EDITO
The Prevalence of Religion
SYLVETTE BABIN
RELIGIONS
Religion in the Digital Age
The regime under which religion—any religion—functions in contemporary secular, democratic Western societies is freedom of belief. After the victory of the Enlightenment, faith became a private affair. Freedom of belief means that everybody is free to believe what he or she chooses to believe, and also that everybody is free to organize his or her personal, private life according to his or her beliefs. But at the same time it means that it is forbidden to impose one's own faith on public life and state institutions. The work of the Enlightenment resulted not in the complete disappearance of the religion but in its privatization, its withdrawal into the private sphere. Under the conditions of the contemporary secularized world, religion has become a matter of private taste—it functions in a way that is analogous to the functioning of art and design. […]
Boris Groys
Transfusing Abstraction: Darren Harvey-Regan's Metalepsis
Darren Harvey-Regan's photographic suite Metalepsis (2013) juxtaposes formalistic images, often on the verge of abstraction, with images of religious figures. What does this juxtaposition do within the series and within the broader context of contemporary photography? The answer requires a longer look at the shifting relationships between concepts of abstraction and transcendence over the past century. Broadly speaking, abstraction, once closely allied with concepts of transcendence, came to be linked instead to repression by the 1960s. In light of this conceptual shift, Harvey-Regan's juxtapositions transfuse abstraction with a dose of its "prior" transcendent content. They also stage a series of questions around the relationship between two forms of faith in imagery: faith as a disposition to be represented, or performed, by images; and faith in the relationship between images and their ostensible referents.
Emily Rosamond
Abraham Abraham and Sarah Sarah
In Abraham Abraham Sarah Sarah, Nira Pereg choreographs religious practices. The sensitive question of land appropriation in the name of religion is analyzed by means of rituals and material facts. Through her particular use of sound in these two perfectly synchronized videos, Pereg orchestrates the automatic and repeated gestures of two communities, each of which, in turn, territorializes the same place. This appropriation also allows the artist to create her own refrain, as Deleuze and Guattari defined it, as an incantatory response.
Nathalie desmet
Red Room: The Future's Pop Religiosity According to Arseniy Zhilyaev
In countries where they have been long repressed, religious practices usually return with a vengeance. At the heart of the issue, the oft-forgotten case of Russia speaks volumes. The Soviet regime had banished Orthodox religion, considered (correctly) to be allied with the tsars: anyone who has seen Sergei Eisenstein's films will recall the foggy, monstrously silhouetted apparitions of popes, followed by the people's destruction of tsarist and religious symbols. Today, the Church is making a comeback. In an installation titled M.I.R.: New Paths to the Objects/Polite Guest from the Future,* young Muscovite artist Arseniy Zhilyaev imagines the consequences of this state of affairs by way of a speculative fiction in which a new religion prevails.
* The first subtitle, "New Paths to the Objects," was given to the version of the exhibition presented at the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, January 18 to March 30, 2014, while the second, "Polite Guests from the Future," belongs to the slightly different version at the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco, July 9 to August 23, 2014.
Vanessa Morisset
Facing Gaia with the Resources of Apocalypse and Art
The question of how to generate an active relation to the future is crucial to Latour's work. Acting as some sort of secular prophet of the puzzling Gaia, the goddess who personifies the programmed disaster that also comes under the name of the Anthropocene, Latour exposes us to a civilizational choice. Following the idea that "a good scientific experimentation is like a theatrical situation of dramatization," he has recently collaborated on the Gaïa Global Circus project, an ambitious theatrical experiment that plunges into the internal drama of science in order to address the discrepancy between the gravity of the ecological crisis and our inability to react appropriately to it.
Erik Bordeleau
From Paradise Lost to the Religion of Art
In his analysis of Mathieu Latulippe's exhibition Retour à Paradise Lost, Pierre Rannou explores the real place that religion occupies in the artist's approach. Although, at first glance, Latulippe's work seems to be based on a Christian cultural imagination, an attentive look at his works tends to show, rather, that they are articulated around the question of the sublime, implying a kinship with the concerns of romantic artists and with the notion of belonging to a religion of art through the notion of Kunstchaos.
