About —
« If it’s attention (deciding what to pay attention to) that makes our reality, regaining control of it can also mean the discovery of new worlds and new ways of moving through them. »
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing. Resisting the Attention Economy, p. 94
The first museum solo in Québec for the duo of Wendt + Dufaux, Miel du temps [Honey Time] transforms the gallery space into sensorial rooms filled with works in which vision, sound, and touch intertwine. The exhibition looks at how we perceive our environments, and also our notion of time. By offering a critical and poetic reflection on the attention economy, the duo examines the essential choices that define our relationship to the world. To whom and to what do we choose to pay attention, and what methods do we use to do so? How much time do we give to other beings and life forms around us? How is their sentience—their capacity for lived experience, which necessarily involves the senses—different from ours? How do we relate to the other beings, territories, or spaces we live in, and how do these shape our experience of the world?
These questions run through Wendt + Dufaux’s overall work, while their individual practices intersect: dance and performance for Sarah Wendt, sculpture and media arts for Pascal Dufaux. Since 2017, they have viewed their collaboration as a continuum of experiments in which the themes they explore respond to each other, feed off one another, and evolve. The same can be said of their works that “exist” within others: drawings become prototypes for sculptures, which are then integrated into performances that are then captured in video. This is particularly the case in their most recent project, L’Horloge de miel, a media installation that crystallizes their recent thoughts on our relationship to time, while examining the world of bees, their way of life, and what we know about the specifics of their perception.
Biographies —
Sarah Wendt and Pascal Dufaux are multidisciplinary artists living and working in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Their collaborative practice began in 2017 and involves sculpture, installation, video, and performance.
The pair’s first work, Strange mood and dissonant feelings, is a video-installation performance exploring the perception and memory of a body dancing in front of a live video archive of its own gestures. Strange mood was presented at Mois Multi in Quebec City and at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, among other venues.
In 2018, they developed The mountain moves while my fingernails grow, a speculative fable about the relationship between ephemeral human temporality and geological time. This became their first solo exhibition, presented at AXENÉO7 in Gatineau in 2019, and at The Rooms in St. John’s in 2022. A choreographic film version was later produced at Tangente Danse and presented at festivals in Canada and Scotland.
In 2021–22, the duo presented Hétérotopias, a performance with two dancers, live sound, and mobile sculpture, at festivals in multiple provinces, and for a residency at the Musée d’art de Joliette. The video version was shown in Montreal and Brussels.
Their project Ectoplasmic Studies, first exhibited at the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides in 2021, was later developed as a solo exhibition at l’Écart in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, in 2023. Elements of the exhibition were shown in Undead Archive: 100 Years of Photographing Ghosts, at the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery, in Winnipeg. Ectoplasmic Studies will tour locations in Montreal as part of the Montreal Arts Council’s 2024–25 program.
As artists working in tactile media, Sarah and Pascal were recently invited to Germany to conduct research on themes of tactility and accessibility in the arts with multidisciplinary artists with diverse sensory abilities. The project was carried out as a collaboration with the ongoing project [in]operabilities, at Theatre Kampnagel in Hamburg.
In collaboration with Goûtez Lanaudière! and Miel Morand.
Image in the banner:
© Sarah Wendt + Pascal Dufaux, Honey Clock (detail), 2024.