Discipline: arts visuels

mohamed ben soltane

Visual artist, curator, and artistic director originally from Tunisia, Mohamed Ben Soltane has been living and working in Montreal since 2022. Trained at the Fine Arts Institute of Tunis, he also taught art history and directed the BAC Art Center, renowned for its socially engaged and transdisciplinary programming. His artistic practice—rooted in postcolonial studies, memory, and social critique—oscillates between mosaic, photography, installation, and text-based art.

For his new creation, Glitch in Arabic, Mohamed explores a phenomenon as subtle as it is revealing: the visual distortions that occur when Arabic text is misread by digital software. These “glitches”—separated letters, reversed direction, corrupted typography—become poetic and political fragments, reinterpreted as visual installations.

Through this project, the artist questions the symbolic forms of domination that are invisible to the eye yet embedded in digital systems. Glitch in Arabic opens a dialogue between artisanal traditions and contemporary technologies, while reaffirming the urgent need for cultural and aesthetic sovereignty in a fragmented digital world.

amaralina ramalho alvarez

© Vladim Villain

Amaralina Ramalho Alvarez is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Her practice explores the political dimension of the ephemeral and of transmission, questioning the relationships between time, memory, and the body. She has participated in several group exhibitions, including Souviens-toi de nous quand tu regardes, presented in partnership with LABARD and the Georges-Vanier Cultural Centre. Her work has also been featured at the RIPA — Performance actuelle festival, in a public art project led with the City of Chambly, as well as at the 8th edition of the Artch Festival at Place Ville Marie. In 2027, she will present her first solo exhibition at the Georges-Vanier Cultural Centre. Amaralina also works as an illustrator and cultural mediator, and she is currently completing her studies in Visual and Media Arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Her project addresses the continuities of colonial dynamics through past and contemporary agricultural systems, drawing parallels between the commercialization of tropical fruits – particularly those from Latin America – and the dynamics of local trade and agriculture.
It unfolds through three interconnected components: archival research, a residency in an agricultural setting, and the activation of a repurposed fruit cart conceived as a mobile space for creation, mediation, and poetic resistance.

abeer dagher esber

Abeer Dagher Esber is a Syrian writer and filmmaker based in Montreal. Her multidisciplinary practice bridges literature, cinema, and visual art, exploring how memory, exile, and architecture intertwine to shape personal and collective identity. A graduate of Damascus University in English Literature, she has authored several Arabic novels—including Freefall (سقوط حر) and Inheritors of Silence (ورثة الصمت)—and has worked in film and television production across Damascus, Beirut, and Montreal. Her current project, The Ninth Step, is a hybrid feature film combining fiction, documentary, and photo-roman aesthetics. Set between Damascus and Montreal, the film follows a woman who reconstructs fragments of her past—love, betrayal, and disappearance—through the architecture of both cities. Using still photography, voiceover, and layered sound design, The Ninth Step explores how urban space becomes an archive of trauma and desire, and how remembering itself becomes an act of survival. Blurring the lines between personal testimony and cinematic essay, Abeer Dagher Esber’s
work continues to investigate the fragile geographies of belonging, questioning how memory inhabits both the body and the city.

sam lee

Sam Lee (he/him) is a Korean-Canadian documentary photographer currently living and working in Montréal. Through visual investigations of the bizarre and surreal in everyday life, his practice investigates the concepts of collective memory and nostalgia, often through a diasporic lens. He prefers traditional photographic processes, shooting primarily on medium format and large format colour negative film and making optical c-prints in hiscolour darkroom. Sam was selected to participate in the 2024 cohort of ARTCH. Later in 2025, he will produce his first solo exhibition at the Etobicoke Civic Centre Ascent Gallery. His work has been exhibited, published, and funded by various Montréal-based arts organizations.

nicolas fattouh

Nicolas Fattouh is an emerging theatre artist, visual artist, and animation director who recently relocated from Monsef, Lebanon, to Montreal, Canada. He has participated in over 30 local and international art exhibitions and auctions with his paintings, sculptures, and installations, including at Bonhams (London) in 2016.

