Palazzo Chupi

Opening :: Saturday January 24 (3 PM)

Michael Blum proposes a critical and subversive (re)reading of major historical narratives. "His projects attempt [. . .] to confront the individual dimension with macro-economic and socio-political systems"1, most often using of overlooked characters or news items whose narrative he reappropriates by introducing new connections. Two exhibitions held in Montreal in 2014 and based on recent investigations dealt, respectively, with the activities of Jacques Mesrine in Quebec (Guerre et paix, VOX) and with the question of the manifold Québécois and Canadian identities (Notre histoire || Our History, Galerie de l’UQAM).

Études préparatoires. Dessins d'explosions 2012-2015

Opening :: Saturday January 24 (3 PM)

TOUT FAIRE PÉTER! MAKP wants to turn it all upside down, raze everything. Like the primitivists, he cries out, Zerstörung ist ein Anfang!1 But what is destruction the beginning of?

A Proposal from Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf

*Schoolchildren Opening - March 9 from 5 PM to 7 PM *
As part of OPTICA’s Artists in the Schools Program, Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf will meet up with 5th and 6th graders at Saint-Enfant-Jésus elementary school in the Mile End. Schoolchildren participating in the project will visit the exhibition with the artist in attendance and explore the creative process through a workshop given at their school. The drawings and poems the students produced during the workshop will be presented at centre OPTICA’s new AGORA space.

Workshops for Kids

On Family Saturdays, you and your children can discover Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf's new exhibition entitled Études préparatoires. Dessins d'explosions 2012-2015.

Polyphonies

Curator Veronique Leblanc is interested in art practices that address questions of alterity and democracy. Her approach involves analyzing works that explore ways ideological and identity-related constructions participate in the articulation of community life. Bringing together works constructed along polyphonic lines, her exhibition project seeks to highlight the issues raised by art practices based on participatory and performative processes and involving a plurality of voices. Often based on a documentary approach that resembles anthropological field exercises (questionnaires, gathering data), she orchestrates the meeting of a multiplicity of particular voices in forms that create a discrepancy with the reality being documented. This gap then opens a space in which the individual meets the political. The works that Leblanc gathers before us testify at once to relationships between individuality and community and to the tensions between self-affirmation and the integration of normative discourse, though bearing new relationships between individual narratives and history.