The MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award 2023

public's favorite

Maria Ezcurra 

Clothing, the Material of Choice

In her art practice, Maria Ezcurra adopts an ecofeminist perspective to reflect on clothing and the social construction of gender, along with questions of identity and immigration. 

The sculptures, installations, performances and wearable pieces the artist creates are composed of domestic materials – textiles, shoes and other personal objects – that she transforms in order to probe their subjective dimension and their cultural significance. Deconstructed and reconfigured, her clothes redefine the body’s physical and emotional limits, laying bare the complex social relations that shape our identities.  

Celia Perrin Sidarous 

Fragments of Stories

Celia Perrin Sidarous creates powerfully poetic image sequences and photographic assemblages by transforming items from her extensive collection of personal objects via the camera’s lens, as well as imbuing found images with new semantic significance. Her staged arrangements resonate simultaneously with the historical genre of still life, confounding the usual conditions of viewing and interpretation.  

The artist also makes experimental short films, an extension of her photographic practice that she describes as temporal collages.   

Eve Tagny 

The Garden, a Symbol of Memory

Eve Tagny combines video, photography, performance and installation to explore various forms of loss. Adopting a fragmented narrative approach, she examines the role played by ritual, movement and gestures of nurture or resistance as ways of countering the violence that characterizes human relationships. Her practice focuses particularly on garden and landscape spaces, which she sees as sites imbued with our memories and our individual and collective identities. 

Sara A. Tremblay 

From the Ordinary to the Extraordinary

Adopting a photographic and performative approach, Sara A.Tremblay accumulates images that shift between the ordinary and extraordinary aspects of life in the Eastern Townships countryside. She uses photography, video and sculpture to document the objects, bodies, actions, interventions and transformations she witnesses daily. Her practice is deeply connected to the place where she lives – to its territory and the moods it encompasses. She captures evidence of the tranquil forces of nature in ephemerally fragile moments shaped by the seasons or the wind. At once poetic and conceptual, her work illustrates experiences lived and landscapes marked by time.  

Overall winner

Anahita Norouzi

Or How to Revisit History

Anahita Norouzi’s practice examines the notions of displacement, memory and identity from a psycho-historical perspective. Intent on illustrating the effects of colonialism on the contemporary world, she unearths forgotten stories, directing her attention particularly to botanical heritage and archaeological excavations.  

Her approach, based on the reappropriation of her own history, draws parallels between the migration of people, plant species and cultural artefacts, revealing how varying geopolitical interests can transform our perception of reality. Interweaving past and present, here and elsewhere, individual and collective, her works question the links between culture and politics in an era of globalization.