Montreal Monochrome IX
© Photo Credits: Laura Leong, 2024.
Montreal Monochrome IX · Undoing
Events - June 13 to 22, 2024
What is receptive, or unreceptive, to being undone: what materials, objects, structures, or systems? How can we undo—untangle, unsettle—systems of oppression or cultural expectations? In the wake of undoing, what remains to be utilized?
For this 9th edition of Montreal Monochrome, articule invites individual artists and collectives to consider the art and act of undoing.
PROGRAM:
Thursday June 13 - 6PM - Design Against Design Launch
A panel discussion, short reading and screening - Co-presented by Dark Opacities Lab - Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, Kaie Kellough and Balbir SinghFriday June 14 - 6PM - Collective Clay Workshop
Participatory ceramics workshop - Amber Goveas and Laura Leong
— Amber Goveas and Laura Leong invite participants from articule’s community to create one or more ceramic tiles to contribute to a single collectively built clay tapestry. The clay, recovered and recycled from various commercially available stonewares, will be fired unglazed to feature their various shades ranging from beiges, to reds and deep browns and following the workshop this collectively created work will be installed outside articule.Saturday June 15 - Noon - Diluting the Sorrows
Immersive Performance - Marcella França
— Marcella França has been working with water's volatility and its socio-political and emotional implications. In her new performance for articule, inspired by Monochrome IX, she will install long pieces of paper from the walls to the floor, each topped with a myocardial ice sculpture. As she writes sad statistical numbers on the paper, these frozen plant blood hearts will dissolve, leaving visual trails. This represents the pain and violence from the oppressive patriarchal and colonial system, transforming it into an art installation. Her work will highlight Brazil's alarming rates of land activist murders, LGBTQIA+ violence, and femicides, as well as the impact on women and children in conflicts around the world.Saturday June 15 - 4PM - Knots that Bind
Participatory Chinese knot-tying workshop - Allegra Hu
— Inspired by the ancient art of Chinese knot making, participants are invited to contribute to a tapestry of knots, interconnected with different colors, styles, and personal touch. The artist will be there to facilitate the knot making, encouraging folks to experiment, collaborate with each other to make the knots flow together, and avoid striving for a perfected finished product. This interactive art piece explores the act of rebuilding what has been lost and undone in diasporic communities, and how the process can bridge new pathways for connection. Participants will have to collaborate with each other to figure out the best way to add to the tapestry without disrupting others from working. Although participants can contribute any type of knot they wish, the artist will provide an instructional Chinese knot-making zine so that participants can feel what it's like to teach themselves a culturally-significant craft, and lean on each other for support. The finished piece will encompass the often messy and experimental process that is learning when there is no one left to teach us.Saturday June 22 - 2:30 PM - What Travels Through Us
Presentation and Discussion - Super Boat People
— For Montreal Monochrome, the collective proposes a presentation-discussion inviting us to "undo" the widespread idea that refugee communities, particularly those from the Indochinese (or Vietnamese) wars, intentionally "silence" or "forget" their past. Drawing on previous implications and research, writings in progress, and above all the workshop experience, the collective will expose the regime or narrative system underlying these discourses of silence and forgetting, and explain how the project contributes to an alternative and relevant memory work. The presentation will also set the scene for the exhibition resulting from the project, opening on June 22nd.
The Fabulous Committee is a space for Black, Indigenous and/or racialized articule members, as well as Black, Indigenous and/or racialized queer and/or trans members, to come together, to have a space to care for each other, to exchange ideas, to share their practice and to see art together. The activities of the Fabulous Committee change according to the needs and desires of the members.
Montreal Monochrome is an annual conference organized by articule's Fabulous (anti-oppression) Committee. It addresses the misrepresentation and under-representation of Indigenous and racialized people in the current Montreal arts scene. The event aims to imagine and nurture new and existing connections, solidarities and friendships between Indigenous artists, thinkers, cultural workers and racialized allies. Artists, cultural workers, researchers, community organizers and others are invited to apply. The selected projects may take the form of workshops, round tables, debates, collective works, actions in the public space, interventions, performances, demonstrations, lightning gatherings, among others.
Kevin Yuen Kit Lo is Assistant Professor of Communication Design and Visual Culture in the Department of Design and Computation Arts. He works at the intersections of graphic design, cultural production, and social change with a research focus on publication practices and social movements. His research is invested in exploring the tensions between material and relational studies of design as a means of fostering greater social and political autonomy.
Kevin founded the graphic design studio LOKI in 2014, working alongside community organizations, non-profits, cultural and educational institutions, unions, artists, researchers and activist groups, as part of broader movements for social change. The studio has worked on campaigns to stop racial profiling, designed protest graphics for anti-racist and anti-colonial social justice movements, created online platforms for critical journalism and supported the cultural production of marginalized writers and artists through the design of publications, exhibitions, and collaborative works.
Kevin holds an MA in Typographic Design from the London College of Printing (UAL). Prior to founding LOKI, he worked in interactive design, advertising and fashion. He is a member of the Memefest network and the Justseeds artist co-operative. Kevin is the author of Design Against Design: Cause and consequence of a dissident graphic practice (2024) with Set Margins’ Press.
Kaie Kellough is a poet, fiction writer, and sound performer. His work emerges at a crossroads of social engagement and formal experiment. His long poem Magnetic Equator (McClelland and Stewart, 2019), won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. His collection of short stories, Dominoes at the Crossroads (Véhicule Press, 2020) was nationally recognized. He is a vocalist for FYEAR, an avant-jazz nonet whose debut album was released in 2024 with Constellation Records.
Laura Leong Educated in Environmental Design, Laura as a professional designer worked in luxury lighting, with three meter high paper walls and renovated an Airstream as a portable vacation home. In her ceramics practice, she’s exploring a speculative future to create an order of reality other than the one she has been given. In 2021 she created atelier clé, a collective ceramics studio in the historic garment district of Chabanel, Tiohtià:ke.
Amber Goveas is a wandering artist in Tiohti:áke, exploring various mediums including ceramics, painting and metalwork. With a background in architecture, she aims to amplify the transformative potential of hybrid spaces ('tiers-lieux') within the context of increasing urban gentrification, to foster radical care and participatory democracy. Amber is actively involved in local community initiatives that build solidarity and collective empowerment among diasporic groups.
Allegra Hu is a queer, non-binary, Chinese-American, multidisciplinary artist, and community organizer based in Tiohtià:ke.
Marcella França is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist based in Greater Montreal. Her practice blends performance, digital technologies, and visual art, expanding artistic conventions to create performances, digital arts, immersive installations, and public art, addressing decolonial, ecofeminist, and immigration issues. Marcella has exhibited in notable galleries and festivals such as Art Souterrain (MTL), SAT (MTL), Montreal en Lumière Festival (MTL), Optica Festival (ES/FR), Amazonia MAPP (BR), as well as La Centrale Powerhouse, Articule, Agrégat, OI Futuro (RJ, BR), and Carmichael Gallery (CA, USA).
Super Boat People is a collective whose mission is to inclusively mobilize Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese people of origin and alliance in Quebec to commit to reclaiming their histories, reconnecting with their culture and communities, ensuring that they are fairly represented, and defending and promoting the interests of immigrants and refugees. To this end, the collective develops and implements various initiatives, around history, literature, social mobilization, urban agriculture and cooking.
Super Boat People’s co-founders Rémy Chhem et Marie-Ève Samson are behind this project. Collaborators Eva-Loan Ponton-Pham and Naomi Frost have joined the team, helping to develop further and implement the project. Rémy and Eva-Loan act as co-facilitators of the workshops.