Pierre Rannou
PORTFOLIO
Mehdi-Georges Lahlou
ARTICLES
Romeo Gongora, Just Watch Me
Initié par l'artiste Romeo Gongora, le projet Just Watch Me de Romeo Gongora, présenté à la Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen de l'Université Concordia à Montréal du 5 septembre au 11 octobre 2014, a transformé l'espace de la galerie en un « club social » pour réfléchir aux enjeux identitaires propres au Québec. L'article met en lumière comment le projet –principalement inspiré par le travail d'artistes québécois ayant œuvré durant la Révolution tranquille – interroge le rôle de l'art quant aux enjeux culturels et politiques actuels, incitant notamment les spectateurs à devenir les acteurs de leur propre histoire.
Ariane De Blois
Michael Blum, Notre histoire || Our History
Michael Blum's exhibition Our History || Notre histoire, completed during the Galerie de l'UQAM's summer residency program and presented at the gallery from September 2 to October 4, 2014, is devoted to showing the dual Quebec–Canadian identity. To realize this ambitious project, Blum creates two museums, each dedicated to expressing the exceptional character of its respective nation. Gathering a wide variety of objects for both sides (human remains, artworks, common consumer products, archaeological artefacts), the artist constructs a dual narrative that humorously mixes historical facts with unbridled inventions and uncompromising statements.
Jean-Philippe Uzel
Radiabolus: Notes on the Melodic Violence of Recruitment
At the Agora Hydro-Québec du Cœur des sciences de l'UQAM a sonic infection spreads the notion that the ideation and attraction of violence can be rendered most effectively when it is composed with a culturally germane soundtrack that has the capacity to ignite and temper emotions on command.
In Saucier & Heys' latest robotic sound installation, Radiabolus, produced for the International Digital Art Biennial in Montreal, we are seduced into a world of melodic conflicts. A musical realm in which the military-entertainment complex expertly mixes the sonic stuff of civilian life with the clarion call of the conflict zone.
Jane Sammuels
Voir : un acte d'interprétation informée. Quelques notes sur le Festival Actoral
Comment rendre compte, par le texte, des spectacles, des lectures, des mises en espace, des performances, des œuvres d'art visuel et de la musique que le festival Actoral, dans un souci de pluridisciplinarité, présentait à Marseille du 24 septembre au 11 octobre dernier ? Ce texte, dont la structure propose des allers-retours qui suivent le fil de ma réflexion telle qu'elle s'est construite, respecte le travail de recréation mis en œuvre par ma propre mémoire des évènements, dirigé par un réseau d'échos croisant les thèmes du travail, du regard et de la violence. Il se veut le reflet d'une perception subjective, conditionnée par les intérêts qui sont les miens.
Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Obra Sonora
Emily Rosamond
SCHIZES en compagnie de Pinocchio
Tout du long du nez, un encan
Michel F. Côté & Catherine Lavoie-Marcus
REVIEWS
Montréal | B-312, Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Orchestre à géométrie variable by Peter Flemming
Toronto | Ryerson Image Centre, Julie Gemuend, Imprint (2014) by Noa Bronstein
New York | MoMA PS1, Xavier Le Roy, Retrospective by Maud Jacquin
Saint-Jean-Port-Joli | La Biennale de sculpture by Chantal Boulanger
Paris | Backslash Gallery, Charlotte Charbonnel, Achròn by Nathalie Desmet
Paris | Galerie Nivet-Carzon, Baxter& Re : accrochage by Vanessa Morisset
Publication | Parachute: The Anthology, Les Presses du Réel et The Contemporary, the Common: Art in a Globalizing World, Steinberg Press by Katrie Chagnon
Publication | Auto/Pathographies, Sagami édition d'art by Ariane De Blois
Publication | moi aussi, Éditions les petits carnets by Katrie Chagnon