© Laila Ait B., 2022.
As part of the 8th edition of Montreal Monochrome, multidiciplinary artist Laila Ait B. presents her Window install Le nœud.
Le nœud is a first in a series of sculptures in progress by artist Laila Ait B.
The artist took this work out of the atelier to exhibit in articule’s window display gallery as a way of returning this mannequin to the street, and specifically Rue St-Hubert from which the mannequin was collected.
Le nœud is a mixed media sculpture and text-based installation, made from recycled electronics and digital testimonies, exploring intimacy and collectivity in our body’s relationship with digital capitalist time.
Found testimonies knotted with mixed media
Within her daily artistic practice, Laila collects discarded electronics and glean stories, dreams and confessions shared by people on several psychoanalytic Facebook groups she’s a member of. For this work, she wanted to identify the political within the personal and trace a collective language around time: with the help of creative code, she identifies the most repeated words that grapple with time. With each repetition Laila made a knot; working long hours that reverse the temporality of endless scrolling and brings her flesh, closer to the metallic, a difficult material to work with by hand and which often cut her own skin.
A mannequin that doesn’t sell anything
The window displays of St Hubert are infamous for its mannequin ensembles draped with evening gowns, costumes, wedding dresses, uniforms, lingerie.......this mannequin is different: it stands alone ; carrying the words and knots of peoples troubled relationship with transactional Time.
Considering the increase in COVID 19 and flu transmissions, please note that masks must be worn for the duration of the events.
© Photos from the Le Noeud window exhibition by Laila Ait B, 2022, at articule, photographed by kimura byol.
© Laila Ait B., 2022.
Laila Ait B. maintains a daily practice of involuntary making: holding space and time for art to come out of an experimental process first. A research process then begins as a living and developing relationship with what she just made. Her oeuvre takes on a life of its own in relation with many others who later encounter it.
Laila grew up in Marrakech, making with materials and stories she gleaned from the diverse worlds which made up her childhood. She believes she cannot understand her consciousness through institutional channels of knowledge like school and university but rather through her desire to discover the mysteries of the human condition in the street, at home or especially by chance. She is particularly curious about the human unconscious as it relates to national and gender identity and how art can reveal and subvert ideology. She started her art practice without calling it such.
Laila lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.
Montreal Monochrome is an annual conference organized by articule’s Fabulous Committee (anti-oppression). It aims to address the mis- and under-representation and systemic oppression of marginalized groups in Montréal’s contemporary art milieu. The conference works toward imagining and nurturing new and existing bonds, solidarities and friendships between Indigenous artists, thinkers and cultural workers and their racialized allies.
As a project of the Fabulous Committee, this year the Short Term Programming Committee is joining the efforts of the Fabulous Committee to combine the annual conference with a window exhibition and a Special Project. Both proposals are an invitation to think about the new gallery space in terms of multiple notions of time.
Given that accessibility is contextual, varied and dynamic, if any aspect of our programming is inaccessible to you now or in the future, please let us know. We are happy to discuss and provide an alternative.
articule is located in a ground floor commercial building in Villeray neighbourhood. There are no stairs at the gallery, and to enter, the front door has a slope (light inclination). There is one glass door to get into the gallery. A staff member can assist you with the door.
Accessibility contact: Aziza Nassih - outreach@articule.org