MMFA 2023: Indigenous Colombia

Portable Universe

THOUGHT AND SPLENDOUR OF INDIGENOUS COLOMBIA

June 3 – October 1, 2023

Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion – Level 3

This new exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) is the result of the collaborative efforts of the following cultural institutions: the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Colombia's Museo del Oro and the Unidad de Artes y Otras Colecciones of the Banco de la República, Colombia. 

The exhibition is the culmination of several years of close collaboration between the curatorial team and the Arhuaco community of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region in northern Colombia. The largest exhibition of art from Colombia ever to be presented outside of that country, it proposes alternative ways of approaching the world around us and presents a completely new perspective on Indigenous art from this region.

The exhibition brings together some 400 works of art from Colombia dating from about 1500 BCE to the present day, most of which have never been exhibited in Canada. This major show gives centre stage to Indigenous perspectives in what is a departure from the more traditional museum discourse about the arts. It invites visitors to engage in a cultural dialogue across space and time and to reflect on a different way of understanding the world and our place in it.

The objects on display, as stated by Erell Hubert, the Curator of Pre-Columbian Art at the MMFA and also the Curator of the Montreal exhibition, have a deeper meaning:

“The works that make up the exhibition are not simply material objects but vectors of ancestral memory and knowledge. Their messages continue to hold great relevance for our world today and lead us to think, among other things, about the interdependence between our planet and all the beings that inhabit it. Portable Universe offers an opportunity to reflect on our individual and collective roles in maintaining a balance in nature. The Arhuaco community invites visitors to connect with the works, hear their messages, and become active participants in preserving this balance.”

 

With the European conquest, Indigenous cultures of the Americas were discredited, and the well-established system to which millions of people turned to understand the meaning of life and existence was reduced to crude superstition. This exhibition attempts to restore a number of these millennia-old teachings by revealing the works’ intrinsic meaning and the life they contain. It draws from contemporary Indigenous concepts to paint a vision of the world in which ancient works of art have relevance for today and tomorrow.

Arhuaco wisdom also teaches that the works in this exhibition were made in conjunction with the principles of creation, and therefore have no beginning or end, which is why the decision was made to not include dates on the individual labels for these items. Instead, the focus is put on their role as participants in the networks of life.

Coming in large part from the Museo del Oro in Bogotá, the creations attest to the diversity and richness of Colombia’s Indigenous cultures. The exhibition features some of the most remarkable artworks ever made in this region, including intricately cast gold pendants, hammered gold masks, ceramic effigies of mystical creatures, rare ancient textiles and a series of contemporary watercolours. These works are displayed against a backdrop of image projections and a soundscape composed by Luis Fernando Franco, featuring ancient ocarinas.

 A PARTICIPATIVE REFLECTION AREA

The exhibition ends with a participative reflection area that is unique to the Montreal presentation. It aimed at inspiring visitors to reflect on their place and role in the universe.

DOCUMENTARY SERIES UNPACKING THE UNIVERSE: THE MAKING OF AN EXHIBITION

This nine-episode documentary produced by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art takes the public behind the scenes of this major exhibition. The series retraces the six years of research and design that went into this collaborative project with the Arhuaco community. In addition to showing the making of the exhibition, Unpacking the Universe allows the public to see archaeological sites and breathtaking scenery, as well as witness enriching conversations with Arhuaco elders on their view of the world and present-day issues.

Visit the the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts website to check on the opening hours and to purchase your ticket online.

Click on images to enlarge them.

All photos @ Nadia Slejskova

For this article's dedicated internet address, click on the title above the very first photo.

MMFA 2023: Wolves-The Art of Dempsey Bob

 

WOLFS

THE ART OF DEMPSEY BOB

May 18 - September 10, 2023

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA)  presents the exhibition Wolves: The Art of Dempsey Bob. This is the first full-career retrospective of Tahltan-Tlingit artist Dempsey Bob. The exhibition brings together some sixty works by this artist who is at the forefront of a centuries-old tradition of wood-carving on Canada's Northwest Coast.

Dempsey Bob was born in Telegraph Creek, British Columbia, He was part of the first generation of Northwest Coast carvers to sell their works at newly developing southern Indigenous art markets at the beginning of the early 1980s. It was then that the established museums were starting to understand Northwest Coast cultures as living, evolving entities, alive in the present.

Bob's carvings blend traditional narratives and iconography with contemporary influences. His exposure to oral histories, songs and dances from his young age has formed his understanding of art and its purpose within the community. At once traditionalist and avant-garde, Bob acknowledges the lineage to which he is indebted. What stands out is the quality of is carvings, the remarkable smoothness and the sensuousness of their surfaces unequalled in the world of Northwest Coast carving today.

