Symposium — Discourse in motion (2019)

In his presentation Adam Kinner will discuss, among other things, his recent staging of a group piece at the Musée d’art de Joliette called Suite canadienne, a demonstration, based on an early choreography of Ludmilla Chiriaeff. This project proceeded from archival research on the history of choreography in Québec, and the politics of the social dances that the original work from the 1950s instrumentalized in its claim to authenticity. By excavating and re-performing historical texts and movements, Kinner’s work invites us to look at Québec’s history through another lens and to rethink how we perform the nation. Followed by a conversation with Vincent Bonin. 

Adam Kinner (Washington, D.C., 1984) is an artist living and working in Montreal. Having trained in music, he now makes work on the thresholds of performance, sound and visual arts, collaborating with artists from dance and music. Recent projects include Instructions for a performance by Emma Goldman, an exhibition at the Foreman Art Gallery which distills his research on the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, a heritage building that straddles the Canada/U.S. border; an exhibition at Artexte that wove together national and personal performance histories, sound works, and readings; a performance with 8 saxophonists for the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides; and a research-performance project for OFFTA in Montreal. He has presented work at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, SBC Gallery, Galerie de l’UQAM, Musée McCord as well as Usine C, Tangente, Studio 303 and Innovations en Concert. His work has been shown abroad in the UK, USA, France and Belgium. In the summer of 2017, Kinner was a fellow at Vila Sul in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. He holds degrees from McGill University and Concordia University and is currently completing an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Since the late 1990s Carola Dertnig’s work and research has questioned the canonization of conceptual and performance based art forms, from a feminist and queer perspective using the example of Viennese Actionism as a point of departure. Presenting the curatorial and artistic research for her publications Let’s Twist Again (2002 to 2004) and exhibition Mothers of Invention (2004) , Dertnig will deconstruct the politics of authorship of women actionnists by unwinding the complex histories of performance avant-gardes since the 1960s on a local, as well from a global perspective. Followed by a conversation with Vanessa Parent. 

Carola Dertnig is an artist who is interested in upturning and overwriting aspects of performance art history through strategies of feminist historical revisionism, including imaginative reconceptualization and performative interventions with existing documentation. Dertnig lives and works currently in Vienna. Since 2006 she is a Professor for Performative Art at the University of Fine Arts in Vienna and has been teaching as a guest professor at Cal ARTS in Los Angeles. Dertnig’s work has appeared in several exhibitions at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Artists Space and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Secession and MUMOK in Vienna. Dertnig published Let’s Twist Again: If You Can’t Think It, Dance it. Performance in Vienna from 1960 until Today (co-edited with Stefanie Seibold) in 2006 and Performing the Sentence. Views on Research and Teaching in Performance Art (co-edited with Felicitas Thun) at Sternberg Press in 2013.

Using the elements of masquerade: mimicry, public engagement, political content and performance, Anique Jordan’s work aims to embody, disturb and complicate the archive. Through recent projects: Mas’, a DJ’d funeral procession, Evidence, a sonic recounting of 1894 Toronto murder trial and the photographic series ban’ yuh belly which documents the design of structural violence in racialized communities across Toronto. Anique Jordan will take us through some of her latest archival research and explore the ways in which performance, self portraiture and group process conflate the past and future into our contemporary moment. Followed by a  conversation with Joana Joachim.

Anique Jordan is an artist, writer and curator who looks to answer the question of possibility in everything she creates. As an artist, Jordan works in photography, sculpture and performance often employing the theory of hauntology to challenge historical or dominant narratives and creating, what she calls, impossible images. Jordan has lectured on her artistic and community engaged curatorial practice as a 2017 Canada Seminar speaker at Harvard University and in numerous institutions across the Americas. In 2017 she co-curated the exhibition Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood at the Art Gallery of Ontario. As an artist, she has exhibited in galleries such as the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), Art Gallery of Guelph, Doris McCarthy Gallery, the Wedge Collection, Art Gallery of Windsor, Gallery 44, and Y+ Contemporary. She has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships and in 2017 was awarded the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist of the Year award. This past year, Jordan completed a residency at the University of the West Indies (Trinidad and Tobago), was the 2018-19 Artist-in-Residence at Osgoode Hall Law School and the most recent recipient of the Hnatyshyn Emerging Artist award. Her work appears in public and private collections nationally. 

