Éric Desmarais, Caught Up in the System – An interview by Jean Gagnon

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Entrevues
Authors: Jean Gagnon | Artists: Eric Desmarais

[Summer 2025] Caught Up in the System Éric Desmarais interviewed by Jean Gagnon [EXCERPT] In botanical science, a sporobolus is a drought­tolerant grass with long, dense leaves. In art, it refers to Sporobole, an artist-run centre in Sher­brooke, Quebec. Rooted in its city and region for more than fifty years, first as the Regroupement des […]

Danièle Méaux, Quand la photographie pense la forêt – Claire Moeder

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Readings
Authors: Claire Moeder | Artists: Danièle Méaux

[Summer 2025] Danièle Méaux, Quand la photographie pense la forêt by Claire Moeder [EXCERPT] In today’s crisis situation, forests are being reshaped or destroyed, subjected to drastic human interventions and major catastrophes, and so a book on the relationship between photography and forests bears the promise of linking art to an exigent reality. In Quand […]

Reno Salvail, Je suis devenu le volcan – Jerôme Delgago

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Readings
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Reno Salvail

[Summer 2025] Je suis devenu le volcan by Reno Salvail [EXCERPT] Je suis devenu le volcan is a unique object that can’t be categorized easily. It is part artist book, part retrospective monograph. It alternates, literally, between photographs and contact sheets by Reno Salvail (1947–2023) and analyses, neither solely descriptive nor purely poetic, written by […]

Agence Stock Photo – Sophie Mangado

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Readings
Authors: Sophie Bertrand, Sophie Mangado

[Summer 2025] Agence Stock Photo by Sophie Mangado [EXCERPT] In 1987, Robert Fréchette, Jean-François LeBlanc, and Martin Roy founded Agence Stock Photo in Montreal. The three shared a humanist vision of documentary photography and wanted to stay indepen­dent of the large press groups; they took inspiration from agencies such as Magnum and VU. Over Stock’s […]

Linda Rutenberg, Traces: Earth’s Memories – Christian Roy

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Christian Roy | Artists: Linda Rutenberg

[Summer 2025] Traces: Earth’s Memories by Christian Roy [EXCERPT] Montreal photographer Linda Rutenberg’s exhibition Traces surveyed the second half of her thirty-year career, juxtaposing three bodies of work related to the theme of fragile traces of threatened environments, whether they be natural, cultural, or a combination of the two. The instal­lation that viewers reached after […]

Janis Rafa, Landscape Depressions – Marie Perrault

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Marie Perrault | Artists: Janis Rafa

[Summer 2025] Landscape Depressions by Marie Perrault [EXCERPT] Janis Rafa, a Greek-born artist based in Amsterdam, is known for her multimedia installations, sculptures, drawings, and films. This exhibition featured a selection of video works from the last ten years that foreground relationships between humans and animals. Pointing her camera toward the spaces where these relationships […]

Chantal Akerman, Travelling – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Chantal Akerman

[Summer 2025] Travelling by Stephen Horne [EXCERPT] The exhibition Travelling presented the practice and life of the acclaimed experimental filmmaker Chantal Akerman (1950–2015), for whom a film was a place to be brought into being, a precarious and personal journey toward the visible. To this end, starting in the 1990s, she began to show her […]

Antoine d’Agata, Methode – Jessica Ragazzini

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jessica Ragazzini

[Summer 2025] Methode by Jessica Ragazzini [EXCERPT] During his residency-exhibition Méthode, Antoine d’Agata invited visitors to the Centre Pompidou to enter the complex, raw world of his photographic practice. For a hundred days, he transformed one of the museum’s galleries into an open studio in which he had amassed three decades of archives, visual narratives, […]

Faits divers – Julie Martin

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Julie Martin

[Summer 2025] Faits divers by Julie Martin [EXCERPT] Considered a minor form of news, often replete with sordid situations, faits divers (weird local news items) lure and fasci­nate as much as they draw repugnance and contempt. Although this ambivalence is key to how we think of such content, the artists gathered at the MAC VAL […]

My-Van Dam, Connecting From the Inside Out – Jean-Michel Quirion

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean-Michel Quirion

[Summer 2025] Connecting From the Inside Out by Jean-Michel Quirion [EXCERPT] The multidisciplinary artist My-Van Dam’s exhibition Connecting From the Inside Out, presented at MAI in fall 2024 and curated by Geneviève Wallen, evinces striking fragility. During an intensive month-long research-creation residency at SBC Galerie d’art contemporain in summer 2023 (with support from Atelier circulaire […]

August Sander, Sander Sardinia 1927 – Kenneth Hayes

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Kenneth Hayes | Artists: August Sander

[Summer 2025] Sander Sardinia 1927 by Kenneth Hayes [EXCERPT] This tightly focused exhibition presents photographs that August Sander made on his little-known journey to Sardinia in the spring of 1927, just prior to the debut of the presentation of his life-work, The People of the 20th Century, at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, in Cologne, later that […]

Michaëlle Sergile, To All the Unnamed Women – Érika Nimis

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Michaëlle Sergile

[Summer 2025] To All the Unnamed Women by Érika Nimis [EXCERPT] The McCord Stewart Museum’s Artist­- in-Residence program, launched in 2012, invites artists to immerse themselves in the museum’s collections, including the Notman Photographic Archives, in order to form new interpretations of them. In 2023, Karen Tam produced the immersive installation Swallowing Mountains, paying tribute […]

Hybridity in Action – Florence Le Blanc

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Essays
Authors: Florence Le Blanc

[Summer 2025] Hybridity in Action by Florence Le Blanc [EXCERPT] Although interactions between photography and animation have evolved since the early twentieth century, recent upheavals in the media world (digital era, social networks, artificial intelligence, and so on) are forcing us to revise how we view images and to realize that reciprocity between the two […]

View from the Sidewalk – Stephanie Hornstein

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Essays
Authors: Stéphanie Hornstein | Artists: Bertrand Carrière, Clara Gutsche, Normand Rajotte, William Notman

[Summer 2025] View from the Sidewalk by Stephanie Hornstein [EXCERPT] Few people have meaningfully transformed the way that I perceive the city around me. One was a graffiti artist friend who took me beneath the Ville-Marie overpass and taught me how to decipher the bubble letters and flourishes that form the signatures of Montreal’s most […]

The Age of Plants – Bénédicte Ramade

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Essays
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade

[Summer 2025] The Age of Plants by Bénédicte Ramade [EXCERPT] With the exhibition Science/Fiction, une non-histoire des Plantes, the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris bore witness to the turn toward plants that has been shaking up the cultural world for a decade, overturning general preconceptions regarding this realm of the living world. Inspired […]

Ed Pien, Presente: Pasado/Futuro – Bernard Schütze, Shaping the Contours of time

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Portfolios
Authors: Bernard Schütze | Artists: Ed Pien

[Summer 2025] Shaping the Contours of time by Bernard Schütze [EXCERPT] The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. – Rainer Maria Rilke In his two-volume artist book, Presente: Pasado/Futuro, Ed Pien sets out part of a broader ongoing project in which he explores notions of time […]

Fatine-Violette Sabiri, Kiss Landing – Fanny Bieth, Photography as a Talisman

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Portfolios
Authors: Fanny Bieth | Artists: Fatine-Violette Sabiri

[Summer 2025] Photography as a Talisman by Fanny Bieth [EXCERPT] Fatine-Violette Sabiri is a multidisciplinary artist whose media include photography, textile arts, and installation. Her book Kiss Landing, published in 2024,1 brings together almost two hundred photographs taken in Casablanca, where Sabrini was born, and in Montreal, where she lives and works. Produced over a […]

Mallory Lowe Mpoka, Architecture of the Self ⎻ Érika Nimis, Feeling and Listening to Images

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Portfolios
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Mallory Lowe Mpoka

[Summer 2025] Feeling and Listening to Images by Érika Nimis [EXCERPT] By combining photography and textiles, the Cameroonian-Belgian artist Mallory Lowe Mpoka weaves visual stories that explore the blurred boundaries of identity and belonging. She focuses on the way in which an individual may navigate in multiple spaces, constantly redefining what it means to be […]

Thematic presentation: From Continent to Continent

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Ed Pien, Fatine-Violette Sabiri, Mallory Lowe Mpoka

Recent news has brought us three artist’s books rooted in a search for identity grounded in duality, encounter, and the passage of memory.

Editorial: Tracing Identities Constructed through Time

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Ed Pien, Fatine-Violette Sabiri

[Summer 2025] Editorial by Jacques Doyon The three artist books featured in this issue were founded on a quest for identity rooted in duality, encounter, and memory. They bear testament to a search for self, built from life sto­ries, diasporic links, transmission of heritages. Photographic portraits and self-portraits are central to these illustrated narratives that […]

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

Art Souterrain – Jérôme Delgado

Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Andrew Rovenko, Barbara Iweins, Blandine Soulage, Caroline Hayeur, Caroline Monnet, Celine Lecomte, Éloi Perreault, Geneviève Thibault, Isabelle Hayeur, Jacynthe Carrier, Jeanne Castonguay-Carrière

For its 17th edition, the Art Souterrain festival has explored our habitats — whether real or mental, intimate or environmental. With photography featured extensively, the festival paints a global portrait that is not always positive but remains tinged with hope. Read here what we thought about it.

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.

Éric Desmarais, Sporobole: A Canary in the Technological Mine – An interview by Jean Gagnon

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Entrevues
Artists: Jean Gagnon

At a time when artificial intelligence (AI) is infiltrating the creative process, the artist-run center Sporobole, whose expertise encompasses digital realities, advocates for an active and pragmatic stance, “neither technophilic nor technophobic.” In an interview, its director, Éric Desmarais, comments on the role of art and copyright in a context where AI would be in control.

Soлomiya no. 3 – Érika Nimis

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Readings
Artists: Érika Nimis

A magazine founded in the months following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Soлomiya addresses a diversity of issues through texts and photography. After reviewing the third issue (2024), Érika Nimis notes that “a tone ranging from hard-hitting articles on the emergency to in-depth reflections on the many challenges raised by the war.”

Sites of Photographic Knowledge – Sophie Bertrand

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Readings
Authors: Sophie Bertrand

Taking stock of photography, its themes, its networks, and its perspectives—that’s the aim of a research group called Formes actuelles de l’expérience photographique. After eight years of existence, its reflection sessions have resulted in seven books.

Paolo Roversi – Ewa Monika Zebrowski

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Ewa Monika Zebrowski | Artists: Paolo Roversi

In her first piece of writing, photographer Ewa Monika Zebrowski reflects on the work of Paolo Roversi, whose retrospective she attended. The exhibition celebrated the experimentation of this fashion and portrait photographer skilled in the techniques of Polaroid.

Yann Pocreau, Des images-lumière – Jean-Michel Quirion

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean-Michel Quirion | Artists: Yann Pocreau

The second iteration of a project on color and light, Yann Pocreau’s exhibition at the Centre Sagamie took the form of a collection of photographic, cinematic and expographical atmospheres. The content was not the result of taking photographs, but of collecting found images and intervening on them in various ways.

Ewa Monika Zebrowski and Anna Lois Dawson Harrington, Light and Fog – Didier Morelli

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Exhibition reviews
Artists: Anna Lois Dawson Harrington, Ewa Monika Zebrowski

The encounter between nature and culture, inherent to the Reford Gardens, resonated in the exhibition Light and Fog. Curator Hélène Samson used the representation of the landscape to create an encounter between two eras, between the photography of Ewa Monika Zebrowski and the watercolors of Anna Dawson and Lois Harrington.

Richard Mosse, Broken Spectre – Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Richard Mosse

Richard Mosse is known for his use of technologies originally designed for non-artistic purposes. For his project in the Amazon, he used a device that reproduces the thermal signature of the human body, aiming this time to capture natural ecosystems. While he imitates companies seeking to exploit land, the Irish artist does so in order to denounce them.