With personal daring, Bob reinterprets the traditional characters and iconography from the age-old stories of his people by occasionally inflecting these traditional tales with influences drawn from European art. During a residency in New Zealand, he was asked to carve a head from a square block of wood. Moving the central feature of the nose to the corner position instead of a frontal one, he discovered an off-kilter way of presenting a face that was more sculpture than mask. That shift led to the experimental works featured at the exhibition, in which conventional mask-making gives way to contemporary experimentation in form and storytelling, as the subjects seems to be caught in mid-transformation.

About Dempsey Bob

At the forefront of a centuries-old tradition of wood-carving on the Canada's Northwest Coast, the Tahltan-Tlingit artist Dempsey Bob (born in 1948) has played a key role in the revitalization of British Columbian culture, both as an artist and a teacher. During his days in Prince Rupert where he lived as a young man, Bob studied with the legendary Haida artist Freda Diesing (1925-2002), one of the few women to carve totem poles. Over the years, he developed his artistry through constant reference to tradition and through his intense investigation of the Northwest Coast historic art objects at Canadian and international collections, and also studying the European sculpture and the South Pacific art.

 Raised in the vibrant cannery milieu of the Skeena River valley and trained in the mainland Indigenous practices of mask and pole carving, Bob has developed his own sense of line that imbues his works with vitality. In his later creations, he has shifted away from the frontal composition, exploring sculptural forms that break free from the past.

Dempsey Bob is one of the important teachers of his generation. He is a founding member of the Freda Diesing School of Northwest Coast Art in Terrace, British Columbia, where he lives and teaches today. For his contributions to the field of art, he was invested as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2013 and recently received the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts for his Artistic Achievement (2021).

Bob's book, In His Own Voice, edited by Sarah Milroy in collaboration with the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the Audain Art Museum, is a 2023 BC and Yukon Book Prizes finalist and made the BC Bestseller List of 2022.

Alongside the wood carvings, the exhibition showcases objects created by Dempsey Bob and his sister, Linda Bob – a heavy robe, a blanket and a chief's robe – illustrating their collaboration, a union of their respective, complementary practices.

Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion – Level 3

Visit the the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts website to check on the opening hours and to purchase your ticket online.

Click on images to enlarge them.

All photos @ Nadia Slejskova

For this article's dedicated internet address, click on the title above the very first photo.

Centaur Theatre 55th Season

Centaur Theatre 55th Season

CENTAUR THEATRE ANNOUNCES ITS 2023/24 SEASON:

BUILDING THE FUTURE @ CENTAUR

BREAKING NEW GROUND IN OLD MONTREAL IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE

April 20, 2023

PRESENTING:

alterNatives

October 17 – November 5, 2023

The English-language production of Menuentakuan’s alterNatives

Written by Drew Hayden Taylor / Directed by Xavier Huard

With Charles Bender, Natalie Tannous, Étienne Thibeault, Lesly Velazquez, Nadia Verrucci, and Xavier Watso

Moose roast, meatless lasagna, and biting social commentary are on the menu in this irreverent comedy of manners from one of the leading Indigenous playwrights in Canada.

GUILT (a love story)

March 12 – 30, 2024

The Tarragon Theatre production of GUILT (a love story)

Written and Performed by Diane Flacks / Directed by Alisa Palmer

A sharply perceptive and painfully funny one-woman show confronting the unshakable monster that is guilt.

Thy Woman’s Weeds

April 23 – May 12, 2024

In partnership with Repercussion and Tableau D’Hôte 

Written by Erin Shields / Directed by Amanda Kellock

With Deena Aziz, Leni Parker, Joy Ross-Jones, Espoir Segbeaya, Warona Setshwaelo, Felicia Shulman, and Julie Tamiko Manning

Seven of Montreal’s finest actresses pull back the curtain on the Bard in this bold behind-the-scenes look at what it means to be a woman working with Shakespeare today.

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For more information on the present and future programs and activities, visit the Centaur Theatre website.

McCord Stewart Museum 2023 : Hochelaga

Hochelaga - Evolving Montreal

by Joannie Lafrenière

Showcasing the neighbourhood’s wonderful people

March 31 - September 10, 2023

This exhibition represents the second part of the Evolving Montreal photographic commission. Joannie Lafrenière, a photographer and filmmaker, offers an intimate dive into the Hochelaga neighbourhood. The exhibition brings together different encounters, videos, photographs and poetry and is an invitation to explore the artist’s view of what constitutes the essence of Hochelaga today.

Located in the south-east of the city, Hochelaga is steeped in a working-class and Frenchspeaking past. Its population has played a major role in the city’s industrial development. Like other Montreal neighbourhoods, Hochelaga has rapidly transformed over the past few years. The vision of a popular Hochelaga is slowly fading away under the social and economic pressures of gentrification.

Lafrenière has a deep affection for the streets and alleys, but especially for the people of this neighbourhood where she has lived for 18 years. The close relationships she establishes with the subjects of her photographs and films are at the heart of the stories she tells. The exhibition introduces the public to individuals who have crossed the artist’s path and who to her personify the heart of Hochelaga.

