Artist.e.s
Jenny Lin & Eloisa Aquino, Jen Leigh Fisher, Raphaële Frigon,
Danny Gaudreault, lamathilde, Soleil Launière, Kinga Michalska,
The artists always propose in their practices themes related to their own queer, lesbian, gay, bi, trans or bi-spiritual identities of different generations, origins and backgrounds.
The curators worked to select artists identifying as LGBTQI + living in Quebec and having an interest in memory, archives, alternative narratives and atypical forms of rendition of stories and knowledge.
The prior encounters with the artists have shown us a common interest in exploded, subjective, political forms and narratives
of queer memory, with a generosity and awareness of past, present and future generations, beyond their own subjectivity and experience.
The issue of the archive and the memoirs will be approached with a great diversity of points of view and practices. Questioning the question of hegemonic memory (white, binary, objective, state) to tend towards the proposals with a strong presence of the body and vulnerable, affective and empathic voices.
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All the works were created for this exhibition.
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Salle de Documentation
Documents and Books from the Archives gaies du Québec (AGQ), a selection that will evolve during the exhibition.
Books and documents are precious and can not leave Never Apart, thank you to ask the reception the book you want before consulting it.
Many Thanks to the A.G.Q team for their help and contribution to this In Progress proposal over the months.
A Bookstore is Not a Bar, 2019 -
A collaborative project of Eloisa Aquino and Jenny Lin,
“A Bookstore is not a Bar” consists of a short video and
wall-mounted prints, as a reflection on the subject of queer bookstores.
Taking inspiration from the fonds of Montreal’s L’Androgyne bookstore collective, the video is a thought collage on queer politics, censorship, the demise of the physical queer bookstore, and the significance of printed matter.
A bookstore is not a bar but what is it?
Under the cover of…, 2019
A project that experiments with the historical documents and material consequences of an event that occurred in 1952 called Les coupes de moralité. Following a panic about gay sex and queer bodies in on Mont-Royal, religious leaders convinced the city to destroy all trees and shrubs under a set size. These actions devastated the ecology of the forest and creating erosion damage that persists today.
I am working with documents and images from a range of archival sources as well as the current ecology of the mountain. The project may include film loops, archival images, staged scientific documentation, fictional and speculative data representations.
Untitled, 2019
Using instagrammar and cellphone photography, my work for La présence de l’absence - absence is present is a process piece in constant evolution over time, as I document my relationships with the queer archives and my community organizing work, opening a 2SLGBT centre in Saskatchewan.
I’m speaking into the institution by retrieving and displaying, on a vertical screen, elements of my life and archived material.
The piece explores the differences in queer archives across geographies and my dislocation between queer Montreal and Prairie culture.
For those times I'm not dead, 2019
A performative reflection that will be articulated in three stages. I chose to consult personal archives (diaries, drawings, letters, etc.) of strangers. I try to (re) create a form of correspondence between these singular archives and my practice in performance art - which itself questions the archiving of an ephemeral art. Photo credits: Álvaro Delgado
BUTCH, FAG THANKS, 2019
To plunge into archives, to lose one's breath, to try to make the past tense resemble the present and present perfect, to find trees with scattered and deep roots to which as mushrooms one graft. Whole forests that have continued to evolve without anybody to look at them and then paths that go back there. We clear the ground to see the light, and we make huts with branches. We settle there and we let ourselves be filled with the smell of moss and serious sounds for old bushy forests and sounds at higher frequency for forests that grow quickly without much trauma. Finally, we take place among the mosses, mushrooms, roots, branches, leaves, rhizomes.
Innikan (old human bone), 2019
I always thought that driftwood was the bones of the earth. The old living trees that fall into the water for years that are then on the edge of lakes and then become homes under another biodiversity.
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I am mishtikᵘ My bones are grieving the bottom of Piekuakami.
