New exhibition - From October 26, 2023 to January 7, 2024 - The 2023 MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award - Five artists propose five singular universes to be discovered

QUÉBEC CITY, Oct. 25, 2023 /CNW/ - The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) and its foundation are proud to launch the fall season by showcasing the work of the five winners of the 2023 MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award: Maria Ezcurra, Anahita Norouzi, Celia Perrin Sidarous, Eve Tagny and Sara A.Tremblay. This landmark group exhibition featuring these talented women offers a snapshot of the most relevant contemporary art in Québec.

The exhibition will be presented from October 26, 2023, to January 7, 2024, with support from RBC Royal Bank, a valued partner since 2013. It tackles some of today's most pressing issues through a variety of media (installation, sculpture, photography, and video): migration, nature and the garden, memory and identity, and expressions of resilience. This multifaceted adventure has everything it takes to capture the imagination.

For the first time, the public will be invited to vote for their favourite exhibit. The distinction will be revealed in December, at the same time as the overall winner of the 2023 edition of the MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award, who will be selected by a jury of experts. The winning artist's work will be published in a monograph in 2024 and acquired for the MNBAQ's collections.

Five women from varied backgrounds—Maria Ezcurra, Anahita Norouzi, Celia Perrin Sidarous, Eve Tagny, and Sara A.Tremblay—were selected by a jury based on the excellence and relevance of their creations. Enter their worlds to discover rich sensory experiences and deep-rooted artistic approaches stemming from unexpected and diverse blends of sources.

In her art practice, Maria Ezcurra adopts an ecofeminist perspective to reflect on clothing and the social construction of gender, along with questions of identity and immigration.

The sculptures, installations, performances and wearable pieces the artist creates are composed of domestic materials – textiles, shoes and other personal objects – that she transforms in order to probe their subjective dimension and their cultural significance. Deconstructed and reconfigured, her clothes redefine the body's physical and emotional limits, laying bare the complex social relations that shape our identities.

The suitcases the artist includes in her latest works act as a metaphor for mobility and displacement. These second-hand items of luggage contain skilful constructions made of pantyhose and tops held up by threads and stones. Tights and other garments – extensible, semi-transparent and body-hugging, identity markers of modern womanhood – are stretched into unexpected shapes that push the fabric to its physical limits.

Maria Ezcurra was born in Buenos Aires in 1973 and raised in Mexico City. She studied visual arts at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas of UNAM in Mexico, the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London and the San Francisco Art Institute. Since 2010 she has been living in Montréal, where she earned a PhD in art education from Concordia University. Her work has been seen in over sixty group shows and fifteen solo exhibitions in Latin America, North America and Europe. She has taught in several universities and organizations in Mexico and Canada over the past twenty-five years. She has also developed various public, participatory and community art projects in diverse contexts. She was awarded the Prix de la diversité en arts visuels of the Conseil des arts de Montréal in 2019 and the Prix Powerhouse in 2022.

Anahita Norouzi's practice examines the notions of displacement, memory and identity from a psycho-historical perspective. Intent on illustrating the effects of colonialism on the contemporary world, she unearths forgotten stories, directing her attention particularly to botanical heritage and archaeological excavations.

Her approach, based on the reappropriation of her own history, draws parallels between the migration of people, plant species and cultural artefacts, revealing how varying geopolitical interests can transform our perception of reality. Interweaving past and present, here and elsewhere, individual and collective, her works question the links between culture and politics in an era of globalization.

Over the course of a lengthy and meticulously documented investigation, the artist has reconstructed the history of an archaeological fragment from the ruins of the Achaemenid palace of Persepolis, in Iran, which was looted from the site in 1936, acquired by a Canadian museum in the early 1950s, stolen, rediscovered and finally returned to its country of origin – only to inexplicably disappear again.

Half of the Red Sun examines the question of the restitution of cultural treasures pillaged during the colonial era and the responsibility of museums with regard to the vast numbers of artefacts that have been exported illegally from their country of production and distributed across the world, depriving local populations of their cultural heritage.

This installation combines a large assemblage of interconnected objects and images – archival documents, a 19th-century lithograph, rubble, sculptures, a video – that all provide clues to the vanished object and its turbulent history. Viewers never see the relief that inspired the work: its presence is felt only through its absence, its spectre, the space it once inhabited.

Born in Tehran in 1983, Anahita Norouzi is a multidisciplinary artist active in Montréal since 2018. She holds a BA in art and graphic design from Sooreh University in Tehran and an MFA from Concordia University. Her work has been exhibited on numerous occasions in Canada and abroad, notably at London's Royal College of Art and in Buenos Aires at BIENALSUR, the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of the South. More recently, she has shown at Oboro in Montréal, at the New Gallery in Calgary and at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. In 2021 she received a creation prize from the Grantham Foundation for the Arts and the Environment, and in 2022 was awarded an Impressions Residency by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.  Anahita Norouzi is represented by the Galerie Nicolas Robert of Montréal and Toronto. She is the Québec finalist for the 2023 edition of the prestigious Sobey Art Award.

Celia Perrin Sidarous creates powerfully poetic image sequences and photographic assemblages by transforming items from her extensive collection of personal objects via the camera's lens, as well as imbuing found images with new semantic significance. Her staged arrangements resonate simultaneously with the historical genre of still life, confounding the usual conditions of viewing and interpretation.

The artist also makes experimental short films, an extension of her photographic practice that she describes as temporal collages. 

This title refers to a seafaring term used to describe the wreckage of a ship or its cargo found floating in the sea or washed up onshore.

For this body of work, Celia Perrin Sidarous is exploring the links between sight and touch, using a process of intuitive selection to create combinations of disparate items that she encourages to interact. The recurring presence of familiar objects – marbles, mirrors, vases, small flasks – and a characteristic chromatic palette give the ensemble a highly personal nature.

The previously unseen cycle Vessels for a film is composed of seven short films in which the artist indirectly addresses her family history by attempting to capture the richness of a mixed cultural heritage. The non-narrative parts, shot in 16mm and Super 8 film, focus on performative gestures around inanimate elements: amphorae and sculptural objects, fruit and shelled foodstuffs, as well as — more experimentally — beams of light and modulations of volumes. Vessels is a fragmentary and fragmented film composed of gestures and observations, transparencies, translucencies and juxtapositions that evoke other lives and other spaces.

Celia Perrin Sidarous, who was born in Montréal in 1982, has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions at a wide range of venues. These include the McCord Museum and the Centre Clark in Montréal, the Embassy of Canada Prince Takamado Gallery in Tokyo, the Norsk Billedhoggerforening in Oslo, the CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto, the FOCUS Photography Festival in Mumbai, Arsenal Contemporary Art in New York, the Esker Foundation in Calgary, the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, the Banff Centre, the Centre VU in Québec City as well as 8eleven and Gallery 44 in Toronto. She also took part in the Biennale de Montréal 2016 – Le Grand Balcon, presented at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. She received the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award in 2011 and the Prix Pierre-Ayot in 2017. Celia Perrin Sidarous is represented by Patel Brown in Montréal and Toronto.

Eve Tagny combines video, photography, performance and installation to explore various forms of loss. Adopting a fragmented narrative approach, she examines the role played by ritual, movement and gestures of nurture or resistance as ways of countering the violence that characterizes human relationships. Her practice focuses particularly on garden and landscape spaces, which she sees as sites imbued with our memories and our individual and collective identities.

This installation focuses on the relationship between earth, its extraction and its valorization. It includes a large-scale photograph of the window of a vacant retail space on Finchley Road, in London, that reflects several of the neighbourhood's luxurious apartment buildings, together with a video shot at the construction site of the new Université de Montréal campus, close to where the artist grew up. In the video, Tagny presents an unrehearsed gestural performance that features emotional responses to a site undergoing radical transformation. Collectively, the images offer fragments of landscape that embody memories of the soil and represent earth as an archive suffused with traces of those who have lived there.

Unadorned Landscapes highlights the history of the site: the complex links between the wealthy community of Outremont and the lower-income neighbourhood of Parc-Extension, the impact of capitalism on real estate development, the social dynamics that shape the reuse of space. The artist prefers to work at sites that have been transformed by human activity, sometimes drastically, spaces that ask for restoration. The performers' ritualized gestures suggest a healing process, their movements constituting a form of resistance and emancipation, evoking the resilience with which people confront the mechanisms of oppression and trauma.

At the heart of the installation, terracotta tiles with incised inscriptions tell the story of both sites' development and commercial value. The artist employs various other organic materials – structures made of cob (a mix of mud and straw), bales of hay – and introduces architectural elements – arches, platforms, staircases – that act as thresholds or passages. Ultimately, the installation resembles a landscape that is a paradoxical blend of garden, building site, landfill and archaeological dig, an edgy encounter between spaces disrupted by human activity and fertile places that strengthen our connection to the living world.

Born in Montreal in 1986, Eve Tagny earned a BFA in film production from Concordia University and a certificate in journalism from the Université de Montréal. She has held noted exhibitions at the Musée d'art de Joliette, the Centre Clark and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, at Cooper Cole, Franz Kaka and Gallery 44 in Toronto, and, more recently, at Platform in Winnipeg and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. She is a recipient of the Women Photographers of the African Diaspora Legacy Grant (2018) and the Bourse Plein Sud (2020), and has been shortlisted for the Contemporary African Photography Prize (2018), the Burtynsky Photobook Grant (2018), the New Generation Photography Award (2022) and the Prix Dynastie (2023). Eve Tagny is represented by the Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto.

