Montreal Monochrome X
© Photo Credits: fernando belote, 2024. © Title: Yuki Tam, 2024.
Montreal Monochrome X — 10th anniversary
Events - October 9th to 12th, 2024
For this 10th edition of Montreal Monochrome, articule has invited artists and activists to reflect on the different struggles BIPOC artists navigate across different temporalities. The contemporary, melds with the past and future in the cultural sector across the identities of the artist - how can we most carefully manage this?
Montreal Monochrome is an annual conference organized by articule's Fabulous Committee (anti-oppression). 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.
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.
PROGRAM:
Wednesday, October 9th at 6 PM — Is Montreal still Monochrome? A decade of Montreal Monochrome
Conference — Kama La Mackerel, Camille Larivée and eunice bélidor
— “With a reputation as one of the most culturally diverse cities in Canada, a niche on which the city's public administration is banking for its development, Montreal offers a multitude of artistic events and activities through various private and public structures.
Yet within the institutions and structures working in the visual arts, such as the Musée d'art contemporain and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the city's diverse face is in short supply. Among the directors and artists of museums, foundations, artist-run centres and private galleries, it is still rare to come across people from diverse backgrounds.”
These are the opening paragraphs from the description of the first ever Montréal Monochrome held on the 24th of May 2013. Now, some ten years later, we are revisiting these words to ask - “What has changed?”, Where are we vis-a-vis representation in the arts in Montreal? How might the goals of minority artists changed?
Friday, October 11th at 6 PM — Anti-racist movements in cultural circles
Panel — Samir Eskanda and M. Gnanasihamany
— articule and the Regroupement des centres d’artistes autogérés du Québec (RCAAQ) are pleased to invite artists and cultural workers Samir Eskanda, a Palestinian musician, organizer, and human rights activist based in the UK. As part of Montreal Monochrome festival, Samir will share his views on the intersection of culture and activism, specifically, with an anti-racist lens, and will propose tools for organizations to enhance their efforts towards social justice. Samir will be in conversation with local artist & writer M. Gnanasihamany whose practice engages similar issues.
Saturday, October 12th at 2 PM — Passeurs D’histoires
Artist Talk — Cécilia Bracmort, Nicolas Premier, Émilie Monnet and Raphaëlle Red
— As part of Nicolas Premier's exhibition Africa is the Future Echoes and Responses at the SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, the screening of his film *Africa is The Future* will be the starting point for a hybrid discussion, both in person and online. The conversation will address the (re)construction of personal and collective histories from lost or fragmented elements.
The event will bring together various artists, using media such as video, literature, theater or photography, to discuss the impact of obscured or marginalized histories on the construction of identity. Discussions will highlight the importance of revealing forgotten narratives and memories, and of grasping the cultural and political stakes of collective memorial commitments.
Saturday, October 12th at 5 PM — a fine African head
A poetic performance — Faith Paré
— a fine African head charts the author's personal and inevitably one-sided connection with a young Black woman student activist from the Bahamas who lived in 1960s Montreal. CJH was among the 97 arrested for participating in the Sir George Williams Computer Centre Occupation in 1969, a historic two-week sit-in against racism at the university. At one time, the only public information on CJH was a claim that she had died following a head injury sustained from the violent police crackdown on the occupation. Grief for this fellow Black woman, and the enclosure that her memory was relegated to in the official record, serves as the departure point for envisioning what her life might have been like in this understatedly critical city to Black Power struggle. The book unfolds as a geographic and temporal diptych between this period of upheaval and the 2020s, when the mental, physical, and historical burdens of institutional education on Black people still loom large in Canada and the Caribbean, long after the student uprising in 1969.
Saturday, October 12th at 6 PM — Montréal Monochrome Social!
For any questions or requests concerning accessibility to the event or our gallery space, please contact James Goddard via email or by phone at 514-842-9686. For general accessibility information, please visit our dedicated page.
Please note that with the increase in COVID 19 and flu transmissions, masks must be worn for the duration of the events
Kama La Mackerel is a Mauritian-Canadian multilingual writer, visual artist, performer, educator and literary translator who believes in love, justice and self and collective empowerment. Their practice blurs the lines between traditional artistic disciplines to create hybrid aesthetic spaces from which decolonial and queer/trans vocabularies can emerge. With wholehearted engagement in ocean narratives, island sovereignty, transgender poetics and queer/trans spiritual histories, their body of work challenges colonial notions of time and space as these relate to history, power, language, subject formation and the body.
eunice bélidor is an independent curator and researcher, art critic, and writer.