Nicolas’s love for theatre began at the age of 8 when he directed small plays with the help of his sisters and school friends, performing them for parents and neighbors in his backyard. Passionate about storytelling and drawing, he pursued his education in 2D/3D animation at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts, graduating with a master’s degree (first in his class) in 2017.

In 2021, Nicolas made his theatrical debut with his first professional hybrid play, “Living with a Piece of Furniture”, which aimed to make history by helping his 95-year-old grandmother become the eldest president of the Sorority of the Immaculate Conception in her village. The play was selected in many festivals including the Zoukak Sidewalks Festival (Beirut) in December 2022 and the Zürcher Theater Spektakel (Switzerland) in August 2023.

marc-alain félix

Marc-Alain Félix is a Canadian painter of Haitian origin, living in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. The artist’s favorite subject is the human being. Through his work, he explores relationships, as well as the issues of our society. He also describes the impact of the influences of popular culture on our daily lives. In his work, he uses bright colors and outrageous strokes. He paints on impulse with an intuitive approach. His work is a fusion of figurative and abstract art, which reflects his imagination and his perceptions of our times. Marc-Alain wants to convey feelings to the public, he wants to give them something to look at that they will remember. Sometimes disproportionate and dynamic, in order to give them a greater expressive intensity, the characters are placed in the foreground in his works. Navigating between reality and imagination, he makes his paintings speak through signs and symbols.

As part of the Alliance program, Marc-Alain Félix aims to improve his communication plan in order to create significant links with future collaborators, such as gallery managers, and curators. In addition, he will be accompanied by the MAI team and a network of partners for project writing and for professional development in the visual arts milieu.

Photo credits: @noiremouliom

jongwook park

Jongwook Park, a settler artist from South Korea, approaches drawing as a fundamental tool of his practice. By using it as his voice, while processing pictorial elements from various cultural references such as Korean Folk paintings and graphic novels, he attempts to discover the unique treatment of line drawing for his works within flat, dimensional, and moving formats. His work has been presented in exhibitions and publications in Canada, the United States, Finland, South Korea, and Japan. He will have a solo exhibition at the Maison de la culture de Pointe-aux-Trembles in March 2023, in Montreal. His project Breathing Words is about developing handcrafting skills with clay to create a series of ceramic sculptures that will be covered with scattered words and imagery. Through symbolic forms, he wants to explore conditions of emotional displacement and create a surreal landscape to evade negative feelings.

reihan ebrahimi

Reihan Ebrahimi is an Iranian-born ceramic artist based in Tiohtiá:ke/ Montreal. She moved to Canada in 2015 and received her BFA in ceramics in 2020 from Concordia University. The focus of her works is a reflection on notions of cultural identity, memory and dislocation. Remaking is the primary approach in Ebrahimi’s work and her research-based practice is nourished by the interplay of her studio practice, personal experiences and research on historical artifacts. 

Ebrahimi is the co-curator and co-founder of Nowruz Projects, a multicultural collective which curates events focused on the rite of Nowruz in Western Asia. The project is developed around the theme of “ritual as a space for rebirth, reunion and appreciation of diversity”.

jongwook park

South Korea-born Jongwook Park holds an MFA in Communication Design from Sangmyung University (Seoul) and a diploma in Animation Art and Design from LaSalle College (Montreal). Living in a foreign land forced him out of his psychological comfort zone, a disorientation that led him to objectively re-examine the familiar. His artwork draws on traditional art practices while adopting new techniques and is distinguished by his unique treatment of line drawing. His work has been presented in exhibitions and publications in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, as well as South Korea, Japan, and the United States.

⇒ https://jon-p.weebly.com/

hea r. kim

South Korean-born, Canadian immigrant Hea R. Kim explores overlapping technical art processes within fibers and sculptures. Visually inspired by her Korean heritage, Kim’s explorations share elements of childhood recollections and imagination. With her formal education in South Korea and her in-depth studies in material processes and contemporary art in Montreal, Kim aims to visualize the innocent period when days are filled with infinite possibility, indulgence, and mystery. Kim has exhibited her works across Canada and South Korea. She had a solo exhibition Vomiting Flowers at MAI in 2019. This exhibition will be presented again at Eastern Edge Gallery in St. John’s Newfoundland in March 2022.