Adopting a photographic and performative approach, Sara A.Tremblay accumulates images that shift between the ordinary and extraordinary aspects of life in the Eastern Townships countryside. She uses photography, video and sculpture to document the objects, bodies, actions, interventions and transformations she witnesses daily. Her practice is deeply connected to the place where she lives – to its territory and the moods it encompasses. She captures evidence of the tranquil forces of nature in ephemerally fragile moments shaped by the seasons or the wind. At once poetic and conceptual, her work illustrates experiences lived and landscapes marked by time.

In this survey work, which summarizes over a decade of art production, Sara A.Tremblay has included vestiges from several projects executed over the years, including entire series of mutilated photographs, large drawings taken from the In and Out body of work, concrete spheres that were part of 277 Days and clay amulets from Worry Stones. Some of the works were left outdoors for extended periods, at the mercy of the elements, before being permanently confined within something very like a coffin. This Portrait of recycled earlier works seems like an act of emancipation: the artist is cutting loose from the past, freeing herself to pursue new avenues. 

In 2019, Sara A.Tremblay quit the city for the country, taking refuge in an old house at the foot of Mont Orford. She created an enormous garden, a place of pleasure and of sustenance, and set up an outdoor studio: a large canvas hung on a barn wall became the backdrop against which she could stage her daily life. For her subjects the artist drew on the harvest from her garden and diverse elements from her domestic world, gradually accumulating thousands of photographs: squash, melons and other fruit and vegetables, masses of gladioli, dried flowers and wild herbs, pets, personal objects – all punctuated by multiple variations on her own likeness.

First shown on Instagram as part of a virtual residency at the Centre d'exposition de l'Université de Montréal, the series of images and videos entitled Tout t'empêche (Everything Slows You Down) is composed of sequences that show the artist improvising different actions in her garden. The project emerged out of a reflection on the pressure to create, the need to earn a living and the stress generated by a lack of time, means and goals. In this work, Sara A.Tremblay strives to construct a space where she can finally take a break.

Sara A.Tremblay, born in Les Éboulements in 1983, has been living in Orford since 2018. Her move to the country proved a major source of inspiration that has had a decisive impact on her career. Holder of an MFA from Concordia University, she teaches photography at the Université de Sherbrooke. In recent years her works have been exhibited at the Colby-Curtis Museum in Stanstead, at the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke, at the artist-run centre Vaste et Vague in Carleton, at the Maison des arts de Laval, at the Guido Molinari Foundation in Montréal and at the YYZ Artists' Outlet in Toronto. In 2016, as part of a creative residency awarded by Les Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie, she walked the 650 kilometres of the Sentier international des Appalaches au Québec, which resulted in the book Sentier difficile (2023). In the spring of 2020, in response to the lockdown, she founded Les Encans de la quarantaine, a virtual auction group devoted to the sale of work by independent and emerging artists, or those without gallery representation.

Every two years since 2015, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, in collaboration with the RBC Royal Bank, has presented the MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award, a major event on the current art scene. The award contributes towards the professional development of artists who have been practicing for between ten and twenty years by offering them greater recognition and enhanced visibility.

For the first time this year, the Award is supporting five artists rather than just one. Selected by a jury based on the excellence of their output, these five women from diverse backgrounds explore a wide range of disciplines. Their works, at once poetic and political, reflect deep preoccupations with questions related to migration and displacement, identity and memory, nature and gardens.

The MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award, which is the only contemporary art prize in Canada that combines exhibition, acquisition and publication, confirms the museum's commitment to playing a leadership role in the realm of Québec art by encouraging promising artists and helping to further their career.

The exhibition The MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award is organized by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.Curatorship
André GILBERT
Curator of Exhibitions, MNBAQ

Management
Yasmée Faucher
Head of Museography, MNBAQ 

Catherine GAUMOND
Head of Restoration, Imaging, and Digital Innovation, MNBAQ 

Isolda GAVIDIA
Registrar and Curator of the Rencontres Collection, MNBAQ

Design and Graphic Design
Marie-France GRONDIN
Designer, MNBAQ

Selection Committee
Sylvette BABIN
Director, Esse

Nuria CARTON DE GRAMMONT
Director and Curator, SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art

Ève DE GARIE-LAMANQUE
Artistic Director, Jardins de Métis

Dominique FONTAINE Curator and Founder, Aposteriori

Marc-Antoine K. PHANEUF
Artistic Director, L'Œil de Poisson

The MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award is produced with financial support from the RBC Royal Bank.

The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec is a state corporation funded by the Gouvernement du Québec.

The 2023 MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award
Pierre Lassonde Pavilion
From October 26, 2023 to January 7, 2024

View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/October2023/25/c0731.html