Archives des visual arts — MAI | Montréal, arts interculturels

milton-parc pop-up neighbours exhibition

The Milton-Parc Neighbors pop-up exhibition brings together 14 neighbors (residents, collectives, or organizations) from the Milton-Parc neighborhood.

Situated in the Milton-Parc neighbourhood for over 25 years, MAI aims to honour the vitality and artistic sensitivity of the people who call it home. This exhibition opens a window onto the creative energy of our community and offers an invitation to encounter the spirit of the neighbourhood through the works of its residents, from December 5 to 7.

Opening reception: December 5th 2025, 5–7 p.m.
Exhibition: December 6th & 7th, 12–6 p.m.

Free admission — no reservation required.

Artists presented:
Corinne Beaumier
Juan Carlos Prada-Lopez
Oonya Kempadoo
Georgia Graham
Campagne Chez Gautier
Jean-Francois Lamoureux
Charlotte Poitras
Trudi Mathieu
Les Short
Claudette Louis
Matt Currie
Vincent Van Dongen
L’Atelier
Atelier Tlachiuak

wayfinders : au gré des sens

Opening: April 2nd, 2026 at 5pm

How do we locate ourselves in our bodies, within the universe, and among others? Wayfinders : Au gré des sens features ten contemporary artists—both with and without disabilities—who chart paths of connection through alternate modes of sensing. Born from a desire to overcome the divide between disabled and non-disabled fields of cultural practice, this exhibition explores new sensory languages with which to bring people together. It becomes a space for artists of various abilities, backgrounds, and geographic locations to connect in new, unexpected ways. Curated by a mixed-abilities team, this exhibition seeks to unite diverse communities and experiment with new ways of creating shared meaning and direction.

Artists : Piet Devos, Raphaëlle de Groot, Véro Leduc, Mareike Yin-Yee Lee + Marc Sabat, Salima Punjani + Greer Pester, Rolande Souliere, Collin van Uchelen with Carmen Papalia

Guided visit with the co-curators → April 30th 2026 from 5:30pm – 6:30pm
French + LSQ

Free entry, no reservation required.

the lost paintings: a prelude to return

This travelling exhibition extends across two venues – MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) and articule.

Curated by Rula Khoury, Joëlle Tomb and Haidi Motola, this exhibition gathers 53 artists from Palestine and its diaspora across time and borders to reimagine the missing works of Maroun Tomb, a Palestinian-Lebanese artist, whose 1947 exhibition in Haifa was lost amid the mass displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians during the Nakba. The works resurrect a moment that was nearly erased until it was discovered in archival documents.

Drawing from the minimal information of Tomb’s last exhibition in Palestine before his forced exile, the contemporary artists’ responses navigate across painting, photography, multi-media, sculpture and video to move between what was and what could be. They do not reconstruct the past, but reclaim it—through fragments, gestures, and stories passed across generations. Bringing together today’s rising artists alongside the trailblazers of Palestinian modern art, this exhibition is a collective act of resistance paired with interrogation of colonial violence and its consequences on multiple generations.

From Haifa to Gaza, landscapes are revisited not as backgrounds, but as living witnesses; still life is rendered unstable, objects and places teetering between presence and disappearance. Archival fragments reemerge as portals, where loss is neither resolved nor concealed but held, examined, and reimagined. Rather than reconstruct the past, the exhibition inhabits the void—where what is absent does not vanish, but stands determined. In this space, memory becomes an act of return, not to what was, but to what still calls.

Guided Tour of the Exhibition With Curator Joëlle Tomb →

articule — September 6th, 1pm to 2pm (English)
Free entry, no reservation required. Doors open at noon.

MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) — September 6th, 3pm to 4pm (French)
Free entry, no reservation required. Doors open at 2pm.

Consult the Arabic version of the artist statement here.

traceable

→ BOX OFFICE

Traceable is a series of distinct evocative capsules exploring the ever-evolving nature of identity. Driven by her journey, Nubian Néné examines how mental health influences creativity, particularly through the lens of her experiences as a Black woman. This reflective piece addresses the effects of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem, highlighting the coping mechanisms and restorative systems that develop in response.

Inspired by music, architecture, atmospheres, dramaturgy, history, Black American culture, and her Haitian heritage, the artist creates a multidimensional process that leads to healing. The performance incorporates visual art, poetry, and dance styles like House and Breaking, using these forms to express the turmoil and resilience within.

Content warning
High volume + Mention of mental health issues + Pitch black moments

PUBLIC+

→ Talkback with the artist
Friday, January 17th — Following the 7:30 p.m. performance
Hosted by Alex Spicey Landé, co-curator of MAI’s 25th anniversary season

→ Childcare during the performance
Saturday, January 18th — 2pm
Free — Offered to children ages 3 to 10 with ticket-holding parents

Michèle Jean Jacques will offer children a dance and movement workshop that explores emotions and moving according to the states of mind that inhabit them. This playful workshop will enable children to explore some of the themes presented in Traceable while their parents watch the performance.

→ Relaxed performance (RP)
Saturday, January 18th — 2pm
A RP takes a more relaxed approach to noise and movement during the show.
To prepare your visit, consult these two useful guides :
· Traceable Show Guide
· MAI Visual Story

the conditions

© Fran Chudnoff — avec/with : Ja James Britton Johnson + Lucy M. May

Can feeling be a way of knowing?

Six improvisers reach into the sensory present. Their fabulations pry open channels between the bewildering envelope of the world and wild inner landscapes. Weaving felt-relationships to place and the physicality of emotion, The Conditions unfurls in part from Lucy M. May’s search for an embodied and spiritual connection to her homeland in Wolastokuk/New Brunswick, whilst facing her settler-colonial origins.

The gallery is both a climate-controlled institution, estranging us from nature and body, and a temple for sensing and feeling. Beneath its concrete foundations, the bedrock shifts. An interdisciplinary exhibition in collaboration with Fran Chudnoff, Ja James Britton Johnson, and Maisie O’Brien accompanies this multifaceted performance featuring live music by Patrick Conan and Amy Macdonald. In the intimacy of this contained space, the artists invite you to listen, spy, wander, and sink in.

The exhibition linked to the performance will be open to the public from 12pm to 5pm from November 13 – 16. No reservation required – free entry.

The November 13th performance will be followed by a talkback moderated by Hanako Hoshimi-Caines.

PUBLIC+

+ Shadow Theatre and Movement workshop :
→ November 16th, from 1pm to 3pm | MAI Gallery
For children and families
Free — Reservation required
Learn more

connecting from the inside out

Connecting From the Inside Out examines how inherited societal trauma settles in the body. My-Van Dam utilizes somatic practices including voice and movement to explore tools for individual and collective care.

Dam’s vision comes alive through sculptures, drawings, and a video installation. