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 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.
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 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 | 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.
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.
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.
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.
Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Essays
Authors: Bernard Schütze | Artists: Kim Waldron
The works in the retrospective Kim Waldron ltée: société civile, rooted in a reflection of the museological process, illustrate the experiments and issues that Waldron took on by inserting herself into real-life contexts such as family life, labour, and corporate finance.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.