New exhibitions at the MAC starting June 20: bold summer programming featuring Québec and Canadian artists
MONTREAL, April 23, 2019 /CNW Telbec/ - Le Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) is pleased to announce its summer programming beginning June 20 which, through questions of identity and humanity, will explore some of the pressing issues of our time. The works of Québec and Canadian artists Rebecca Belmore, Nadia Myre, Chloé Lum and Yannick Desranleau will be presented throughout the summer, offering visitors unexpected discoveries and moving experiences. Performances, talks with artists and curators, interactive tours and a series of educational activities round up the program. The MAC is also excited to collaborate once again with MOMENTA | Biennale de l'image to welcome artist Francis Alÿs this fall, as part of the next Biennale. As the start date of the MAC's Transformation Project has been postponed, the MAC will continue to hold its activities in its current location, on Sainte-Catherine Street, while offering high-quality programming to visitors. Updates about the Transformation Project will be shared as they become available.
"This will be a great summer for the MAC. I'm really happy about how we created a high-calibre program that's imbued with poetry and brings up timely and crucial questions about human condition and the times we live in," said John Zepetelli, Director and Chief Curator of the MAC.
Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental
June 20 to October 6, 2019
MAC's summer season will begin on June 20 with Canadian artist Rebecca Belmore and the exhibition Facing the Monumental, her largest exhibition to date and a major overview from the past 30 years. The rich body of work presented includes sculptures, installations, photography and videos, some of which are based on performances. With boundless beauty, sensitivity and resilience, her work explores our problematic relationships with territory, women's lives, historic events and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples.
One of Canada's most celebrated and important contemporary artists, Rebecca Belmore started working as a performance artist in the late 1980s. The immediacy and presence of that discipline continue to influence her diverse practice. Themes in her work include conflicts and issues related to climate change, access to water, land use, homelessness, and human migration and displacement. In Facing the Monumental, the artist presents a collection of visceral images exploring the pressing issues our time.
The exhibition is organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and curated by Wanda Nanibush, Curator of Indigenous Art. The MAC presentation is organized by Lesley Johnstone, Curator and Head of Exhibitions and Education.
MAC Collection: Nadia Myre, Chloé Lum and Yannick Desranleau
June 20 to August 4, 2019
In keeping with Rebecca Belmore's exhibition, the MAC will present works from its collection and new acquisitions, including pieces by Nadia Myre, that express something profoundly human as they tackle topics of desire, loss, resilience and knowledge. Based on themes such as Indigenous identity, Meditations on Red, 2013, is a series of photographs depicting meticulous beadwork. Through the piece, the artist offers a critical reflection on identity as defined by blood and the racist concepts of "white man" and "red." With her Contact in Monochrome (Toile de Jouy), 2018, wallpaper and Pipe, 2017, her bronze-cast tobacco pipe, she reinterprets the history and evolution of the tobacco trade.
The theme of performativity, present in Rebecca Belmore's work, can be seen through a completely different lens in the work of Chloé Lum and Yannick Desranleau. Two installations?one a sculpture: The Face Stayed East The Mouth Went West, 2014, a recent acquisition of the MAC's Collection that has yet to be presented, and the other a video installation: What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest?, 2018?will be positioned in mutual dialogue. The installation will serve as a testimony to the development of the artists' work in relation to the living arts and performativity of the last few years.
Francis Alÿs: Children's Games
September 4, 2019, to January 5, 2020
Focusing on the theme The Life of Things, proposed by curator María Wills Londoño in collaboration with Audrey Genois and Maude Johnson, the MAC and MOMENTA | Biennale de l'image unite to present Children's Games, 1999-2018, by Francis Alÿs.
Francis Alÿs presents his series Children's Games, a collection of scenes of children at play around the world. Ongoing since 1999 and now comprising nearly twenty videos, this inventory of childhood activities shows how children turn simple, ordinary things?chairs, coins, sand, stones, plastic bottles?into the foundation of unlikely and fantastical universes.
By exploring public space and the everyday through the playful imagination of children, Alÿs proposes an intimate yet political view of the universal and unifying nature of games. Although the current state of the world prevents us from imagining globalization as a positive form of togetherness, this praxis of imagination might express the very essence of humanism, reinvented.
Talks and tours with artists and curators will also take place throughout the summer. For the full schedule, visitors can sign up to the newsletter and make sure to visit the Museum's website regularly: https://macm.org/en/mac-newsletter/.
OTHER MAC ACTIVITIES THIS SUMMER
Performances: Los subrogados | Les substituts
June 20, 2019, as part of Place Publique, at the Darling Foundry
Co-presented by the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) of Mexico City, the MAC and Quartier éphémère, and conceived by Véronique Leblanc, guest MAC curator, and Alejandra Labastida, associate curator at MUAC, Los subrogados | Les substituts is a one-night event featuring eight performance artists, four in Mexico City and four in Montreal. Each artist will update or create a work that will be performed simultaneously by a delegated artist in the other city. The project is based on the diversity of the voices?of their trajectories, identities, generations?in each place, to showcase today's most relevant forms of performance.
The invited artists are:
Sarah Chouinard-Poirier | Juan Caloca
Catherine Lavoie-Marcus | Nadia Lartigue
Helena Martin Franco | Alicia Medina
Martín Rodríguez | Guillermo Santamarina
The event will take place as part of Place Publique, at the Darling Foundry.
Ongoing media art programming: Ragnar Kjartansson starting June 20
As of June 20, programming dedicated to media works and projections will be presented in the museum's Beverly Webster Rolph room. Ragnar Kjartansson will open the show and occupy the entire space with A Lot of Sorrow, 2013. Belonging to the MAC's Collection, the piece is a collaboration with band The National. The video is the result of a performance organized by MoMA PS1 and directed by the artist, where the group performed their song Sorrow repeatedly for six hours, or 105 times.
Educational activities and tours
The famous MAC summer camp is back on June 25 and will continue until August 16. Young campers will have the opportunity to discover public art exhibited near the museum, as well as works of art exhibited at the MAC. A wide range of activities in the visual arts and digital arts will be offered: drawing, painting, engraving, collage, sculpture and t-shirt screen-printing. At the end of the week, there will be an exhibition displaying the budding artists' artwork.
Information and registration: https://macm.org/en/activities/summer-camp-2019/
Workshops for families and adults, as well as a summer Workshop/Tour Combo, related to the themes from Rebecca Belmore's and Nadia Myre's exhibitions will be offered to visitors.
Schedule and information: https://macm.org/en/education/
Interactive individual or group tours will be offered all summer, as well as on-site mediation, where visitors can speak with the Museum's art mediators and ask them questions.
Schedules and information: https://macm.org/en/activities/
Acknowledgements
The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal is a provincially owned corporation funded by the ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec. It receives additional funding from the Government of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal
Located in the heart of the Quartier des Spectacles, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal makes today's art a vital part of Montréal and Québec life. For more than fifty years, this vibrant museum has brought together local and international artists, their works and an ever-growing public. It is also a place of discovery, offering visitors experiences that are continually changing and new, and often unexpected and stirring. The MAC presents temporary exhibitions devoted to outstanding and relevant current artists who provide their own particular insight into our society, as well as exhibitions of works drawn from the museum's extensive Permanent Collection. These may feature any and every form of expression: digital and sound works, installations, paintings, sculptures, ephemeral pieces, and more. In addition to its wide range of educational activities familiarizing the general public with contemporary art, the MAC organizes unique artistic performances and festive events. It is a window onto a myriad of avant-garde expressions that extend the reach of art throughout the city and beyond. macm.org/en/
SOURCE Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal
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