Recent Issues – Ciel variable Magazine

Ciel variable 131 – Collecting

[Winter 2026]

This issue brings together three bodies of work united by a shared passion for images: Christos Dikeakos’s portraits of art collectors, Michel Campeau’s extensive archive-based series celebrating the gestures and rituals of the darkroom, and Sara Knelman’s unusual collection of vernacular photographs of women reading across a century. Together, these projects highlight the gestures, knowledge, and commitments that shape culture, ensure its transmission, and affirm the essential place of images in our lives.

Ciel variable 130 – Plants and Gardens

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS

Issue 130: an artistic and sensory exploration of the plant world, blending observation, ecology, and poetic quest, through the works of Sara Angelucci, Sara A. Tremblay, and Frédéric Lavoie.

Ciel variable 129 – From Continent to Continent

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT

[Summer 2025] Entitled From Continent to Continent, the thematic dossier highlights the books of three artists — Mallory Lowe Mpoka, Fatine-Violette Sabiri and Ed Pien — whose photographic projects explore questions of identity through portraiture and self-portraiture, in an intimate journey across continents, cultures, and personal histories. EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITIONS READINGS VOICES

Ciel variable 128 – Change of Scene

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE

The thematic dossier of issue 128 presents recent works by Geoffrey James, Louie Palu and Jinyoung Kim which highlight a feeling of disorientation and relative strangeness evoked by the exploration of different aspects of Canadian reality.

Ciel variable 127 – Sisters, Fighters, Queens

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS

This issue’s dossier features portfolios telling the story of women’s affirmation and contributions in various contexts: decolonization, resistance to Islamic fundamentalism and the reconsideration of traditional gamesmanship.

Ciel variable 126 – Trajectories

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES

La trajectoire implique un déplacement et, implicitement, une évolution, voire un avancement (lire un progrès). Elle est le contraire d’un point, qui illustre l’immobilisme, l’arrêt, le statu quo. Si on se déplace d’un point A à un point B, c’est qu’on change de position, de contexte, de point de vue. La ou les trajectoires que suivent les trois artistes de notre numéro thématique les montrent dans un état de vigilance, à l’affût de ce quelque chose qui ouvre de nouvelles perspectives, qui nous ouvre les esprits.

Ciel variable 125 – Agglomerations

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS

[Winter 2024] Cities are born from clusters of structures that provide shelter for human life and activities. Through them flow grids of thoroughfares that form patterns of movement and exchange. That’s what an urban agglomeration is: a dense knot, large or small, placed at a certain point in a rhizomatic lattice that runs through an […]

Ciel variable 124 – Seeing Through Images

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES

[Fall 2023] These are images that disrupt, catch our attention, and thus intensify our gaze. What they show us is clear and precise, and yet there is something we can’t place, sometimes almost imperceptible, that encourages us to look more closely and ask more questions about the context of image production. So, what we are […]

Ciel variable 123 – The Power of Intimacy

Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY

[Summer 2023] The intimate is where we first experiment and affirm our own identity – an existential issue that plays out essentially between self and self. At the same time, such identification can occur only in interrelation with people with whom one has strong affinities. Identity is also a relationship with the other: what we […]

Ciel variable 122 – Night Rounds

Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS

[Winter 2023] No matter what the adage says, all cats are not grey in the dark. Night-time brings out a throng of personalities, countless activities, and – without a shadow of a doubt – a rich colour palette. More often than not, it suits us to close our eyes to what’s happening once the light […]

Ciel variable 121 – Wanderings

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS

[Fall 2022]

Walking in the city, travelling down country roads, discovering the country, exploring foreign capitals – in short, getting moving – we confront different perspectives, contextualize or a rm our values, and take the measure of the world we live in. Such mobility, such constant travels, are the basis for the works brought together here, which are rooted in the desire to show the underside of America, to invert the icons of planetary tourism, or to take stock of the hypertrophy of major urban centres.

Ciel variable 120 – Figures of Affirmation

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION

[Summer 2022]

Indigenous culture has long been oppressed in this country, but strong proud voices are now speaking out in public and are increasingly being heard. Here, we present three of these voices: they stand out for their use of photography as a central vehicle of their approach. Together, they offer a renewed vision of Indigenous identity, drawing on both tradition and contemporary realities and stamping a presence everywhere in the territory.

Ciel variable 119 – AGAINST NATURE

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE

[Winter 2022]

The title Against Nature might seem paradoxical, as the artists brought together for this issue’s thematic section are all defenders and lovers of nature and spend a good deal of time in it. But what their works reveal is a “naturality” thoroughly permeated by human activity and entirely shaped by it, implying that its fate is entirely in our hands.

Ciel variable 118 – EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY

[Fall 2021]
The thematic section in this issue presents three exhibitions that show how photography can contribute to shaping a critical vision of the world. The first sets out to offer an overall sense of the changes affecting global civilization. The second contrasts traditional photography with its mutant, digital, and interactive form. The third is the career of a photography critic whose vision is fed by the act of collecting.

Ciel variable 117 – SHIFTED

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED

[Summer 2021]

This issue features three artists, with three aesthetic positionings, who share an ironic distancing. One, more scholarly, builds on strata of cultural history; the second, more narrative, fashions, with small strokes, a self-fiction with existential echoes; the last, more direct, affirms the subjectivity of a framing, a gaze. What is it exactly about the visible and the invisible? What wisdom do we need to live better? And what do all these little things that are derailed say about the state of the world?