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.
[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 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 | 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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]