Sandra Brewster, Lullaby of Birdlands – Earl Miller

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Earl Miller | Artists: Sandra Brewster

For the exhibition Lullaby of Birdland, Sandra Brewster presented images printed by gel transfer. This technique, specific to analog photography, involves a number of imperfections that the artist accentuated by crumpling the paper and giving it an illusion of wear.

Thomas Struth, Nature & Politics – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth’s exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery brought together photographs from the last fifteen years, including those from his visits to the European Organization for Nuclear Research, a place marked by the measurement of time.

Thematic presentation: Change of Scene

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon

Thematic presentation for Ciel variable 128: Change of Scene.

Geoffrey James, Canadian Photographs – Kenneth Hayes, A Weakness for Places

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Portfolios
Authors: Kenneth Hayes | Artists: Geoffrey James

Geoffrey James’s Canadian Photographs offer a paradoxical perspective on the vast country that is Canada. Cities and landscapes appear torn between a not always glorious past and an uncertain future.

Louie Palu, Distant Early Warning – Jill Glessing, The New Battle Lines: Images from the Arctic

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Portfolios
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Louie Palu

Louie Palu has traveled to the Canadian Arctic several times, a part of the country whose strategic importance is well known, yet largely inaccessible to most of us due to its inhospitable nature. From his travels, Palu has created a critical project on the militarization of this territory.

Editorial: Elsewhere as Here

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

Editorial by Jacques Doyon for Ciel variable no. 128, on the idea of a change of scene.

Jinyoung Kim, Here – Gabrielle Sarthou, Uprooted, Taking Root

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Portfolios
Authors: Gabrielle Sarthou | Artists: Jinyoung Kim

Jinyoung Kim’s journey is one of emigration, from South Korea to Canada. Although the places are briefly mentioned, it is the very idea of displacement, and the upheavals associated with such uprooting, that forms the core of his works.

Woman, Life, Freedom: Resistance through Images – Claudia Polledri

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Essays, Focus
Authors: Claudia Polledri

Conceived by two Le Monde journalists, Tu ne meurs pas gives a key role to images in the political resistance being waged by the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran. Claudia Polledri’s essay describes the context behind the uprising unfolding both in the streets and on social media, and invokes the concept of “citizen journalism” to assess amateur images not by their aesthetic value but by their informational significance.

Michael Torosian, Bound Greatness – Michel Hardy-Vallée

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Essays
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Michael Torosian

On the occasion of the summer 2024 exhibition paying tribute to the publishing work of Toronto-based Michael Torosian, Michel Hardy-Vallée takes a look at some of the books he has devoted to photography. The Lumiere Press titles, which focus on eminent photographers, are deeply rooted, he notes, within a broader print culture, as Torosian placed great importance on aspects such as image reproduction, typography, presswork, and bookbinding.

Marlene Creates, Territory, Memory, Language – Pierre Dessureault

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Marlene Creates

In this text dedicated to Marlene Creates, Pierre Dessureault explores forty years of image-making in which territory, memory and language intertwine. The Newfoundland artist, whose early work is rooted in the tradition of land art, has never ceased to draw inspiration from her experiences of nature.

Virginie Laganière, Le silence des murs – Esther Bourdages

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Esther Bourdages | Artists: Virginie Laganière

Virginie Laganière’s exhibition at Occurrence revisited the “silence of the walls,” inspired by an old nuclear power plant in Switzerland that has been converted into a storage facility for cultural goods belonging to museum institutions.

Charles-Frédérick Ouellet, A Book – and an Award – Sophie Mangado

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Entrevues
Authors: Sophie Mangado | Artists: Charles-Frédérick Ouellet

In this interview, conducted in the wake of two pieces of news concerning him (the publication of a book and the receiving of a prestigious award), Charles-Frédérick Ouellet talks about the backstory of the image honoured by the World Press Photo jury and about the approach behind his projects.

Maxence Croteau, L’infime (codex) – Michel Hardy-Vallée

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Readings
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Maxence Croteau

In L’infime (codex), a single-copy volume, Maxence Croteau photographed one image of each of the books in a university library on every single shelf. The exhaustiveness of his approach effaces the hierarchy of the gaze, Hardy-Vallée believes, but its materiality is its most interesting aspect.

Isabelle Bonnet et Sophie Hackett, Casa Susanna – Dayna McLeod

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Readings
Authors: Dayna McLeod

The book Casa Susanna, and the photography exhibition that it accompanied, looked back at an unusual celebration of femininity that took place in New York State in the 1960s: that of a community of transvestite men, trans women, and non-gender-conforming people.

Nathalie Bujold, Métroscopies – Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Michel Campeau | Artists: Nathalie Bujold

Flowing from the video recording of the Montreal metro that Nathalie Bujold made as she rode, equipped only with her cell phone, the exhibition Métroscopies comprises eleven screens that convey both unity and diversity.

Josée Pedneault, Talle – Laurie Boivin

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Laurie Boivin | Artists: Josée Pedneault

A meditative, almost wondrous experience, in Laurie Boivin’s view, the exhibition Talle immersed viewers in the underbrush of the Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean region. In works produced during photographic missions developed by Les Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie, Josée Pedneault joined people picking berries in secret spots where wild fruits grow in abundance.

Simon S. Belleau, Répliques – Jean-Michel Quirion

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean-Michel Quirion | Artists: Simon S. Belleau

Montreal artist Simon S. Belleau’s most important exhibition in his decade-long career, Répliques, combined a film, works on paper, and an architectural intervention. Ambitious and spectacular, in the view of Jean-Michel Quirion, Belleau’s offering evoked the work in preparation or backstage in a theatre or film set, by paying attention to what is made visible and what is hidden.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente et Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Foreign in a Domestic Sense – Didier Morelli

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Didier Morelli | Artists: Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Sofía Gallisá Muriente

Reflecting the political and identity-related ambiguity of Puerto Rico, the artists Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo produced a four-channel video installation, shot in Florida among members of the Puerto Rican diaspora.

De la vie au lit – Fanny Bieth

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Fanny Bieth

Unlike what capitalist customs would have us believe, beds are not made simply for rest with a view to better productivity on the job. As the exhibition De la vie au lit advocates, a bed can also be a space for creation, discussion, or action – a place where people with disabilities or illnesses express themselves. The works on display addressed the question of inclusivity and urged us to rethink our spaces and our practices.

Jeremy Shaw, Phase Shifting Index – Marie Perrault

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Marie Perrault | Artists: Jeremy Shaw

Phase Shifting Index, Jeremy Shaw’s seven-channel video installation illustrating how physical and collective rituals influence minds is so impactful that viewers may experience profound illumination, as Marie Perrault suggests. From the initial cacophony to the final rave, the work is the spectacular outcome of Shaw’s twenty years of research into sublimation and its cognitive effects.

Suzanne Lafont, Et toi, chère plante ? – Nathalie Côté

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Nathalie Côté | Artists: Suzanne Lafont

Far from the herbarium and botanical identification, the images that Suzanne Lafont produces from the wildflowers and weeds that she gathers comprise an exploration of colour and relationships between the visual and the written. Following in the tradition of conceptual art, as Nathalie Côté notes, Lafont manipulates her photographs to obtain surreal results, even as she evokes our connections with nature in a myriad of ways.

Eric Tschaeppeler, Birth Order – Michel Hellman

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Michel Hellman | Artists: Eric Tschaeppeler

The order in which children are born plays a fundamental role in the construction of their identity. This notion is behind Eric Tschaeppeler’s series of portraits of siblings titled Birth Order. When Michel Hellman saw the exhibition, he appreciated the absence of artifice and was struck by the composition and intimate nature of the images.

Pussy Riot, Velvet Terrorism – Kelly Midori McCormick

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Kelly Midori McCormick

Irreverential both in its political actions and in the dissemination of its works, Pussy Riot acts with boldness and humour. Kelly Midori McCormick’s observations were made during her visit to the group’s retrospective at The Polygon Gallery, which offered a reflection of the discontent fulminating in Russia even before the invasion of Ukraine.

Bertille Bak, In the Eddies of Globalization – Fabien Pinaroli

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Essays
Authors: Fabien Pinaroli | Artists: Bertille Bak

The exhibition Abus de souffle featured a selection of works produced by Bertille Bak over the last ten years – works that Fabien Pinaroli, in his essay, calls “economic and political fabulations.” The video installations and objects on display, which were made in cooperation with communities caught up in the eddies of globalization in Bolivia, Morocco, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, can be considered tools of resistance.

Suzan Vachon, The Atlas: A Word – Edward Pérez-González

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Essays
Authors: Edward Pérez-González | Artists: Suzan Vachon

Atlas, nébuleuses du Sphinx, an exhibition in which Suzan Vachon staged her own imagination, includes works by sixteen artists but is articulated mainly, as Edward Pérez-González points out in his essay, around “constellations of hyper-connected images in arbitrary arrangements of meanings and shapes.” The five sections form a nebula with “a wealth of blurry edges and imprecise, sometimes confused relationships.”

Deanna Bowen, The Artist as Avenger – Cheryl Simon

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Essays
Authors: Cheryl Simon | Artists: Deanna Bowen

In her essay, Cheryl Simon looks at two projects in which the artist Deanna Bowen examined the relations of influence and identity at the foundation of Canadian history. One project took the form of a mural that highlighted resistance to Black and Jewish immigration; in the other, an exhibition, Bowen looked back to a time when Montreal’s Golden Square Mile neighbourhood was the epicentre of the country’s (white and Anglo-Saxon) power.

Suzy Lake, Game Theory: Global Gamesmanship – Erin Silver, Queening the Pawn

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Portfolios
Authors: Erin Silver | Artists: Suzy Lake

In the series Game Theory: Global Gamesmanship, Suzy Lake presents herself, both as queen and pawn, in a chess game illustrating the power relations of our societies.

Zaynê Akyol, NÛJEN, les combattantes – Claudia Polledri, For “Better and Freer Tomorrows”

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Portfolios
Authors: Claudia Polledri | Artists: Zaynê Akyol

A documentary filmmaker known for her works showing the importance of women’s commitment to the war against the Islamic State, Zaynê Akyol also creates the NÛJEN, les combattantes photography series, which reflects women’s experiences and solidarity on the frontline.

Caroline Monnet, Sororité – Caroline Nepton Hotte, Living Here: A Voice for Indigenous Women

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Portfolios
Authors: Caroline Nepton-Hotte | Artists: Caroline Monnet

As part of her wide-ranging, shape-shifting practice, Caroline Monnet’s composite and multigenerational portraits highlight the important role of native women in transmitting values in a context of decolonization.

Theme presentation: Sisters, Fighters, Queens

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon

The works gathered in this thematic dossier tell the story of women’s affirmation and contributions in various contexts: decolonization, resistance to Islamic fundamentalism and the reconsideration of traditional gamesmanship.

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.

Women at War

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

Hieratic portraits, solemn and emblematic of women in solidarity, standing tall and fighting. Figures of transmission and resistance: sisters, fighters, queens, attacking gamesmanship, fighting for a change in the actual rules of power.  

Andrea Kunard, La photographie au Musée des beaux-arts du Canada — Hélène Samson

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Entrevues
Authors: Hélène Samson

[Summer 2024] by Hélène Samson [EXCERPT] The current photography collection at the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) was built from various sources. The original international collection was established by curator James Borcoman in 1967. After the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (CMCP) closed, in 2009, the NGC incorporated its collection, which included the Still Photography […]

Mirement/Towering — Marie Perrault

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Readings
Authors: Marie Perrault

[Summer 2024] by Marie Perrault Mirement/Towering The book Mirement/Towering continues a reflection based on Geneviève Chevalier’s homonymous exhibition project, which was presented in three parts between 2021 and 2024 at Dazibao (the installations Towering/The Menagerie and Towering/The Herbarium), the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University (Mirement/Trissements), and the Galerie de l’Université du Québec en Outaouais […]

Facing Black Star — Fanny Bieth

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Readings
Authors: Fanny Bieth

