Summer Window Exhibition & Opening Events
What Travels Through Us: Family History Workshops — 3rd Cohort
Summer Window Exhibition — From Saturday, June 27 to August 3, 2026.
Visible from our window on the Plaza Saint-Hubert, at 6282 St-Hubert Street.
OPENING EVENT
Saturday, June 27, 2026, from 4:30 to 9 PM In person at articule.
Since Fall 2025, Super Boat People has been running the "What Travels Through Us: Family History Workshops" project, in collaboration with articule and Concordia University's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. The What Travels Through Us exhibition is the fruit of this project, which enabled a third cohort of 14 participants of Cambodian, Vietnamese and Laotian origin, whose families had experienced war and refuge, to reappropriate their family history.
In ten sessions led by experienced documentary filmmakers and artists from these communities, participants delved deeper into the journeys and experiences of their families and themselves. The exhibition brings together personal reflections, archives, artworks, objects and a zine created during this process.
Join us for the opening of the exhibition on June 27 at articule, with the following program, from 4:30 p.m.:
- 4:30 PM: Doors open
- 5:00 PM: SQUAT workshop with Vietnamese-French contemporary dance artist Kim-Sanh Châu
- 5:30 PM: Screening of the short film Dear Nya, followed by a virtual Q&A with director Sidney Phommarath
- 6:30 PM: Exhibition opening and presentation of the artworks and exhibition by the group, followed by performances
- Until 9:00 PM: DJ set by Chittakone Baccam Thirakul, accompanied by food and drinks!
Please confirm your attendance here so we can track attendance.
* Throughout this short workshop, participants will be invited to squat. We’ll start with a brief active warm-up inspired by gym workouts and martial arts (Vo Vi Nam Viet Vo Dao), then dive into a long, meditative squat sequence—all set to a Vietnamese soundtrack on cassette.
Artists
Cécilia Maï
Francis O’Shaughnessy
Angela Diem Thanh Vu
Namaï Kham Po
Rémi Siv
Touny Somsavath
Pascale M Dithgnavong
Julie-Chantheavy Meam
My An Fraser
Marie-Thérèse Nguyên Thi Hông Nhung
Alexandre Nguyen-Duong
Jade Giang
Khansay Sisouphone
Winsane Lim
Super Boat People & their co-facilitators
Super Boat People is a collective whose mission is to inclusively mobilize of 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 the transmission of history and memory, community archives, food sovereignty, storytelling, and social mobilization.
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, Eva-Loan and Marie-Ève act as co-facilitators of the workshops.
Rémy Chhem, co-founder of the Super Boat People Collective, is a longtime community organizer, particularly within the Cambodian community. Rémy enjoys developing dynamic projects that foster connections, collaboration, and dialogue between communities and across generations. He plays an active role within Super Boat People by leading various projects related to community and family history and memory, documentary and photographic archives, and culinary and horticultural knowledge. Outside the collective, Rémy works as a social science researcher.
Eva-Loan Ponton-Pham is a multidisciplinary artist with a degree in Art History & Visual Arts from Concordia University. In all her projects, whether as co-founder of Atelier La Coulée, member of the feminist publishing collective Les Bêtes d'hier or as a cultural mediator in various community projects, she is committed to putting forward voices that are too often marginalized, by focusing on personal and collective narratives that complicate dominant discourses. Of mixed Vietnamese and Canadian origin, her personal work deals with confluent identities and the complexities of cultural transmission in diasporic contexts. Her concerns are conceptualized and shaped primarily through the mediums of photography, fanzines, documentaries and sculpture.
Marie-Ève Samson is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the Université de Montréal and is of French-Canadian Quebecer origin. Her research interests focus on the experiences of ageing, end-of-life, accompaniment and care for immigrant elderly and their caregivers, in the context of transformations in Quebec's social protection and healthcare systems. Co-founder of Super Boat People, she was also involved in the Montreal Life Stories project in the early 2010s. Her thesis draws on these various commitments and focuses more specifically on the intergenerational issues in elder care among families of Cambodian, Vietnamese and Laotian origin in Montreal.
Kim-Sanh Châu (she) is a dance and video artist. Her work has been presented in Montreal (Agora de la danse and the MAI, among others), as well as in Vietnam (Krossing-Over), Malaysia (Five Arts Center), the Philippines (PCI/Dance Forum), and Korea (SIDance). Her two most recent pieces, SQUAT and BLEU NÉON, explore the squat position, at the intersection of Asian and Western references. Kim-Sanh is a Việt Kiều (a Vietnamese woman born in France) who has been based in Tio’tia:ke Mooniyang Montreal since 2012. She travels to Vietnam every year, where she maintains an active relationship with the local artistic community.
Sidney Phommarath is a Laotian-Canadian filmmaker from Winnipeg. She has been producing short documentaries through CBC's Creator Network while also working as a technician in the local film industry. Her passion for documenting social issues stems from her family's refugee experience. Dear Nya retraces Phommarath’s yearning to understand her Laotian roots by retracing her grandmother’s perilous journey to escape war and poverty. Along the way, she seeks answers to the question "Who am I?"
Sound artist Chittakone Baccam explores sound as a living material, memory, and a means of transmission. His practice, which spans composition, installation, and performance, weaves dialogues between cultural heritage and contemporary experimentation. Of Laotian/Tai Dam descent, he draws on the songs, mantras, and stories of his community to create spaces for listening that connect the visible and the invisible.
The project is created by Super Boat People, in partnership with articule and Concordia University's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS). This project has also been made possible thanks to the financial support of the Government of Quebec and the City of Montreal, as part of the Entente de développement culturel de Montréal. The graphic design is the work of Gabrielle Godbout.
