These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling.
– Audre Lorde
What can art do in the face of global adversity?
This exhibition took shape through an exploration of this broad and recurring question. If art can neither mend the past nor heal reality, we must admit that, time and time again, it’s proven to be a vital necessity. As the queer, Black, Afro-feminist poet and activist Audre Lorde wrote, “Poetry is not a luxury.” For her, poetry was a space of transformation, the lever of a free conscience from which desire and hope springs forth, and where the personal meets the political.
With that in mind, la clarté creuse les montagnes brings together works by eight artists who harness the poetic potential of creativity as an emancipatory space. From ceramics to installation, along with painting, weaving, performance, and video, the works in this exhibition express a political scope that manifests itself as much through their formal and material aspects as through the meanings they convey. Drawing from familial and collective memories (Nêhiya, Palestinian, Haitian), and inspired by lived experience, rebellion, and traditional knowledge, these works are the manifestations of free, rebellious, and disobedient minds. These artists’ practices embody formal processes and the search for beauty as a position of resistance against hegemonic systems that constrain lives and imaginations.
In uncertain times, when the collapse of the world order exposes long-ignored forms of violence, the realm of the senses becomes a crucial arena for forging new avenues, identifying possibilities, and envisioning other ways of being in the world. This exhibition considers art as a space for transition, an area of friction where forms are capable, if only for a moment, of moving mountains.
Curator: Ariane De Blois
The exhibition title is inspired by the first line of the poem Shipiss by Marie-Andrée Gill.
Artists
asinnajaq, Nathalie Batraville, Stina Baudin, Amanda Boulos, Berirouche Feddal, Shannon Garden-Smith, Frantz Patrick Henry and Tyson Houseman
Partner