[Summer 2024] by Fanny Bieth 291,049: that’s how many prints are in the collection of the Black Star photo agency, acquired by Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) in 2005. The Image Centre, a museum dedicated more broadly to the photographic image, was created to receive, conserve, and promote this immense collection. For anyone with […]

Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Jaida Grey Eagle et Casey Riley, In Our Hands – Native Photography, 1890 to Now — Sophie Guignard

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Readings
Authors: Sophie Guignard | Artists: Casey Riley, Jaida Grey Eagle, Jill Ahlberg Yohe

[Summer 2024] by Sophie Guignard In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now is the catalogue for a major exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art that featured Indigenous photographers who worked between the late nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. The co-curators guest curator, photojournalist Jaida Grey Eagle (Oglala Lakota); the museum’s associate curator of Indigenous […]

Sylviane Van de Moortele, Femmes photographes – Dix ans de luttes pour sortir de l’ombre — Sophie Mangado

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Readings
Authors: Sophie Mangado | Artists: Sylviane Van de Moortele

[Summer 2024] by Sophie Mangado [EXCERPT] “When a feminist is accused of exaggerating, she’s on the right path.” The epigraph announces what is coming. In Femmes photographes. Dix ans de luttes pour sortir de l’ombre, Sylviane Van de Moortele describes the battle fought by women in France against the erasure of their sex in the […]

Sophie Jodoin, d’un seul souffle – Michel Hardy-Vallée

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Sophie Jodoin

[Summer 2024] by Michel Hardy-Vallée [EXCERPT] Sophie Jodoin is an artist of grey nuances. Her range of tones is predictable and her textures are matte – diametrically opposed to the canons of black-and-white photography, in which the world is projected through a scale of contrasts from deep shadows to brilliant reflections. By restraining her palette, […]

Fabiano Kueva, Archive Alexandre de Humboldt Montréal – Gabrielle Sarthou

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Gabrielle Sarthou | Artists: Fabiano Kueva

[Summer 2024] by Gabrielle Sarthou [EXCERPT] The exhibition Archive Alexandre de Humboldt Montréal, organized in collaboration with the independent curator Emmanuelle Choquette, is part of a project built over more than ten years by the Ecuadorian artist, curator, and director Fabiano Kueva, whose works combine sound art, installation, and experimental video. It was presented as […]

Manon de Pauw, Lueurs oniriques – Maxence Croteau

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Maxence Croteau | Artists: Manon De Pauw

[Summer 2024] by Maxence Croteau [EXCERPT] In a rather paroxysmal context in which human-made destruction is scaling up to a hecatomb, the digital interface is inescapable in our lives. Some see it as a mutilated and mutilating way of life in which we are inter-isolated in a totalizing connectivity, reduced to being powerless spectators stupefied […]

SMITH, Outre — Jessica Ragazzini

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jessica Ragazzini

[Summer 2024] by Jessica Ragazzini [EXCERPT] Outre. In the French-language dictionary, the word outre has several definitions. First, as a common noun, outre is an animal pelt sewn into a bag and used as a receptacle. As an adverb, it designates going beyond something. Finally, as a preposition, it signifies an addition. The works by […]

Jean-Jacques Ringuette, Sombre – Méditation sur les abîmes – Karl-Gilbert Murray

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Karl-Gilbert Murray | Artists: Jean-Jacques Ringuette

[Summer 2024] by Karl-Gilbert Murray [EXCERPT] Each image that Jean-Jacques Ringuette creates forcefully, determinedly, and constantly assails the viewer’s eye. Its ambience, whether dreamlike, conflictual, or surrealistic, always offers a mix of affects that reflect a mythology of the human condition and provoke an instant response to the unpredictable spectacle of life. Ringuette’s photographs presented […]

Geneviève Thibault, Corps habité — Alexandra Tourigny Fleury

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Alexandra Tourigny Fleury | Artists: Geneviève Thibault

[Summer 2024] by Alexandra Tourigny Fleury [EXCERPT] The works presented in the exhibition Corps habité are the result of a relationship that Geneviève Thibault cultivated with the Ursuline Sisters of Quebec City over many years. In 2017, the nuns announced that they had to leave the convent in Old Quebec City that had been home […]

Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin, Lune de craie — Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin

[Summer 2024] par Sylvain Campeau [EXCERPT] As I was beginning to write this review of Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin’s exhibition, the fact that she had won the Prix Lynne Cohen in 2021 suddenly came to mind. Beyond the importance and prestige attached to this award, in this case – more than in others – there seem to […]

Claudia Andujar, Activism Beyond Images – André-Louis Paré

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Essays
Authors: André-Louis Paré | Artists: Claudia Andujar

[Summer 2024] Activism Beyond Images by André-Louis Paré [EXCERPT] The exhibition Claudia Andujar and the Yanomami Struggle features the work of the Brazilian photographer and activist Claudia Andujar (born Claudine Haas in 1931, in Neuchâtel, Switzerland). Her Jewish Hungarian father and his family were deported to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. With her Protestant mother, […]

From Slander’s Brand, Visualizing the Past – Kelly Midori McCormick

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Essays
Authors: Kelly Midori McCormick

[Summer 2024] Visualizing the Past by Kelly Midori McCormick [EXCERPT] The exhibition From Slander’s Brand takes as its starting point the impossibility of representing historical events from a singular, one-to-one relationship with reality. The title, referencing Herodotus, the “father of history” – and, for some, the “father of lies” – asks viewers to question the […]

The Photography Scene, France 2023 – Bruno Chalifour

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Essays
Authors: Bruno Chalifour

[Summer 2024] by Bruno Chalifour [EXCERPT] Post-COVID-19, how is photography faring in France? In the past five years the French government commissioned two surveys of the situation, discussed below. Their conclusions and recommendations attempt to staunch the decline of the profession and define the French cultural exception in this field. Since 2022, the focus has […]

Justin Wonnacott, Figureground — Pierre Dessureault, Observing the Theatre of the Streets

