Launched during the pandemic, when it seemed that the world had shrunk to what was taking place on our personal screens, this section enabled Ciel variable to report on what was being disseminated and created in other places. These archived essays give a glimpse at a period that, though turbulent, snuffed out neither creativity nor solidarity.
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Denis Farley
[September 7, 2021] A period of staying home, barely leaving the cocoon, can be a fertile time. At least, experienced photographer Denis Farley seems to have taken full advantage. He talks about it in an interview on the platform Ffoto, after more than a year of COVID-19 restrictions. “I hadn’t much choice but to concentrate […]
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Authors: Ciel variable
[September 2, 2021] It takes courage and solidarity, along with resourcefulness and a measure of composure, to cope with the terrible events that have battered Haiti, and these qualities shine through the pictures taken after the mid-August earthquake. AyiboPost – “more than an online media outlet, a platform for intellectual self-defence” – published a photo […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Jeff Bierk
[May 6, 2021] A twenty-fifth edition shouldn’t be just one more event. The twenty-fifth edition of CONTACT, the Toronto photography festival born in 1996, had an air of renewal, due to the public health context. Without an opening date – “dates pending,” we read – most of the exhibitions will end up stretching beyond the […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Alfredo Bosco
[April 28, 2021] For ten years, the Humanitarian Visa d’or Award has been highlighting photography in the context of armed conflict. To underline this first decade of the competition, which it runs with the Visa Pour l’Image photojournalism festival, the International Committee of the Red Cross has put online a “retrospective” featuring photographs and statements […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Michel Huneault
[April 20, 2021] The dozen images don’t cover a year of the pandemic, but they convey its tone amply: beyond the tragedies and the fears, life finds a way to continue. Upon invitation from the McCord Museum, photographer Michel Huneault threw himself into the fray, as they say. Yes, he had access to intensive care […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Mads Nissen
[April 15, 2021] The photograph of the year chosen by World Press Photo, a huge competition that honours what has been published in preceding months, featured, for the 2021 edition, the pandemic. No surprise there. And yet, the winning image, unveiled on April 15, is a digest of all the pain in the world, sufferings […]
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Authors: Ciel variable
[April 14, 2021] “Certain images still have the ability to feed our imagination with something other than consumerist desires!” proclaims Valérie Jouve, previous recipient of the Prix Niépce. Charlotte Abramow, whose Instagram account boasts 200,000 followers, declares, “Images are an inventive torchlight that is shone on a subject.” Yael Burstein says that she’s “enchanted by […]
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Authors: Ciel variable
[February 23, 2021] Facing the closure of exhibition spaces and the uncertainty regarding their reopening or the health restrictions that will have to be adopted, dissemination on virtual platforms has grown more important, even though it has involved simply putting works online. New York artist and author Magali Duzant takes the pulse of the issues […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Isabelle Hayeur
[January 21, 2021] As reclusive as most of us, yet prolific, Isabelle Hayeur began 2021 by producing video after video, available for view on the Vimeo platform. The context of the pandemic and the accompanying health measures first inspired her to make the foggy Hygieia, named after the goddess of health and cleanliness, then the […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Tony Fouhse
[January 13, 2021] Tony Fouhse, an Ottawa-based photographer known for the projects he produces in his own city, including portraits of drug addicts – (re)read the Ciel variable article published in 2011 – could be a model of creativity during these lockdown times. Three quarters of the images in his recent book After the Fact […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Jonk
[December 8, 2020] The monumental ceiling, full of detail and appearing circular (is this a photographic effect?), overwhelms its glassed-in – and, it should be mentioned empty – space. It towers, barely held up by its single base: two walls and a column. This is the architectural work. The title labels it a “coffee shop” […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Edward Burtynsky
[November 24, 2020] After forty years recording the twisted relationships between humans and nature, Edward Burtynsky is thinking about his posterity. The former student at Ryerson University, in Toronto, is promising a huge donation to the university’s museum. The Ryerson Image Centre will therefore house the largest Burtynsky collection. The donation will be made as […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Joshua Bonnetta
[November 12, 2020] The Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal is kicking off, and, thanks to the pandemic, everything will take place online for three weeks – rather than the usual ten days. Ciel variable wanted to make its presence known, and our suggestion for you is Joshua Bonnetta’s very photogenic The Two Sights. Bonnetta, […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Alec Soth
[October 20, 2020] “We all confront the parameters of our cage eventually. What we do when we reach those bars helps define us.” This excerpt from The Parameters of Our Cage, published in 2020 by British publisher MACK, is an apt summary of a project that developed as COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Amélie Laurence Fortin
