LE SEPTIÈME PÉTALE D’UNE TULIPE-MONSTRE

From November 3, 2023 to January 20, 2024.

To perceive the different textures of the body is to open oneself to perspectives and experiences untainted by the mechanisms of domination and the primacy of reason, be it in an elephant woman, or in the affect of body hair. This type of perception privileges somatic and sensory forms of knowledge. It stems, at least sometimes, from simply trusting oneself. Other times, it poses a challenge to our usual ways of thinking and of understanding reality. It is in this spirit that curator Elise Anne LaPlante invites us to partake in the works and words that come together in "Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre" [the seventh petal of the tulip creature].

How does normativity and its many forms control our bodies? How might an exploration of the body’s imaginary uncover the potential contained in the tension between different transitional and circulatory states? Faced with these questions, we thus cannot deny ourselves women’s poetry, the fertile meanderings and connections of monstrous imaginaries far too long muffled. For they are essential to the free movement of breath between the skin and the organs, without and within, essential to the resolution of those tensions lodged deep in the archive of our bodies.

Concluding its journey in Montréal, this three-part exhibition project presents practices that make room for hybrid, ambiguous bodies, or that explore different possibilities through metamorphosis.

Exhibition produced by La Maison des artistes visuels francophones, Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen and Galerie de l’UQAM.

Curator: Elise Anne LaPlante
Artists: Caroline Boileau, Mimi Haddam, Daze Jefferies, Ikumagialiit, Helena Martin Franco, Dominique Rey, Winnie Truong

- Opening on November 2, 2023, at 5:30 p.m.