Sarah Chouinard-Poirier is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal. She develops performances with content where the presence, the gesture, the word, the object and sometimes the technologies combine to create a radical experience and a feminist and resistant mythology. Her current research explores the body and its writing in space, the narrativity of action and the image and the performative orality. She is interested in the representativeness of marginalized people and populations, in relational practices, in the ethics of care and in the transmission and reappropriation of stories by individuals and communities. She currently divides her life between artistic creation, cultural work (Volte 21) and social work (La Rue des Femmes de Montréal).

Yen-Chao Lin 林延昭 is a Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist. Commenting on the impermanence of existence through intuitive play, collaboration and scavenging, her practice explores divination arts, folk religion, ecology and social permaculture. A self-described postmodern archivist, and natural history enthusiast, she is an avid collector of all things from found family records to Victorian ephemera and biological specimens. Her works have been shown at Berlinale (Berlin), articule (Montreal), Art Metropole (Toronto), Festival du nouveau cinéma (Montreal), OBORO (Montreal), SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art (Montreal), among others. Yen-Chao also serves as a key programmer and exhibition designer for Atelier Céladon.

Danielle St-Amour is an artist, writer, and curator. She has produced research-based exhibitions for SBC Gallery in Montreal (2019), and the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre, Alberta (2014), amongst others. From 2016-2018, she was the Director at Art Metropole in Toronto. From 2014-2018 St-Amour was a member of the editorial advisory board for C Magazine, and was co-editor of the Poetry issue in 2016. St-Amour was the co-founder of critical publication REARVIEWS, a platform for reviewing exhibition reviews (2011-2016), as well as the exhibition space WWTWO in Montreal (2011-2013). From 2008-2013, she was a member of the experimental publishing collective palimpsest. She has exhibited, lectured, given workshops and published both nationally and internationally since 2009.

Tanya Lukin Linklater will read from her forthcoming book of poetry, Slow Scrape, which will be published in the Documents series by The Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism, in Montréal (2020). Her first book lives at the interstices of performance, the body, memory, and relationality. Followed by a conversation with Robin Simpson

Tanya Lukin Linklater often makes performances with dancers and sometimes composers/musicians in relation to objects in exhibitions, scores, cultural belongings and the structure of the museum, reaching towards atmospheres that shift the space or, potentially, the viewer. Her work centres knowledge production in and through orality, conversation, and embodied practices, including dance. While reckoning with histories that affect Indigenous peoples’ lives, lands and ideas, she investigates insistence. Her work is currently on view at …and other such stories, the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019 and at SFMOMA’s Soft Power organized by curator of contemporary art, Eungie Joo. Her forthcoming book of poetry, Slow Scrape, will be published in the Documents series by The Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism, Montréal. Tanya studied at University of Alberta (M. Ed.) and Stanford University (A.B. Honours) and is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University.

Sylvette Babin and Paul Couillard will discuss how writing and publishing have influenced their thinking and practice in the field of performance. The discussion will explore questions about how the publications and writings of performance artists are also sites of production, research as well as manifestations, which are continually changing and expanding the perception of the field.

Paul Couillard has been working as an artist, curator, and performance art scholar since 1985. He has created more than 200 solo and collaborative performance works in 26 countries, often working with his partner Ed Johnson. Couillard was the Performance Art Curator for Fado Performance Inc. from its inception in 1993 until 2007 and is also a founding co-curator of Toronto’s 7a*11d International Festival of Performance. He is the editor of Fado’s Canadian Performance Art Legends, a series of books on senior Canadian performance artists. His current research is focused on a theoretical recuperation of the notion of presence as intra-active relationality and shared meaningfulness.

Sylvette Babin holds a Master of Fine Arts (Open Media) from Concordia University. Her practice of artistic performance has led her to participate in numerous events in Canada and in some twenty cities in Europe, Asia and Latin America. She has been a member of esse magazine’s editorial board for over 20 years and has acted as editor since 2002. She has contributed articles for magazines, catalogs and artists’ books and has curated the events Les Convertibles produced by Culture pour tous (2006), Infraction 08 (Sète, France, 2008), and Il Nostro Gusto (Triennale Orange, Saint-Hyacinthe, 2009). She has taught Art and Urban Theatre at Shawinigan College and Visual and Media Arts at Cégep de Saint-Hyacinthe. Sylvette Babin has sat on several peer committees, including for the Canada Council for the Arts, the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture and for various art centers, and has taken part in various advisory committees.