Lafrenière states:

“Through this intimate portrait of my neighbourhood, I want to give a dignified voice to forgotten and marginalized people as well as to important individuals who have crossed my path during the last two decades spent in Hochelaga. My intention is to highlight their beauty and colour, without masking the harshness of the experience imprinted in their features, bodies and hearts, to highlight both what is left of this working-class neighbourhood and what is being transformed as it is gentrified.”

A poetic journey

Visitors will notice Benoit Bordeleau’s poetry on the walls of the exhibition. Composed for the exhibition or excerpts from his collection Orange Pekoe (2021), the poet’s verses and stanzas dot the gallery with reflections on life in the neighbourhood and tributes to the resilience of his community, in dialogue with the images encountered in the exhibition.

Hochelaga, an evolving neighbourhood

Launched by the McCord Stewart Museum in 2019, the Evolving Montreal photographic commission program supports documentary projects that testify to the transformations of Montreal neighbourhoods through unique points of view. “The idea behind Evolving Montreal was born from the conviction that the Museum should play a more active role, both in supporting the local photographic community and in building its own photography collection. The remarkable creativity and documentary value of the projects produced so far in the series are eloquent proof that encouraging contemporary photographers to capture the continuous transformation of the city is a fruitful undertaking,” explains Zoë Tousignant, Curator, Photography.

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All photos @ Nadia Slejskova

For more information about current exhibitions and activities, visit the McCord Museum website.

MMFA 2023: Nalini Malani

NALINI MALANI

CROSSING BOUNDARIES

March 23 – August 20, 2023

Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion – Level S2

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) presents works of Nalini Malani, one of India’s most important contemporary artists. This is her the first-ever Canadian solo exhibition. It showcases her powerfully engaged works that address social inequalities and violence, the subject matter she has dealt with for more than 50 years. Through her art, she gives voice to the subjugated, marginalized, and oppressed, especially women.

Malani has developed a unique multi-media practice that encompasses video, film, animation, painting, drawing and immersive installations.

The exhibition consists of Malani's three works:

Can You Hear Me? (2018-2020).

An acclaimed video installation, an immersive nine-channel animation chamber consisting of eighty-eight animations hand-drawn with the artist’s index finger on an iPad. Marking her first use of digital technology to make drawings, this work is described by Malani as the human mind full of turmoil, fantasies and ideas. Literary characters and mythological figures, accompanied by curious sounds, overlap with allusions to political events, personal thoughts and fragments of text by leading writers from diverse cultural backgrounds that together address global issues of social injustice, including gender inequality, civil conflict and cultural hegemony.

The installation Can You Hear Me? by Nalini Malani at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Sarralves, Porto, 2020. Nine-Channel animation chamber. © Nalini Malani. Photo Filipe Braga

City of Desires—Crossing Boundaries (1992-2023)

It is a new and latest situ iteration of the artist’s ongoing Wall Drawing/Erasure Performance series, which uses drawing and erasure to explore the politics and poetics of memory. Materializing processes of remembrance and forgetting, this performative drawing prompts powerful reflection on the fragility of our shared traditions and experiences. Anchoring the project in the Montreal community, Malani has selected two Montreal-based artists, Iuliana Irimia and Cassandra Dickie, to collaborate on the drawing of the mural. The artwork will be on view at a busy junction in the Museum located close to the Contemporary Art Square. When the exhibition closes, the drawings will be erased in a performance directed by Malani. 

Notice further personages-faces in this mural that are not immediately noticeable. Search for more...

Ballad of a Woman (2023)

It is a major work created specially for the exhibition. It will be projected on the facade of the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion, as part of the MMFA’s Digital Canvas project. The projection starts each day at sunset and ends at 23:00.

This hand-drawn animation tells the story of a woman who is murdered and, in her afterlife, cleans up the traces of her death, protecting her killer. For Malani, this act after death symbolizes the undue burden of self-sacrifice borne by women since time immemorial. In this major new work, the bold colours, dramatic movement and dynamic lines of the film camouflage its darker message, like so many of life’s distractions that make suffering harder to discern. 

Nalini Malani

Recognized as the pioneer of video art in India, Nalini Malani (born in 1946) has been working in a variety of artistic media since the 1960s. Her practice integrates animation, theatre arts, photography, reverse painting on glass, performance art, cinema and video. Winner of the 2019 Joan-Miró Prize, she has notably presented her work in thirty solo museum exhibitions worldwide, including most recently at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, M+, Hong Kong and the National Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, and the National Gallery, London.

https://www.instagram.com/nalinimalani/

Visit the the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts website to check on the opening hours and to purchase your ticket online.

Click on images to enlarge them.

All photos of City of Desires—Crossing Boundaries mural © Nadia Slejskova