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Justin Wonnacott

[Summer 2024] Observing the Theatre of the Streets by Pierre Dessureault [EXCERPT] Following in the street-photography tradition, Ontario photographer Justin Wonnacott has been scrutinizing life in cities in Canada and elsewhere for more than three decades. The images that he has brought together in Figureground highlight the uniqueness of his approach, which has evolved over […]

Patrick Beaulieu, El Perdido — Julie Martin, On the Road to Nowhere

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Portfolios
Authors: Julie Martin | Artists: Patrick Beaulieu

[Summer 2024] On the Road to Nowhere by Julie Martin [EXCERPT] What story can photographs tell? How can a performance be reconstructed? How can travel be recounted with still images? These questions traverse the histories of performance and of photography, and are at the core of the work of the artist Patrick Beaulieu, who updates […]

Francis Alÿs, Children’s Games — Stephen Horne, Outside/Elsewhere

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Francis Alÿs

[Summer 2024] Outside/Elsewhere by Stephen Horne There is no need to understand it, only to contemplate it, to be struck with wonder and laugh with the universal laugh of creation. – Octavio Paz In his video series Children’s Games (1999–ongoing), the Belgian-Mexican artist Francis Alÿs documents the creation of place by children – a space […]

Off the Path

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Editorial
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Francis Alÿs, Justin Wonnacott, Patrick Beaulieu

A trajectory involves movement and, implicitly, evolution or even advancement (read, progress). It is the contrary of a point, which represents immobility, stopping, the status quo. As we move from point A to point B, we change position, context, point of view. The trajectories followed by the three artists in our thematic section show them on the lookout, searching for something that can open new perspectives – and our minds.

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.

Trajectories

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Portfolios

[Summer 2024] PORTFOLIOS A trajectory involves movement and, implicitly, evolution or even advance­ ment (read, progress). It is the contrary of a point, which represents immobility, stopping, the status quo. As we move from point A to point B, we change position, context, point of view. The trajectories followed by the three artists in our […]

Rhizomes, Atlases, and Herbaria

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Bertrand Carrière, Éric Tabuchi, Nelly Monnier, Suzanne Lafont

[Winter 2024] By Jacques Doyon 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 […]

Marie-Carole Noël / Elisapie Isaac, Derrière chaque image, une histoire — Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Elisapie Isaac, Marie-Carole Noël

[Winter 2024] An interview by Jacques Doyon [Excerpt] [ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS ] [ Complete article, in digital version, available here: Marie-Carole Noël / Elisapie Isaac, Derrière chaque image, une histoire — Jacques Doyon ]

Sara A. Tremblay, Poids, plumes – Franck Michel

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Franck Michel | Artists: Sara A. Tremblay

[Winter 2024] By Franck Michel Galerie B-312, Montréal 10.03.2023 — 29.04.2023 [Excerpt] The exhibition Poids, plumes marks a return to the gallery for Sara A. Tremblay after a number of years away. Her great sensitivity and pointed sense of observation are still evident in these works, which display the themes dearest to her: the intimate […]

Patrick Beaulieu, Transvasements – Jérôme Delgado

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Patrick Beaulieu

[Winter 2024] By Jérôme Delgado Art Mûr, Montréal 9.09.2023 — 28.10.2023 [Excerpt] In still and moving images, as well as by various other means (installation, ambient sound, found objects), the exhibition Transvasements takes us to the south of France for a boat trip – in an old fishing boat, to be precise, furnished with a […]

Léna Mill-Reuillard, Airer – Marie Perrault

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Marie Perrault | Artists: Léna Mill-Reuillard

[Winter 2024] By Marie Perrault DRAC Art actuel, Drummondville 8.07.2023 — 20.08.2023 [Excerpt] The exhibition Airer at DRAC Art actuel consisted of Léna Mill-Reuillard’s video installation shot at dusk during a residency at the Grantham Foundation. Projected on six big size screens, the installation transposes the spatial organization of the foundation’s building situated near Drummondville. […]

John Akomfrah, Purple – Ariane Noël de Tilly

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Ariane Noël de Tilly | Artists: John Akomfrah

[Winter 2024] By Ariane Noël de Tilly Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC 23.11.2022 — 7.01.2024 [Excerpt] Like Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings featuring a traveller, a monk, or a handful of people painted from the back looking out at a grandiose landscape – Moonrise over the Sea (1822), for example – the Ghanaian-British artist […]

Michel Huneault, Péninsule – Baptiste Grison

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Baptiste Grison | Artists: Michel Huneault

[Winter 2024] By Baptiste Grison Musée régional de Rimouski 4.06.2023 — 3.09.2023 [Excerpt] “Does this line exist if we don’t see it?” Michel Huneault asked himself this question when he visited the website Surging Seas, which features easy-to-use interactive “risk maps” that allow users to view the prospective effects of sea level rises caused by […]

Shirin Neshat, The Fury – Emmanuelle Choquette

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Emmanuelle Choquette | Artists: Shirin Neshat

[Winter 2024] By Emmanuelle Choquette Centre PHI, Montréal 28.06.2023 — 20.08.2023 [Excerpt] Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s exhibition The Fury resonates strikingly with current events. Neshat addresses the subject of violence perpetrated on people imprisoned for political reasons in the Islamic Republic of Iran, with a specific focus on the treatment of women and girls, many […]

Josué Azor, Emmanuel Galland, Roberto Stephenson, Haïti – Territoires informels – Jean-Michel Quirion

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean-Michel Quirion | Artists: Emmanuel Galland, Josué Azor, Roberto Stephenson

[Winter 2024] By Jean-Michel Quirion Art-image et espace Odyssée de la Maison de la culture de Gatineau 6.07.2023 — 27.08.2023 [Excerpt] The travelling exhibition Haïti – Territoires informels, an initiative by the Montreal artist and curator Emmanuel Galland, is deployed in three series of images by three photographers: Galland himself and the Haitian photographers Josué […]

Shelley Niro, 500 Year Itch – Sophie Guignard

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sophie Guignard | Artists: Shelley Niro

