Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Essays
Authors: Louis Perreault
July 31, 2017 [originally published in CV109 in Spring 2018] — First, there was a fox. A few strollers noticed him, but he evaded a closer look by disappearing into the weeds of a post-industrial lot in Montreal East. I quickly took a liking to the animal and made him a sort of personal totem…
Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Essays
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Angela Grauerholz, Chih-Chien Wang, Gabor Szilasi, Luc Courchesne, Marie-Jeanne Musiol, Michel Campeau, Raymonde April, Roberto Pellegrinuzzi, Serge Clément, Yan Giguère, Yann Pocreau
Octobre 19, 2021 [originally published in CV109 in Summer 2018 ] — This round-robin exhibition featured powerful and evocative images of the original site of the recently abandoned Royal Victoria Hospital. Eleven Montreal artists were invited by the RBC Art and Heritage Centre of the McGill University Health Centre to tour the original site…
Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Essays
Authors: Marie-Josée Jean | Artists: Jonathan Monk
Octobre 26, 2021 [originally published in CV109 in Summer 2018 ] — Exhibition views have taken on an increasingly important role since museum specialists began featuring them in exhibitions. Originally placed under glass, following a documentary protocol introduced via museology, this form of documentation has gradually come to be displayed on walls, occasionally ascribed the status of artwork…
Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Essays
Authors: Claudia Polledri | Artists: Akram Zaatari
November 3, 2021 [originally published in CV109 in Summer 2018 ] — According to Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari, photography is expressed in many ways. This is the message of his exhibition, Against Photography: An Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation, a kaleidoscopic journey, through stories and images…
Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Essays
Authors: Florence Chantoury-Lacombe | Artists: Alain Laframboise
June 8, 2021 [originally published in French only in CV108 in Winter 2018] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: 2fik, Johan Hallberg-Campbell, Katherine Knight, Luis Jacob, Margo Pfeiff, Mark Lewis, Michael Snow, Michelle Latimer, Sandra Brewster, Suzy Lake
June 15, 2021 [originally published in French only in CV108 in Winter 2018] —
Promotion for “Canada 150” – marking the inception of the colonial enterprise of the “Dominion of Canada” and its unequal union with Quebec – was tepid, perhaps foretelling the inevitable response: a hundred and fifty years old – really? The land, of course, had been inhabited a little longer than that – about twelve thousand years – by Indigenous peoples…
Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Angela Grauerholz, David McMillan, Gabor Szilasi, George Hunter, Jeff Wall, Jim Breukelman, Jin-Me Yoon, John Massey, Ken Lum, Lynne Cohen, Nina Raginsky, Robert Burley
June 22, 2021 [originally published in French only in CV108 in Winter 2018] — It seems less and less possible to analyze photography and photographic history without talking about production protocols, dissemination strategies, and contexts for conservation and display in public collections. Andrea Kunard situates her undertaking in regard to this position from the start…
Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Essays
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Akram Zaatari, Meryl McMaster, Pascal Grandmaison, Taryn Simon, Yto Barrada, Zanele Muholi
February 21, 2018 [originally published in CV108 in Winter 2018] — In June 2017, Le Mois de la Photo de Montréal metamorphosed to the Biennale de l’image, taking on the name MOMENTA, plural of momentum, which means “impetus, energy, force, thrust, drive, impulse”1 and often denotes a favourable or propitious situation. Would the update to this international event devoted to the contemporary fixed and moving image be successful and yet provide continuity with the old formula?…
Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault
December 8, 2020 [originally published in CV107 in Fall 2017] — The NFB’s Still Photography Division was created in 1941, as a Canadian government information agency under the direction of John Grierson. By 1985, when the small unit’s production, now a collection of photographs, became the core of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Division had produced some 250,000 images.
Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Essays
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Délio Jasse, Katia Kameli, Vasco Araújo
December 15, 2020 [originally published in CV107 in Fall 2017] — Three solo exhibitions (Katia Kameli, Délio Jasse, and Vasco Araújo) organized in London late in 2016 featured episodes from African and European history, particularly during the colonial period, in which the artists used “traces,” mainly photographic corpuses dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, updated via different media and devices.
Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Essays
Authors: Guillaume Lafleur | Artists: Emanuel Licha
December 22, 2020 [originally published in CV107 in Fall 2017] — Hotel Machine is a feature-length film in the current meaning of the term. It is Licha’s first production of this type, as he comes from the contemporary-art world and his work has usually been presented in galleries. It is related to the trend in documentary cinema that involves taking solid formal points of view – a trend that has been validated by following the traditional levers of funding.
