Faux plis par hypothèses

In September, Galerie de l’UQAM will present Faux plis par hypothèses, a group exhibition curated by Louise Déry, Director of Galerie de l’UQAM, and Marie-Hélène Leblanc, Director of Galerie UQO. The project, supported by the Chief Scientist of Quebec, Rémi Quirion, examines the role of the university gallery in reflecting on the relationship between art and science. The thirteen artistic bodies of work selected by the curators are presented in five exhibition and research centres in Quebec: Galerie de l’UQAM, Galerie UQO (Université du Québec en Outaouais), Galerie l’Œuvre de l’Autre (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi), Reford Gardens, and Foreman Art Gallery (Bishop’s University). As part of Faux plis par hypothèses, Galerie de l’UQAM presents works by Caroline Fillion, Maryse Goudreau, Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, Kosisochukwu Nnebe and Leila Zelli, as well as an apparatus displaying interventions by all the artists participating in the project.

The exhibition

Faux plis par hypothèses reflects the aspirations of two university gallery curators and directors interested in expressing how a university gallery engages in crucial issues that often concern several research sectors: questions of languages and identities, terrestrials and territories, structures and institutions. The university gallery is precisely the place where daring and promising initiatives, which develop at the intersection of artistic and scientific knowledge, can dismantle preconceived ideas and allow for new research forms and perspectives to emerge with the common view of encountering contemporary art. Galerie de l’UQAM and Galerie UQO actively take part in breaking down the boundaries between disciplines by exhibiting works and inviting artists who invent productive links with scientific content. The conceptual framework of Faux plis par hypothèses is based on the notion of creases (faux plis), considered here metaphorically as biases that are sometimes imposed, sometimes acquired, and sometimes transmitted. Inevitably, though not exclusively, present in university contexts, these creases infiltrate research and creation. How can we identify, undo, and transform them?

The approach of Faux plis par hypothèses also recognizes various types of expertise that are subject to countless vulnerabilities, particularly in terms of the hierarchization of knowledge and the intellectual freedom of artist or scientific researchers who furthermore are subject to an established bureaucratic amplitude, as most of the project’s collaborators can attest to. The curators explain: “At the same time as fruitful alliances, trans-sectoral intersections, and new pollinations between multiple fields of research proliferate, certain creases sneak in and sometimes become entrenched, requiring a form of subterfuge and possible resistance when it comes to confronting an understanding of science and art that is ever less smooth. While folds may conceal glimpses of things, creases reveal twists, manipulations, and discrepancies that tend to upset and mistreat reality. From pleated crumples and twisted ebbs comes a desire to be vigilant and in a state of alert, an inclination to look more closely at something, and an obligation to pay attention.”

Dates and venues

Galerie UQO (Gatineau): September 5 – October 26, 2024, opening on September 4
Galerie de l’UQAM (Montreal): September 6 – October 26, 2024, opening on September 5
Galerie l’Œuvre de l’Autre – UQAC (Saguenay): October 3 – October 31, 2024, opening on October 2
Reford Gardens (Grand-Métis): October 7 – December 15, 2024, opening on October 6
Foreman Art Gallery – Bishop’s University (Sherbrooke): October 19 – December 14, 2024, opening on October 18

About the artists

Eruoma Awashish is an Atikamekw artist and curator from the Opitciwan community, in Haute-Mauricie. In recent years, her research has focused on the hybridity of Indigenous cultures who have known how to adapt despite colonization and attempts at assimilation. In her practice, she seeks to overturn the dominant/dominated relationship by shifting religious Catholic symbols and mixing them with those inherited from Indigenous spiritualities. She lives in Saint-Prime and works in Mashteuiatsh.

Geneviève Chevalier is an artist and assistant professor at the School of Art of Laval University. Taking the form of video projections, films, and photographic series, her work focuses on certain modes of understanding and knowledge, such as the garden, the menagerie, and the natural history collection. She is interested in the field of natural history to better address the issue of biodiversity loss in an era of climate crisis. She lives in Quebec City.
genevievechevalier.com

Combining art and the natural sciences, the Club de prospection figurée aims to be a doubly resonant encounter between Magali Baribeau-Marchand and Mariane Tremblay, two artists with similar practices, and their member-invitees hailing from various fields of expertise. Inspired by the correlations between the terrestrial and the celestial to extract their figurative signification, their co-creation approach underpins a relationship to our environment and the interrelated cycles that constitute it. They live in Saguenay.
prospectionfiguree.club