[Winter 2024] By Sophie Guignard National Museum of the American Indian, New York 27.05.2023 — 1.01.2024 [Excerpt] The exhibition Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch is the first major retrospective for Shelley Niro, a multidisciplinary Mohawk artist from the Bay of Quinte Kanyen’kehá:ka Nation and member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, Turtle Clan. […]

Peter Hujar, Performing After the Fact – Didier Morelli

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Essays
Authors: Didier Morelli | Artists: Peter Hujar

[Winter 2024] Performing After the Fact By Didier Morelli [Excerpt] In the Art Institute of Chicago’s lower level, the Photography and Media galleries are a bit of a vault. The drop ceiling hangs low, and the rooms pale in comparison to the museum’s tall and light-flooded galleries above. While Georges Seurat’s emblematic A Sunday on […]

Wolfgang Tillmans, From Banal to Beautiful – Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Wolfgang Tillmans

[Winter 2024] From Banal to Beautiful By Jill Glessing [Excerpt] To Look Without Fear – the title of the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans’s traveling exhibition presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario1 – is an invitation to look around us, unflinchingly, at the real world that we inhabit, an approach modelled throughout Tillmans’s career and […]

Jocelyne Alloucherie, The Image Set in Motion Between Non-Place and Monument – Christian Roy

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Essays
Authors: Christian Roy | Artists: Jocelyne Alloucherie

[Winter 2024] The Image Set in Motion Between Non-Place and Monument By Christian Roy [Excerpt] Selected to contribute to the design of the Viau station, one of the five that will extend the Montreal metro’s blue line, Jocelyne Alloucherie developed a proposal around images of clouds. She recently offered an overview of it, for which […]

Bertrand Carrière, Autoroutes 10-20-55 — Michel Hardy-Vallée, Landscape and Automobile

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Bertrand Carrière

[Winter 2024] Landscape and Automobile By Michel Hardy-Vallée [Excerpt] Recently, driving home from Quebec City, I stopped for hot dogs in Neuville. The setting wasn’t elegant: a gas station with a food concession, surrounded by a lot with vague edges. I wanted something shapeless and soft after spending a full day with intellectually and aesthetically […]

Suzanne Lafont, Nouvelles espèces de compagnie — Julie Martin, Urban Intrusion

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: Julie Martin

[Winter 2024] Urban Intrusion By Julie Martin [Excerpt] Here, petals in subtle variations of red. There, the intricately traced veins of a leaf. Elsewhere, delicate yellow stamens; and farther on, a clean green sepal and half-open cottony buds. In her series Nouvelles espèces de compagnie, produced in 2017 for a commission from the city of […]

Marie-Carole Noël / Elisapie Isaac, Derrière chaque image, une histoire — Jacques Doyon

Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Elisapie Isaac, Marie-Carole Noël

[Winter 2024] Marie-Carole Noël and Elisapie Isaac, Derrière chaque image, une histoire An interview by Jacques Doyon [Excerpt] The fascinating documentary Derrière chaque image, une histoire, broadcast during the National Day for Truth and Reconcilation,1 highlights projects aimed at recovering the names of Inuit and Indigenous people who, in colonial history – our history – […]

Photographie contemporaine et anthropocène – Bénédicte Ramade

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Book Reviews, Readings
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade

[Winter 2024] Bénédicte Ramade Photographie contemporaine & anthropocène Danièle Méaux Paris, Éditions Filigranes, 2022, 288 pages [Excerpt] How do we photograph the hyper-object that is the Anthropocene? How do we capture the geological and atmospheric dimensions of this human-determined epoch, the chronology of which stretches back centuries, according to research on the Capitalocene (Andreas Malm), […]

Documentary Genealogies: Photography 1848–1917 – Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Book Reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing

[Winter 2024] By Jill Glessing Edited by Jorge Ribalta Madrid, Museo Reina Sofia, 2023, 263 pages [Excerpt] Important technologies are designed for and controlled by those holding wealth and power. Photography, as a potent information medium, is one of these. It was developed during the mid-nineteenth century in France and England – Europe’s imperialist heartland […]

Art, publics et cultures numériques – Jean Gagnon

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Book Reviews
Authors: Jean Gagnon | Artists: Jean Gagnon

[Winter 2024] By Jean Gagnon Sous la direction de Suzanne Paquet et Alexandrine Théorêt Montréal, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2023, 201 pages [Excerpt] This book, published by a university press in spring 2023, bears a title that might lead one to believe that it addresses the publics for works circulating in digital networks. It […]

Éric Tabuchi / Nelly Monnier, Exposer l’ARN — Luce Lebart, Photographic Tour of France

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: Luce Lebart | Artists: Éric Tabuchi, Nelly Monnier

[Winter 2024] Photographic Tour of France By Luce Lebart [Excerpt] Soleil Gris, Éric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier’s exhibition in Arles,1 opened under a blazing sun in the Ground Control industrial site on the edge of the historic city in the Bouches-du-Rhône department. This big hangar, to which attendees to Rencontres d’Arles photography festival rarely return […]

Agglomerations

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Portfolios
Artists: Bertrand Carrière, Éric Tabuchi, Nelly Monnier, Suzanne Lafont

[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 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 […]

New & Worthy — Jérôme Delgado

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Book Reviews, Readings
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Josée Pedneault

[Fall 2023] By Jérôme Delgado [Excerpt] Clément Brochet et Marvin Serandrei, Conversations, sous la direction d’Anick Arsenault et Geneviève Thibault, Matane, Cégep de Matane, 2022, non paginé Josée Pedneault, Contre-jour, Montréal, Free Pony Press, 2022, non paginé [bilingue] Guy Tremblay, À la vitesse que poussent les arbres. Guide de survie en temps de morosité, Montréal, […]

Manifeste pour une post-photographie, Joan Fontcuberta — Nicolas Mavrikakis

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Book Reviews
Artists: Joan Fontcuberta

[Fall 2023] By Nicolas Mavrikakis [Excerpt] Manifeste pour une post-photographie Joan Fontcuberta Arles, Actes Sud, 2022, 80 pages The artist, critic, professor, and theoretician Joan Fontcuberta has written a manifesto in which he takes an unvarnished look at issues and, especially, anxieties surrounding how photographs, and the image in general, seem to be changing in […]