Her practice currently uses questioning as a methodology for curating, writing as creating curatorial auto theory, and at the intersection of letter writing with care, feminism, and racial issues. She holds an MA in Art History with a Graduate Diploma in Curatorial Studies from York University, where she looked at the curating of contemporary Haitian art in international cultural exhibitions after the 2010 earthquake. eunice bélidor won the prestigious Emerging Curator award from the Hnatyshyn Foundation in 2018.
Camille Larivée is an artist, independent curator, author and cultural worker based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyaang/Montreal. They hold a bachelor's degree in art history and a certificate in feminist studies from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Over the past 12 years, Camille has created and curated many public art projects, exhibitions and publications with extraordinary collaborators. Their artistic and curatorial practice is rooted in collective emotional memories in urban public spaces and a love of local biodiversity. Camille has been General and Artistic Director of Montréal, arts interculturels (MAI) since 2023.
Samir Eskanda He has played a key role in many campaigns, covered by the New York Times, CNN, BBC, Rolling Stone, among others, appealing to celebrities like Shakira and Lana del Rey to cancel performances in Tel Aviv. He has also helped organize high profile petitions defending the freedom of expression of artists speaking out for Palestinian rights, including Sally Rooney, Lorde, and Emma Watson, against repressive attacks aimed at intimidating or silencing them.
M Gnanasihamany is an artist, writer, and curator based in Montreal. Their work has appeared in publications including Maisonneuve Magazine, BlackFlash Mag, and Peripheral Review, and they have been supported by multiple grants and residencies including with Artscape Gibraltar Point, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and Canada Council for the Arts. M is currently pursuing their Master of Fine Arts at Concordia University, researching landscape and potential sites of resistance against carceral, extractive, and colonial structures and technologies.
Nicolas Premier examines modernity and contemporaneity from the perspective of “out of field” experience and knowledge through his work in video, photography and installations. He explores the links of mutual borrowing and dazzlement that exist between and towards African diasporas. His transdisciplinary co-creations aim to develop his practice taking into account contexts and exhibition spaces, especially with his AITF project, a fluctuating entity and a field for formal and conceptual experimentation.
Raphaëlle Red Paris-born Raphaëlle Red lives in Berlin, where she is pursuing research into the role of narratives in the construction of the African diaspora as a community. Her work has been published in French (Jef Klak, L'Humanité), English (gal-dem, The Funambulist) and German (Bella Triste, Resonanzen and Glückwunsch anthologies). Her first novel, Adikou (Grasset, 2024), follows the eponymous character's journey from Togo, the land of his father about which Adikou knows little, along the Gulf of Guinea, and as far south as the United States. A literary journey that explores questions of identity, the history of slavery, colonial continuity and belonging.
Cécilia Bracmort is a French-Canadian artist and curator living in Montreal. Her Caribbean heritage influences her artistic and curatorial practices, which focus on notions of identity - both individual and collective - memory and history.
Through these projects, Bracmort builds bridges between themes such as ecology, trauma and mythology. In this way, she encourages people to think outside the box and see the world in a new light.
Émilie Monnet is an interdisciplinary artist who has developed a stage practice around questions of identity, territory and transformation that has propelled her onto the world's most prestigious stages. At the crossroads of theater, performance and media arts, she creates collaborative works that bring neglected lives and stories to the surface. Of Anishinaabe and French descent, she grew up between the Outaouais and Brittany, and now lives in Mooniyaang/Montreal. With her company ONISHKA, she builds bridges between indigenous artistic communities around the world, notably through the Scène contemporaine autochtone platform, an indigenous living arts festival whose latest edition was presented in Scotland in 2019. Her play Marguerite : le feu was acclaimed at the Festival d'Avignon in 2023, and her show Nigamon/Tunai has been presented on international stages in Europe and South America since its premiere at the FTA last May. In November, she presents her latest creation at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, a theatrical adaptation of Michel Jeaan's novel Kukum.