The Reading Club — 7th edition

Magali Babin

Magali Babin is an interdisciplinary artist who works with sound. Her projects focus on listening as a tool for collective attention and gathering. Many of her works explore notions of imperceptibility and alertness. Her recent projects look at the relationship between our auditory perception of the environment and our auditory memory.  Magali Babin has appeared in concert or in performance as part of international festivals in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and in Europe. Her sound installations and performances have been presented at FITU (Mexico, 2020), Mois Multi (Québec, 2018), the New Music Festival (Vancouver, 2013-2019), and at the Musée d’art contemporain (Triennale Québécoise 2011). She is currently pursuing a PhD in Art Theory and Practice at UQAM. Artist’s website

Caroline Blais

Caroline Blais is a Canadian animation filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist. Since 2013, her six short films have been screened in over 40 international festivals and art centres, including in France, Sweden, Australia, Germany, and the US. Her exploratory work has the innate ability to reveal the uncommon side of ordinary things and to treat life’s daily occurrences with compassionate candour. Artist’s website

Louis-Philippe Côté

Through his different projects, Louis-Philippe Côté examines questions of space, systems, violence, and control. Between 1996 and 2015, he created his DATA series, a group of collages that involve research on the violence of images and their organization. Between 2007 and 2010, he devoted most of his time to the series SCHIZO-SYSTÈME, a group of paintings depicting a world dominated by robotization, automatization, virtualization, and surveillance. This was followed by the series VIDÉO-SPECTRE, a vision based on the technological and economic failure of the system. Among his research interests, Côté has looked at colonization through machines, precognitive editing techniques, and speculative fiction. Since 2015, he has become resistant to showing what has become too visible to us, particularly the violence of images. More than ever, Côté seeks to convey a state of mind in his paintings, an unpredictable complexity and an ever-deepening need. His work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, namely at the Maison des arts de Laval in 2019, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2014, at the Galerie de l’UQAM and the Musée regional de Rimouski in 2013, and the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery in 2012. Artist’s website

Frédéric Lavoie

Frédéric Lavoie (1976, Montréal) holds a BA in Anthropology and an MFA in Visual and Media Arts. Through an eclectic practice that uses documentary or fictional elements, he produces narratives, group portraits or thematic analyses. The archive, whether it be film, paper, or digital, constitutes his primary material source. His works look at the relationship between nature and culture within a context of biodiversity collapse. His works have been presented in galleries, artist-run centres, museums, and video screenings. Artist’s website

Leyla Majeri & Katherine Kline

Leyla Majeri’s practice is based in sculptural installation and experimental film animation, which revolve around the ecological links between materials, the imaginary, and the political. Her first solo exhibition, Harness the Sun (Arprim, Montréal, 2016), launched a reflection on her gardening practice in which she explores the movement of borders while negotiating the slippery distinction between the act of cultivating and the cultivated object. She continued this work in Don’t Blame Us if We Get Playful (Galerie de l’UQAM, 2018), and Garden Archive (CIRCA art actuel, Montréal, 2019). Majeri holds an MFA in Visual and Media Arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Artist’s website

Katherine Kline is a psychoanalytic therapist in private practice and a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. Her research looks at spiritism, dendrophilia, and the work of Wilhelm Reich to investigate the borders between the body and the psyche, the material and the immaterial. As a musician, she is involved in the crone-core project The Powers with Jessica Mensch and Emily Pelstring. Kline has also collaborated for the past several years with Leyla Mejeri. Together, they have conceived projects using writing, puppets, experimental animation, and sound.

Anne-Marie Ninacs

Anne-Marie Ninacs is an art historian and professor at the School of Visual and Media Arts at UQAM. Her research looks at the creative process as a site of self-transformation. She has curated numerous exhibitions, namely as the curator of contemporary art for the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Artist’s website