November 19, 2015–January 23, 2016
Opening: Wednesday, November 18, 5:30pm
Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
Concordia University
1400, boul. de Maisonneuve West
Montreal, Québec
Canada
Curator: Katrie Chagnon
Fiona Banner, Simon Bertrand, Clayton Cubitt, Ricardo Cuevas, Brendan Fernandes, Gary Hill, Bouchra Khalili, Ève K. Tremblay, Nicoline van Harskamp and #ReadTheTRCReport, an initiative by Erica Violet Lee, Joseph Murdoch-Flowers, and Zoe Todd, presented in collaboration with No Reading After the Internet, a project by Amy Kazymerchyk, Alexander Muir, and cheyanne turions.
In recent years, upheavals to traditional reading methods brought on by the development of new digital media have led to a nostalgic discourse foretelling the imminent demise of book culture and its replacement by a widespread new regime of entertainment. Running counter to this trend, many artists today are revisiting the act of reading and reinventing its rules, inviting us to think differently about contemporary issues surrounding this practice.
The exhibition Reading Exercises juxtaposes recent works that use multiple strategies to reappropriate the fields of knowledge, language and writing. As the title suggests, reading is addressed and deployed in this exhibition specifically as an exercise (physical, mental, cognitive, pedagogical, epistemological, political, ethical, etc.) in order to question, among other things, our cognitive faculties, the involvement of the body, contexts of utterances, modes of subjectivation, relations of power, and the formation of social, cultural and gender identities. As such, the presented works serve to broaden our thinking on what it means to read in our day and age.
Events
Wednesday, November 18, during the opening
Performances
Starting at 5:30pm: Simon Bertrand
6–7:30pm: Brendan Fernandes
Dancers: David Albert-Toth, Simon-Xavier Lefebvre
Friday, November 20, 4–5:30pm
Brendan Fernandes in conversation with Matthew-Robin Nye
Wednesday, November 25, 6pm
Conversation between exhibition curator Katrie Chagnon and Guylaine Beaudry, university librarian, Concordia University
Free admission—wheelchair accessible
For more information on the exhibition and related events, please visit our website.