African Studies, Edward Burtynsky — Anaïs Castro

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Book Reviews
Artists: Edward Burtynsky

[Fall 2023] By Anaïs Castro [Excerpt] African Studies Edward Burtynsky Göttingen, Steidl, 2022, 208 pages Edward Burtynsky’s most recent book, African Studies, is a visually stunning journey across the second-largest and widely misunderstood continent that is Africa, and the forces of industrialization and globalization that are shaping its diverse landscapes. Burtynsky enlisted esteemed collaborators on […]

Evergon Nitty Gritty: Male Toilet Angst — Karl-Gilbert Murray

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Karl-Gilbert Murray | Artists: Evergon

[Fall 2023] By Karl-Gilbert Murray [Excerpt] Ellephant, Montréal 25.02.2023 — 28.04.2023 The exhibition Nitty Gritty: Male Toilet Angst at Galerie Ellephant presents a group of Evergon’s photographs from the series Manscapes. Bathed in backlighting that indicates an aesthetic choice, the images suggest a sense of reflection that oscillates between study of morals and analysis of […]

Lynne Cohen / Marina Gadonneix, Laboratories / Observatories — Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Lynne Cohen

[Fall 2023] By [Excerpt] Centre Pompidou, Paris 12.04.2023 — 28.08.2023 “It’s not that I don’t care about content, but content is not the only way a photograph has meaning.” — James Welling The exhibition Laboratories/Observatories comprises large bodies of work by two contemporary photographers: the late American/Canadian Lynne Cohen (1944– 2014) and the French Marina […]

Sanaz Sohrabi, Extraction Out of Frame — Stéphanie Hornstein

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stéphanie Hornstein | Artists: Sanaz Sohrabi

[Fall 2023] By Stéphanie Hornstein [Excerpt] VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal 14.01.2023 — 4.03.2023 In an all-new body of work commissioned by VOX, Sanaz Sohrabi traces the imperialist legacy of Britain’s involvement in the exploitation of Iranian oil resources from the first concession, in 1901, to the forced nationalization of the British Petroleum Company […]

Bert Danckaert, Teatros — Emmanuel Galland

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Emmanuel Galland | Artists: Bert Danckaert

[Fall 2023] By Emmanuel Galland [Excerpt] Galerie Laroche / Joncas, Montréal 11.01.2023 — 11.02.2023 The Belgian artist Bert Danckaert’s regular visits to Cuba seem to have created a new opening in his work, as can be seen in his recent series Teatros (2018–22). In his previous projects, he collected fragments of urban life in tight […]

Goose Village, Marisa Portolese — Sophie Bertrand

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sophie Bertrand | Artists: Marisa Portolese

[Fall 2023] By Sophie Bertrand [Excerpt] Occurrence, espace d’art et d’essai contemporains, Montréal 20.01.2023 — 11.03.2023 Once upon a time, there was Goose Village – also called Village-aux-Oies or Victoriatown – a working-class district in Montreal, adjacent to the port on one side and the Canadian National Railway train yards on the other. This enclave […]

Joannie Lafrenière, Hochelaga – Montréal en mutation — Michel Hellman

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Michel Hellman

[Fall 2023] By Michel Hellman [Excerpt] Musée McCord Stewart, Montréal 31.03.2023 — 10.09.2023 When the director and photographer Joannie Lafrenière was approached by the McCord Stewart Museum to take part in the second edition of Evolving Montreal (a program of photographic commissions on the theme of transformation of the city’s neighbourhoods), she had no doubt […]

Mary Ellen Mark, Ward 81 — Fanny Bieth

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Fanny Bieth

[Fall 2023] By Fanny Bieth [Excerpt] The Image Centre, Toronto 25.01.2023 — 1.04.2023 In winter 1975, Mary Ellen Mark was the on-set photographer for the shooting of Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on location at a psychiatric institution, the Oregon State Hospital, where she first met and photographed patients. She returned the […]

Alain Paiement, Cosmic Blues — Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Alain Paiement

[Fall 2023] By Sylvain Campeau [Excerpt] Galerie Hugues Charbonneau Montréal 15.03.2023 — 23.04.2023 Theodor Adorno wondered whether it was still possible to write poetry after the horrors of Auschwitz. The same question can no doubt be asked today, of the entire field of art, as we wait uneasily to find out how climate change will […]

Edward Hillel, Framing the Sequel — Michel Hardy-Vallée

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Essays
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Edward Hillel

[Fall 2023] Framing the Sequel Michel Hardy-Vallée [Excerpt] I would love to go to the Main for a smoked meat right now, but it’s closed. I mean: the Main Deli has just closed. It was the one right across the street from Schwartz’s. It served the same kind of sandwiches that are too fat to […]

The Lives of Documents – Photography as Project — Edward Pérez-González

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Essays
Authors: Edward Pérez-González

[Fall 2023] Capturing the Image, Grasping What’s Human Edward Pérez-González [Excerpt] The idea that documentary photography is a neutral means of capturing reality has been utterly debunked. Photographs are not, and never were, simple recordings of reality, which is always complex and subjective. They are imbued with the preconceived ideas – values, feelings, social construction […]

Décadrage colonial, Decentring the Gaze — Claudia Polledri

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Essays
Authors: Claudia Polledri

[Fall 2023] Décadrage colonial Decentring the Gaze [Excerpt] Based on a rereading of French photographic production in the 1930s, the exhibition Décadrage colonial1 underlines the contradictions of an era fascinated by cultures from “elsewhere” and concerned with redefining the image of a nation. Décadrage: leaving the frame, shifting the image, decentring the subject and, thus, […]

Adad Hannah, Expositions récentes — Posing Bodies and Works, Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Adad Hannah

[Fall 2023] Posing Bodies and Works Sylvain Campeau [Excerpt] At Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain,1 Adad Hannah recently presented a panorama combining new works, in the first gallery, with others still underway, in the second gallery. Hence the logic of grouping them under the title Recent Exposures. There is in allusion here to one of Hannah’s […]