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Essays
Authors: Colette Tougas | Artists: Angela Grauerholz
June 30, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — From July 19, 2016, to February 19, 2017, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts mounted an exhibition titled She Photographs, described in the press release as a “feminine echo” of the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective at the museum in autumn 2016. More than simply an echo, this presentation of works by thirty female photographers, most of them Canadian, painted a strong and true portrait…
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Josef Sudek
August 18, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — In the early 1920s, when Josef Sudek was becoming established as a photographer, Prague had emerged as a point of convergence for avant-garde movements from France, Germany, and Russia. After the dismantlement of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following the Great War, members of these movements were interested in rethinking art – both how it was practised and its relationship with life…
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing
August 25, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — Resistance to oppression takes many forms. Antonio Gramsci, incarcerated during Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, struggled to understand the workings of power. Developing his concept of hegemony, published later in Prison Notebooks, Gramsci proposed that power is always in flux and unstable, hence always vulnerable to popular contestation…
Artworks created as part of the fund-raising campaign ARTGEIST II – FREE FIGURES (2015-2016) Ciel variable presents the artworks created and acquired during its second fund-raising campaign, conducted in 2015–16. In the same spirit as Sitegeist, the 2012–13 campaign, Artgeist proposed that collectors support the magazine by acquiring an original work created specifically for them. […]
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Essays
Artists: Angela Grauerholz, Benoit Aquin, Éliane Excoffier, Marisa Portolese, Pascal Grandmaison
[Winter 2017] Artworks created as part of the find-raising campaign (2015-2016) Ciel variable presents the artworks created and acquired during its second fund-raising campaign, conducted in 2015–16. In the same spirit as Sitegeist, the 2012–13 campaign, Artgeist proposed that collectors support the magazine by acquiring an original work created specifically for them. This project also […]
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Essays
Authors: Guy Sioui Durand
April 28, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — Two forms of orality opened and then closed the exhibition Ensemble at VU in Quebec City in October 2016. At the opening, an Indigenous talking circle, led by Nadia Myre, was performed in the large gallery called Espace américain. At the end of the exhibition was a roundtable in the centre of the same gallery, moderated by curator Anne-Marie Proulx…
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Essays
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Jessica Eaton
April 30, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — Jessica Eaton, a fast-rising star in the photographic world, has for some time now explored the notion of “colour is a verb” with rare verve, intensity, and thematic abandon. In her recent dovetailing series of works shown at Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran in Montreal as part of an exhibition aptly titled Transmutations, Eaton, already celebrated as a doyenne of colour theory…
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Essays
Authors: Zoë Tousignant
May 5, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — The essay reprinted here was written for an exhibition curated by Zoë Tousignant and presented at Artexte. The exhibition was developed as part of Tousignant’s long-term research project, which examines histories and relationships between photography and the printed document in Canada…
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Essays
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Carl Trahan
February 24, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — The arts were turned upside down by the advent of the internet and social media, and photography perhaps more than any other art. The uninterrupted flow of images on the Web creates both anxiety and saturation…
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Essays
Authors: Robert Evans | Artists: Robert Bean
February 26, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — Robert Bean’s photographs in the series Études (for Marconi), though seemingly straightforward in content, continue the artist’s investigations of obsolescence, its myriad relationships with and the surprisingly malleable notions of past, present, and future, and their outcomes…
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Essays, Interviews
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade, Jacques Doyon
March 3, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — The Edge of the Earth focuses on contributions by various artists and journalists to the recognition and consideration of issues linked to climate change, with a particular emphasis on the challenges posed by recognition of the central role played by humans in the disruption of their environment in what is now known as the Anthropocene Era.
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Essays
Authors: Marcel Blouin
December 11, 2019 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — It was Lucie Bureau who thought up the organization’s name. She was working at Radio Centre-Ville, a multilingual community radio station broadcasting from St. Lawrence Boulevard in Montreal. The name came to mind because she was producing “vox populi” pieces about social and cultural issues…
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Essays
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Coco Fusco, Em’kal Eyongakpa, George Mahashe, Georges Senga, Héla Ammar, J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Lebohang Kganye, Lola Khalfa, Moussa Kalapo, Seydou Camara, Sihem Salhi, Uche Okpa-Iroha, Youssef Lahrichi
December 16, 2019 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — The biennale in Bamako, Mali, came to an end on December 31, 2015. This anniversary edition – the tenth – had been delayed by two years due to a major crisis that occurred in 2012. Even a few weeks before the opening, there was still a climate of uncertainty, though it was quickly swept away by the invigorating enthusiasm of the organizing committee.
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Essays
Authors: Claude Baillargeon | Artists: Ishiuchi Miyako
December 18, 2019 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — Active since 1975 as a fiercely independent photographer in her native Japan, Ishiuchi Miyako has at last achieved significant recognition on the North American art scene…
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Ana Casas Broda, Janek Zamoyski, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Luis Arturo Aguirre, Luis González Palma, Martín Chambi, Ray Govea, Rodrigo Moya, Tina Modotti
October 9, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Essays
Authors: Élène Tremblay
October 15, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — Curator Joan Fontcuberta’s idea of bringing together artists who explore the post-photographic condition for Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal is especially pertinent in an era in which digital technology has challenged the status of the photographic image…
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Essays
Authors: Erika Nimis
October 16, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — Lagos – Eko in the Yoruba language – is a typical megalopolis. With its some twenty million inhabitants, it is the economic and cultural heart and soul of Nigeria, which is the birthplace of Wole Soyinka (Nobel Prize for literature) and Fela Kuti (the father of Afrobeat) and the home of Nollywood (the third-largest movie industry in the world)….
January 20, 2016 — We received two long letters to the editor, by Hannah Claus and by Lori Beavis, written in reaction to Bénédicte Ramade’s essay on the exhibition The Rebel Yells: Dress and Political Re-dress in Contemporary Indigenous Art, published in issue 101 of the magazine (autumn 2015).
October 27, 2015 Dear Editor, Re: L’habit fait-il le moine/ Do the clothes make the man? Thank you for setting up a situation through the September 2015 review of The Rebel Yells: Dress and Political Re-dress in Contemporary Indigenous Art/ Le cri rebelle: habillement et redressement politique dans l’art autochtone actuel to continue the conversation […]