Anna Binta Diallo is an artist originally from Dakar who grew up in Saint-Boniface. Through painting, video, drawing, and collage, she addresses the question of identity as an unstable ground that constantly needs to be probed. The biases that slip into our relationship with the self and the other as well as contradictory cultural heritages challenge and feed her thinking. She lives in Winnipeg.
annabintadiallo.com

Caroline Fillion is an artist originally from Saguenay. Her conceptual practice is based on symbolic conjunctions or metaphors that question, subvert, or transgress the traditional postulates of the art milieu. It is a reflection tempered by an absurd seriousness on the methods of legitimizing art through its institutions and the relationship between the work, the artist, and the commentary that precedes them. She lives in Saguenay.
carolinefillion.net

Maryse Goudreau is an independent artist, writer, filmmaker, and researcher. She creates works in which images, documents, and artistic and participatory gestures of care intersect. Since 2012, she has been working on an important archive dedicated to the beluga whale, an open-ended project for which she has assembled data and creative works realized over the past two decades. She lives in Escuminac.
marysegoudreau.com

Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens form an artist duo whose collaborative practice combines rigorous research with a material exploration that is specific to each project in order to explore questions at the intersection of ecology, economy, epistemology, and history. More recently, their work has sought to expand concepts of hospitality, care, and interspecies communication. They live in South Durham.
ibghylemmens.com

Driven by a growing interest in the articulations of language in its relationship to the image, Sophie Jodoin questions manifestations of femininity, intimacy, loss, and absence in relationship to the body: how to evoke, embody, represent, and write the body as a lived, inhabited, experienced space? These personal and collective considerations underlie her hybrid and installational work, which combines drawing, collage, writing, photography, found objects, books, and video. She lives and works in Montreal.
sophiejodoin.com

Emmanuelle Léonard is an artist and sessional lecturer at several universities. Her current research focuses on observing groups founded on hierarchical modes. Like an ethnologist feeding and documenting her investigations, as well as photographing, filming, and revealing her subjects, she conducts her research with intuition and empathy, guided by her experience of the study, the interview, and archival research. She lives in Montreal.
emmanuelleleonard.com

Mélanie Myers is an artist and sessional lecturer at Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO). Her practice expands the plastic and interpretive possibilities of drawing to highlight our mediated relationships to landscapes and built environments. Focusing on everyday clichés and the inexhaustible online repositories of images, her work explores the peripheral vision of ordinary reality as well as the blind spots of Land Art. She lives in Gatineau.
melaniemyers.ca

Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian visual artist and writer. She engages with topics that range from the politics of visibility and embodiment to the use of food habits and language as counter-archives of colonial histories.  She is interested in anti-colonial and anti-imperial world-building through acts of solidarity and speculative (re)imaginings of other pasts, presents, and futures. She lives in Ottawa and Lagos.
colouredconversations.com

Anahita Norouzi is an artist originally from Teheran whose practice examines different cultural and political perspectives on the human and non-human “other.” Inspired by marginalized histories, she focuses on the legacies of botanical explorations and archeological excavations, especially when scientific research became entangled in the colonial exploitation of non-Western geographies. She lives in Montreal.
anahitanorouzi.com

Leila Zelli is an artist originally from Teheran whose practice explores the relationship that we have with ideas of “others” and “elsewhere,” more specifically within the geopolitical space often referred to by the questionable term “Middle East.” She creates site-specific installations using images, videos, and texts often found on the Internet and social media. She lives in Montreal.
leilazelli.com

About the curators

Louise Déry is a museologist, curator, writer, and the director of Galerie de l’UQAM. She holds a PhD in art history (Laval University, 1991). Through almost a hundred exhibitions and as many publications, she has developed the concepts of the exposition chantier (exhibition worksite), the image manquante (missing image) and the œuvre s’exposant (artwork exposing itself). She is known for her support of female artists and emerging artists and for her drive to disseminate Canadian artists internationally. Originally from the Gaspé Peninsula, she lives in Montreal.

Holding a PhD in art studies and practices from UQAM (2024), Marie-Hélène Leblanc has been the director and curator of Galerie UQO of Université du Québec en Outaouais since 2015. Her curatorial practice has led her to produce over thirty projects in various exhibition spaces in Quebec, Canada, and Europe. Considering the exhibition as a medium, she defines herself as curator-exhibition maker-writer-practitioner-researcher. Originally from the Gaspé Peninsula, she lives in Gatineau.

Partners