Art in Montreal

The Rustlings of the Group Are Invented as They Slip Away is an exhibition by UQAM graduate student Marie-Pier Vanchestein at Elektra. According to the accompanying text : This installation features robotic benches that move together in space, following rules inspired by swarm algorithms. Through their movements, both programmed and unpredictable, the benches seek, through a common movement, to escape the gallery. The hum of their motors accompanies this attempt at emancipation, creating a collective murmur. [p] By playing with diversion and the principle of emergence, the exhibition questions our relationship with the structures that surround us. Can these benches truly break free from the framework that defines them? Through this poetic staging, the artist invites us to rethink the connections that unite a collective and the spaces it inhabits. As is my habit, I did not read the accompanying text until I had spent some time in the exhibition. I assumed it was some kind of joki...

In my grandmother's dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin. It was a small piece only, but thick and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair. It was stuck to a card with a rusty pin. On the card was some writing in faded black ink, but I was too young then to read. - Bruce Chatwin Diyar Mayil ’s Houseguest at Centre Clarke contains a series of objects that conjure a domestic space. Its loosely legible objects (a clock, a broom, a medicine cabinet, a table etc.) are obscured by being covered with a thin, textured material that vaguely resembles skin. More explicitly, it seems like a representation of skin. Before entering the narrow room where these objects are stationed, there is an accompanying text by Mojeanne Behzadi that provides a welter of trite cliches to guide you through: Mayil invites you into a space of tension and vulnerability. She asks you, its guest, to consider your positionality and relationship to home, land,...