Art that strives for change – locally and globally
ABC: MTL looks to address city’s social and economic conflicts
Artists are social beings, so it’s no wonder that many of them address issues that confront society at large.
But where the social activist tries to get people to take up a cause, the artist takes the more subversive approach of trying to get people to invent their own tools for change.
Two exhibitions are engaging in the sphere of political action, one globally and one on a local level.
The Canadian Centre for Architecture’s ABC: MTL exhibition is an attempt to open a discussion about Montreal’s future, its curators say.
Ideally, it will lead to a process of creating a larger vision of Montreal as part of the natural environment with a stronger landscape component, said CCA director Mirko Zardini. It’s not a vision to be created by a new Jean Drapeau, but a wider one involving people from all the municipalities in the region.
The SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art looks at the sovereignty of the individual in Fault Lines, the first exhibition by new SBC curator Pip Day. The exhibition presents examples of how the power of speech can loosen the grip of institutions on our political lives.
One of them is a tape-recording of playwright Bertolt Brecht before a U.S. congressional committee in 1947 using the vagaries of translation to keep from admitting to anything that might get him labelled as a Communist sympathizer, but without denying his revolutionary positions. François Bucher presents the case of a translator for a British intelligence agency who revealed U.S. spying at the UN in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. The translator said she was trying to prevent an illegal war; she escaped conviction because the case against her might reveal more incriminating evidence.
Nightmares is the first part of a film trilogy (And Europe Will Be Stunned) by Israeli artist Yael Bartana that calls for the return of three million Jews to Poland — equal to the number of Jews murdered there by the Nazis. Nightmares is done in 1930s fascist style that recalls Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will: the shouting speech in a huge — here, decaying and empty — stadium and close-up shots from below of red-cheeked, smiling youths in uniforms.
But the message is different. “We cannot live alone. … Come, let us live together,” the leader shouts. “Everyone will learn from us. … Return not as shadows of the past, but as hope for the future.”
The film resonates in Poland, which chose it as its official entry in the 2011 Venice Biennale, but it seems more universal. Day described it as many-layered in meaning and says the theme of return also refers to Palestinians.
Fault Lines
continues until Feb. 16 at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art. 372 Ste. Catherine St. W., Suite 507. Information: sbcgallery.ca.
CCA director Mirko Zardini says ABC: MTL is not an exhibition, but “a tool to induce reflection” about the issues confronting Montreal. The call for submissions to ABC: MTL continues, and the exhibition will be reinvented at the end of January.
The open call didn’t attract proposals that address issues of the economy or social conflict, Zardini said, so the CCA filled some of the holes.
Fabrizio Gallanti, the curator, said there was a sense of Montreal in the submissions as a bright city with no poor people — or working class.
Or corruption. It’s too bad Porte Parole, the theatre company, didn’t enter an excerpt from Sexy béton, its play about the collapse of Laval’s De la Concorde overpass that killed five people. Taking words from court transcripts and statements, actors playing survivors and relatives of victims slowly realize that suing a government that won’t accept responsibility for the collapse is too psychologically difficult.
But there is plenty in this typically austere exhibition to think about: Robert Burley photographs a rock in Mount Royal Park as a sign of a designed environment. There is a map of Montreal showing only its alleyways, and the collective SYN imagines the underground city not as a connective structure but as a single “hyper-building.”
7 à nous, a collective in Point St. Charles supported by the Darling Foundry, saved a building in the CN rail yards from demolition, and residents appear in a live video fed from CN’s Bâtiment 7 to the exhibition. Gabor Szilasi’s 1983 photograph depicts a sign with the slogan “La fierté a une ville: Montréal” standing in isolation before the Jacques Cartier Bridge.
Family activities on Sunday conclude the pre-Christmas schedule, but it continues with free talks, discussions and guided tours in January.
ABC: MTL
continues until March 31 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1920 Baile St. Information: cca.qc.ca.
What is real
about a photograph these days? Or a painting that looks like a photograph of abstract space?
According to her website, Angèle Verret came to painting through photography, and her paintings on display at Galerie Roger Bellemare are monochrome renditions of what seem to be rippled sand or other environmental phenomena in isolated close-up. But while trying to figure out what you’re looking at, you enter the beautiful, meditative spaces she has created.
Angèle Verret
appears in a group exhibition until Dec. 22 with John Heward, Ray Mead and Michael Merrill at Galerie Roger Bellemare, 372 Ste. Catherine St. W., Suites 501-502. Information: rogerbellemare.com