EFEBIA (faux magazine érotique polonais lesbien et trans des années 90), 2019
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When I was first invited to this project at Les Archives Gay du Québec, as a Polish queer femme with poor French skills and no awareness of the gay history of Quebec, I struggled quite a bit to find an access point to the archive. Since photography is my primary medium, I chose to enter that way. I went through the entire photographic collection of AGQ. After poring through dozens of boxes filled with male nudes - mostly dick pics, essentially - I came across an interesting find while looking through John Brosseau’s photographs. Brosseau was a Montreal-born gay photographer who travelled the world taking pictures of young naked boys, photos which were extensively published in gay magazines across the globe. In his scrapbook, I found a press clipping featuring his photos in an ad announcing the upcoming release of “Efebos The First Polish Magazine of Male Nudes (1991)”. When I travelled to Poland this summer, I went to Lambda Warsaw Gay Archives and asked about this magazine. At first, the archivist told me that no such thing existed. When I showed him an iPhone photo of the ad though, he made a connection and found the same ads in Polish gay press of that era. We were sad to realise that regardless of multiple enthusiastic ads anticipating it's imminent release, the magazine never actually came out. Having learned this, I decided to make an issue of this magazine myself, as a tribute to all the great DIY activist initiatives that failed - the art projects that were abandoned and collectives that fell apart before their first action. The result was a work of speculative fiction - a utopian erotic magazine focused on representing some of those whose absance hounts the archives: lesbians, bisexual women, trans and non-binary folks. For this reason I renamed it “Efebia”. Since most of Polish 90s erotic magazines feature Western photographs, it was important to me to shoot actual Polish people. I did an open call for photo submissions and for participants in an erotic shoot. I received 1 photo series and 6 model submissions. We rented a hotel room, shot all day and made friends. I placed one copy of the magazine in Warsaw Gay Archives in the 90s section.
Thank you to the models who took part in the project:
Sonia Milch as Lena, Katarzyna Szugajew as Dolores
Dollemotion as Natalia, Zofia Jabłońska as Klara
Niko, BartuÅ›
Plants Queers Leave Behind, 2019
Plants Queers Leave Behind is a small collection of houseplants former roommates from queer collective houses abandoned when they moved out of the city. The living gallery is about domestic space, migration, care, and the legacies we leave behind, outside of the archives.
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In OUT of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories (2015), scholar Greg Youmens makes a case for explanding our understanding of the archive beyond physical structures and the materiality of text and papery remains to include the natural world. By taking a cutting from poet and activist Elsa Gidlow's garden, repotting it, and nurturing it over the years, Youmens gained a greater understanding of Gidlow's philosophy and a deeper sense of connection to her.
These living objects, usually cared for in my own living space, remind me of the individual queers who left them: a nurse, an artist, a carpenter, a horse trainer, a filmmaker, and a librarian. None of these plants are native to this land, and so I am also reminded of the ways queers may contribute to the colonization of this botanical world.
Frolics Library For Future Bodies, 2019
Frolics Library for Future Bodies imagines the relationship between the body and physical materials as an archive of queer experience.
Through a video catalogue of queer gestures and rituals
(as well hand crafted objects), the work rejects archival tendencies of clearly defined bodies, places and and time - Preferring to resist these categorizations through the collection of undefinable moments of reflection, transformation, dream and perversion.
LEAVING SPACE, 2019
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Archives are structured by desire and power. In the history
of queer documentation, certain bodies were not seen as desirable to record, such as racialized, migrant and gender non-conforming people.
In honour of all the stories, moments, objects and people unseen in the archives, the artist has replicated the standardized boxes that house the AGQ's documentation as ghostly tombstones. Unable to be opened or filled, the embroidered boxes will stay on the archives' shelves alongside the real boxes, so as to always leave space for the unrecorded, the unrecordable and the yet-to-be recorded.
Despite the assumptions that archives deal with the past, this project acknowledges that historical absence impacts our vision of what is presently possible, and attempts to open up avenues of queer futurity for the marginalized.
