About —
[…] we must “remember the details” in order to produce an ethics of memory and narrative by means of images and words that inscribe realities within the historical narrative.
Françoise Vergès, Programme de désordre absolu, 2023
It’s often said that our body has a memory, that it carries within it the important events of our past, and also those of our parents and even our ancestors: as the vehicle for personal and collective stories, the body evokes and summons. Various forms of performance art intrinsically deal with this powerful symbolism, adding new layers of meaning to it. For its winter programming, the Musée d’art de Joliette has chosen the theme of the body and its stories.
Our two main-floor exhibitions look at how personal mythologies and collective memories meet where intergenerational trauma persists. In Bloodline, Meryl McMaster explores her hybrid identity through a series of photo and video self-portraits. Born of Plains Cree/Siksika, and British/Dutch descent, McMaster stages a series of forays on the lands of her ancestors in Western Canada, where she embodies a timeless figure, both real and imaginary, whose clothing and appearance bear witness to the various identities that coexist with those of her ancestors. Her work evokes the memory of her forebearers, of those she never knew but whose vivid memory she carries as part of a vast historical narrative. The body as a site for coexisting memories, histories, and mythologies is also at the heart of Emma Waltraud Howes’ practice. Running throughout the selected works on view in The Time it Takes is a profuse and majestic aesthetic rife with distinct cultural references that range from the theatre of Bertolt Brecht to Inuit legends. Drawing from her background in dance, Howes uses choreographic notations as the foundation for a codified imaginary world that unfolds through a range of objects, mediums, and materials. The gestures of the body—or its parts—manifest their expressiveness and agency as a form of resistance to oppression and destruction.
On the second floor, the MAJ is pleased to present, for the first time, a satellite venue for the Manif d’art – The Quebec City Biennial, whose theme for this edition is The Strength of Sleep. The Cohabitations of All the Living. Curator Marie Muracciole presents video works by Yto Barrada, Francis Alÿs, and Rodney Graham, in which suspended productivity and latent states become forms of resistance. In the second floor’s common areas, viewers can revisit important historical works of performance art as part of an itinerary designed by our education department. Across the five stations, different experiments shed light on how notions such as time or space have been examined and redefined.
Marianne Cloutier, Interim Curator of Contemporary Art
Images in the banner:
Meryl McMaster, The Grass Grows Deep, 2022. Giclée print, 101.6 x 152.5 cm. Photo: Romain Guilbault
Emma Waltraud Howes, The Narcissist, or Elsa’s Muse: Performer III, from the series Bang Bang Baroque, 2019. Photo: Romain Guilbault
Rodney Graham, Halcion Sleep, 1994. Courtesy of the Estate of Rodney Graham. Photo: Romain Guilbault
Meryl McMaster, Lead Me to Places I Could Never Find on My Own II, (detail), 2019. Digital Chromogenic Print, 101.6 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery, and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain