Women were more than just pious readers of Books of Hours. As the works in the exhibition demonstrate, thye contributed their expertise at various stages of production.

In comparison with other collections of early books in North America, what is special about the Books of Hours held in Quebec is the fact that they were first and foremost devotional works of New France. This is evidenced in the Jesuit Relations as of 1653 and in requests made by the Hospitalières (nursing sisters in Quebec) between 1664 and 1668 to their benefactors in France. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these devotional books found a new vocation, becoming collectible artefacts. Whether complete or fragmentary, Books of Hours came into Quebec by way of inheritances or purchases in Europe. 

Click on images to enlarge them.

Hover you mouse over images for description  and credits.

This exhibition is located the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Graphic Arts Centre: Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion, Level S2

For more information about the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts exhibitions and activities, visit the museum's website.

ArtFIFA 2017: Agatha Christie Contre Hercule Poirot

AGATHA CHRISTIE CONTRE HERCULE POIROT:

QUI A TUÉ ROGER ACKROYD?

WHO KILLED ROGER ACKROYD?

FRANCE | 2016 | 57 MIN | French

Category: FIFA Grand Panorama

This film clearly illustrates how little, until now, have we understood the real genius of Agatha Christie, at least vis-a-vis her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It is only when Pierre Bayard undertakes to stage the novel as a play that he ends up discovering an amazing, original concept of this novel.

At first the film takes us through Agatha Christie's early biography and what motivated her to write. Then it focuses on Pierre Bayard's staging of the play, his need to minutely analyse Christie's writing, the novel's characters and scenes, and even to look into the police investigative tools that he himself then applies to understand better the novel's action and timing. This leads him to discover that the way the novel and its plot have been understood until now is not exactly what the novel insinuates. Unfortunately, if I say anything more, I would give out too many clues and spoil the film, which in itself becomes an investigative narrative, a search for the clues of Who's Done It?

The film elucidates Agatha Christie's technique and intent, and lets the viewer to discovers how much she was in the forefront of the crime novel genre, how avant-garde for her times, to the extend that it is only now this aspect of her writing is becoming finally understood. 

I had a problem with only one aspect of this film: the way the interviews with English researchers were audibly translated into French, both English and French simultaneous narrations heard at the same volume. Since neither of the languages is my mother tongue, and I acquired them both later in life, I had a hard time, actually had failed to pick up any of them clearly enough to understand what was being said. When previously presented with a similar situation in a film where one of the languages was my mother tongue, I had no problem to hear my native tongue clearly. I additionally suspect that people with some hearing problems, even slight ones like tinnitus, would also have  problems to pick up one of the languages more clearly, even a mother tongue. I therefore recommend that the film has a written translation s.- t.  to facilitate the understanding of what is being said.

Agatha Chritie as a child

Agatha Christie

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS

“The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) is one of Agatha Christie’s most celebrated novels. Its renown stems from a plot twist that was highly original for its time: the killer is hidden behind the mask of the narrator himself. This earned Christie the wrath of some critics, who considered the artifice dishonest, a violation of the conventions of the genre. Eighty years later, Pierre Bayard, a professor of literature and psychoanalyst, revisits the book in order to deconstruct it. His textual analysis leads to an exploration of the context of the work’s publication and the private life of the mysterious novelist. Bayard finally arrives at a stunning conclusion.”

DIRECTOR

JEAN-CHRISTOPHE KLOTZ

Born in Washington, Jean-Christophe Klotz is a graduate of the Centre de formation des journalistes in Paris and of Paris II (Economics, Information and Communication). He wrote the documentary Kigali, des images contre un massacre(2006), presented at the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes in 2006. In 2009, he directed his first feature-length film, Lignes de front.

Filmography | Lignes de Front (2010) ; L'Argent, le sang et la démocratie - A propos de l'affaire Karachi (2013); Kigali, des images contre un massacre (2006).

Cinematography: Alberto Marquardt

Distribution: Arte Distribution

Editing: Pascal Ariel

Music: Jean-Christophe Klotz

Producer: Estelle Fialon

Sound: Marc Soupa

Production: Les Films Du Poisson

FILM TRAILER

For more information and FIFA film festival and scheduling, visit the Art FIFA website.

In 2016 Montreal's PAC Museum held a commemorative exhibition to honour Agatha Christire. You can read about it here.

Salon du livre 2016 - René Derouin

René Derouin at Le Salon du livre de Montréal

Montreal Annual Book Show

November 16-21, 2016

This year, the very popular book faire at the Palce Bonaventure has a small gallery that showcases 10 books out of 12 written by the Quebec artist René Derouin, along with his three artistic creations and two more reproductions glued to the gallery's walls.

The books displayed also include two of Derouin's newest books which speak of Mexico. Derouin is a great lover of Mexico, of its culture and its people. His gallery is located right next to the Mexican pavilion. This year, Mexico is celebrated as a special guest of the Salon. 

The artistic corner dedicated to René Derouin is quite small and one could easily miss it if one plunges right into the centre of the exhibition hall filled to the brim with great quantities and varieties of books. Make sure you will not forget to visit it.

At the same time, the exhibition RAPACES - RAPTORS - RAPACES by René Derouin is presented at the Éric Devlin Gallery in Montreal from November 12 to November 27, 2016.

Click on images to enlarge them.

Hover your mouse over images for description and credits.

For more information, visit the Salon's website.