[September 16, 2020] Canadian Artist Amélie Laurence Fortin was supposed to spend all twelve months of 2020 outside home, having a sojourn at Quebec’s studio in Berlin and making her way through Europe from east to west. But she didn’t foresee the springtime lockdown. Stuck in Warsaw, her bad luck turned to good: she had […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: doublespace photography
[September 8, 2020] In August, works by the Toronto architectural photography collective doublespace (Amanda Large and Younes Bounhar) received worldwide recognition. The collective’s images of the Horizon residential complex in the Utah mountains earned it two photography awards – jury and public – at the ArchitizerA+Awardscompetititon. Designed by the Halifax firm MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, the […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Marco del Pra'
[August 18, 2020] No photographers will be on tour in the Gaspé this year. The Rencontres internationales de la photographie, with its exhibitions scattered around a good part of the peninsula, is indeed taking place. But in these pandemic times, the current edition has been modified a bit. For instance, the Rencontres on Tour has […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Olivier Papegnies
[August 14, 2020] The World Press Photo exhibition, which usually travels the globe, will be on the road less during this year of pandemic. By the end of July, more than half of the 125 stops had been cancelled. All of the presentations kept on the schedule, including the ones to come, were to take […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Aindreas Scholz
[August 13, 2020] In midsummer, the international documentary image competition Earth Photo announced the finalists (54 photographs and videos) for its 2020 edition. Divided into five categories (Changing Forests, Nature, Place, People, A Climate of Change), the environment-related selection had no lack of both surprises and relevancy, such as the image of a mask that […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Dana Claxton
[June 30, 2020] It was practically impossible for the 10th Scotiabank Photography Award, with its $50,000 prize, not to go to a woman, as seven nominees out of the eleven were female. From the all-woman list of finalists, it was Dana Claxton, a Vancouver artist known for her themes of Indigenous beauty, the body, and […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Damian Heinisch
[June 25, 2020] At the core of 45, a photobook by Damian Heinisch, a German artist born in Poland and based in Norway, is a narrative of migration, family separation, and fragments of life (and death). The book, Heinisch’s first in his thirty-year career, earned him the First Book Award, handed out each year since […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Juan Ignacio Davila
[June 9, 2020] The time has come for action, trumpets the Black community. Here is one opportunity, among many others, to make a concrete gesture. Instigated at UQAM in 2016, the organization Nigra Iuventa – Black youth, in Latin – promotes an “other gaze.” Its action has become a struggle to eliminate the underrepresentation of […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Daniel Iregui
[June 3, 2020] New-media artist Daniel Iregui was to have had an exhibition in May at a Montreal public space. The cancelled project did not give rise to a virtual exhibition. However, it led to a new creation that explicitly shows what is different between real gatherings and their current manifestation, videoconferences: a new awareness […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Douglas Walker
[June 3, 2020] The Papier art fair was postponed more than once this spring. In the end, it was transformed. And so, it is having its first virtual edition, after thirteen years in existence. It has increased in duration from four to seventeen days, and it has returned to being free of charge. Nevertheless, visitors […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Adad Hannah
[June 1, 2020] During the pandemic, the Musée d’art de Joliette undertaken a project called Quarantined Museum, a blog put online and hosted by the museum’s team to stay in touch with its community. The idea is to solicit exchanges and reactions by the public (posts, creations, etc.) around different themes related to the museum’s […]
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Authors: Ciel variable
[28 May 2020] We’ve known for a few months that Vancouver artist Stan Douglas was chosen to represent Canada at the 59th Venice Biennale – the one that COVID-19 has postponed from 2021 to 2022. Now, we know that Reid Shier, director of the Polygon Gallery, in North Vancouver, will act as curator for the […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Pablo Ortíz Monasterio
[27 May 2020] The Aperture Foundation, a New York publisher and exhibition centre, has published online interviews with twelve photographers on lockdown here and there: in and around New York, as well as Istanbul, Dhaka, and Algiers. Each gives her or his impressions about the pandemic and its after effects. Bangladeshi Tahia Farhin Haque feels, […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Louis Barbeau
[20 May 2020] In these pandemic times, the creative residencies network is in difficulty. How much difficulty? And for how long? Will the noble principle of going somewhere away from home to create or pursue a research project still be possible? The international organization Res Artis, which has about 600 members in 70 countries, wants […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Matteo Ceschi
[May 15, 2020] With the support of the Italian gallery Artespressione, photographer Matteo Ceschi has published an online diary featuring a black-and-white overview of Milan, one of the first major cities to have fallen under the sombre reality of the novel coronavirus. The images are of silence, isolation, stillness. The series, titled Winter Midsummer, also […]
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Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Marilou Lyonnais A
[May 13, 2020] Is it possible to “fold”websites? And what can we make of an “offline digital site”? In confinement like all of us, Marilou Lyonnais A. wants to endow the immaterial with a material condition. She is one of the ten artists in Parallel Lines, a program of virtual artist residencies set up in […]