About —
Known for her immersive video installations, Nelly-Eve Rajotte presents Matter. In the depths of flesh, the delicacy of invasive machines, her most personal work to date. Based on her own experience with robot-assisted abdominal surgery, Rajotte’s piece involves an operation conducted by the medical robot Da Vinci, and invites us on a fanciful voyage to the heart of an imaginary patient’s body.
Via a large-format projection that combines real images shot by a camera, ones generated by artificial intelligence, and others modelled in 3D, Nelly-Eve Rajotte explores the growing integration of robotics and intelligent systems in the field of medicine. She also questions the complex relationship between medicine, the body, and women’s health.
The first sequences of the video reveal the Da Vinci robot, with its impressive, mechanical, spider-like appearance, as it moves with surprising dexterity thanks to its multiple, articulated limbs. The video then immerses us into the patient’s belly as she is transformed into a teeming, biomorphic landscape.
Through her speculative approach, Nelly-Eve Rajotte adopts a feminist perspective that reconfigures our perception of the body’s materiality. She offers a powerful and sensitive vision of the female body that has ruptured with the objectifying representations of the male gaze, inherited from artistic traditions and scientific knowledge. In Rajotte’s eyes, the interior landscape comes alive and becomes a topography of possibility, where organic forms evoke a vibrant, flowing space full of memories and sensations.
Booklet
Biography —
Nelly-Eve Rajotte is a professor at the School of Design of UQAM, where she heads the Moving Image and Sound Design axis. As a visual and media artist, her hybrid practice is particularly interested in moving images, sound, and immersion, through performance and installation. She is also a filmmaker, editor, and composer. In addition to numerous exhibitions in Quebec, including at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM), Fonderie Darling, Parisian Laundry, Occurrence, Clark, Optica, and Circa, her works have been shown in several festivals in Canada, including MUTEK, the International Festival of Films on Art, and Espace [IM] Media, as well as internationally – International Short Film Festival of Berlin (Germany), Transmediale (Germany), MUTEK (Argentina, Japan, and Mexico), Lab30 (Germany) , Finnish Contemporary Art Fair (Finland), and ISEA2020. Her work is part of the Hydro-Québec Collection.
The artist would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their support.
The artist would also like to thank the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) and Dr. Franck Vandenbroucke-Menu, Chief, Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery and Liver Transplantation, CHUM.
Images in the banner:
© Nelly-Eve Rajotte, Matter, still image, 2025. With the collaboration of Henri Carreau (effects/SFX) and Simran Dewan (director of photography).