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News ........................................................................ > Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal is pleased to announce the appointment of its new guest curator Anne-Marie Ninacs who will be taking over from Scott McLeod. Click here to downoad the press release. > "Picture yourself supporting Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal!" Click here to donate. > The 12th presentation of Le Mois de la Photo à Montreal will be held from September 8 to October 9, 2011 around the theme Lucidity. Inward Views.
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Theme of the 2011 event
Lucidity. Inward Views
Guest Curator: Anne-Marie Ninacs
Lucidity. Inward Views is the theme proposed by Anne-Marie Ninacs for the 12th presentation of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, around which the exhibition program, publication, colloquium and other activities will be held from September 8 to October 9, 2011. The camera will be completely turned around for the event, showing that photography can also bring into focus our interior world.
Lucidity. Inward Views
By definition, and regardless of the specific process, photography involves work with light. Thus, it is lucid in the earliest sense of the term: “bright, shining, luminous.”1 But photography is also lucid according to the word’s extended meaning in that it makes things “clear,” “easily intelligible,”2 for its basic action is to present objects, phenomena and circumstances to view by focussing our gaze on them. Consequently, photography brings into the light, and sheds light on, aspects of the world that would otherwise be left in the shadows of indifference and ignorance.
In the past ten years, numerous artists have used photography to draw our attention to complex or neglected geopolitical situations and painful human realities. Almost as many exhibitions have also raised the issue of the social responsibility of individuals and nations in the context of globalization. Though it behoves us to prolong this penetrating gaze at human beings facing difficulty, it nevertheless seems more urgent than ever that, as a society, we examine the causes and forces at the root of these external miseries in the hope of attaining a measure of inner clarity, of “transparency of mind,”3 which is the psychological meaning given to the term lucidity in modern times.
Thus, Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2011 will feature artists who, in a certain way, turn their cameras on themselves – even when they are photographing the exterior world –, artists who look upon photographic practice mainly as a means of introspection, a means of exposing the unconscious and the conscience; artists engaged less in self-expression than, as John Cage put it, in “self-alteration.”4 In addition, there will be works whose subject matter, form, and philosophical and conceptual dimension provide a glimpse of those main causes and forces underlying human experience. Reluctant as we may be to recognize them, we know them intimately: fear in all its forms, self-interest, ineluctable death, the impermanence of phenomena, the illusion of identity, the impenetrability of the Other, the power of desire and the tyranny of the ego. These are eclipsed only during those precious moments when we are buoyed by love, beauty and joy.
Lucidity. Inward Views will question our ability as individuals to conduct a rigorous and honest investigation into the deep-seated motivations of our actions at a time when comfort and complacency are the most powerful agents of obscurantism. Far from being a form of navel-gazing, this inward look is an act of social responsibility, for it is first of all within us that the faraway conflicts we are so quick to denounce flare up. If it is important to turn to artists and photographers to sustain us in this task, it is because they are by profession what Milan Kundera calls “explorer[s] of existence.”5 Their art is a “realm where moral judgment is suspended,”6 a realm where “knowledge is the ... only morality,”7 and all the dimly lit zones must be observed assiduously, appreciated, embraced; for lucidity also signifies seeing clearly in the darkness.
Anne-Marie Ninacs
Guest Curator
Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2011
Notes
1 The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, s.v. lucid.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 John Cage (1978), quoted in Kathan Brown, John Cage Visual Art: To Sober and Quiet the Mind (San Francisco: Crown Point Press, 2000), p. 64.
5 This phrase, describing novelists, is from Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Perennial Classics, HarperCollins, 2003), p. 44.
6 Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 7
7 M. Kundera, Art of the Novel, p. 6 (emphasis added).
Biographical Note
Independent researcher and curator Anne-Marie Ninacs is currently pursuing a doctorate in art history at the Université de Montréal. Her work focuses on the links between human consciousness and the visual arts. From 2002 to 2006, she was curator of contemporary art at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ), where she organized the exhibitions Massimo Guerrera: Darboral, Diane Borsato: The Twitching Project, Timepieces and Proceeding in the Fog. Her most recent exhibition project, Chimère/Shimmer, will be presented at the MNBAQ in the fall of 2010. Ninacs also curated Alain Paiement: The World in the Works at the Galerie de l’UQAM (2002) and, with Patrice Loubier, co-directed the program Les commensaux at the Centre des arts actuels SKOL, Montréal, in 2000-2001. In 2005, she was awarded the UQAM Prix Reconnaissance for her commitment to the Québec arts scene. She lives and works in Montréal.
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