Où sommes-nous

Opening: September 22th, 2018
Exhibition: September 23th to October 27th, 2018
OBORO, Montreal, Canada

Artists
Judith Albert (CH), Nik Forrest (CA), Katrin Freisager (CH) and Dana Claxton (CA)

Curators
Chantal Molleur, White Frame, Basel
Aaron Pollard, OBORO, Montreal

The absence of the question mark is deliberate. 'Where are we (Où sommes-nous)’ hints at the place we occupy within the exhibition space. These four artists provide a diversity of approaches to exploring fundamental questions concerning framing, narrative, still and moving pictures. Their practices span performance, figurative and abstract imagery tying the body to landscape. Brought together, their works articulate common preoccupations concerning perception and a desire to both disrupt and expand the popular imaginary by drawing from avant-garde, feminist, and post-colonial vernaculars and strategies.

Judith Albert's (CH) highly focused yet mobile still lives and her use of the vanishing vocabularies inscribe the frame, and in some cases the architecture of a space with the poetics of the body. Her installations link language and gesture with both built environments and the natural world. Through her performances, video installations and photographs, Dana Claxton (CA) has taken on the colossal task of traversing worlds, deploying and undermining the vernaculars of high fashion and popular culture to bridge the gap between colonial and Indigenous cosmologies, to unsettle and resist dominant narratives concerning Indigenous women. Nik Forrest’s (CA) practice also examines resistance, often turning to more abstract strategies, material processes and silences, whereby small gestures take on a significance that might otherwise be overlooked. Rather than framing acts of resistance, Forrest proposes tuning of senses where the viewer is invited to experience the artist's gesture outside the purview of the lens. Katrin Freisager's (CH) photographs conjure mise-en-scène of bodies and staged phenomena. Her imagery traverses the boundary between reality and fiction. In her newer works, created in her studio, she takes us on a journey between experiencing and remembering, past and future, suggestion and after-image.

These four established artists open and disrupt our knowledge of space and time, bringing into question the line between reality and illusion through poetry and resistance.

This project is made possible thanks to the financial support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and the Canadian Council for the Art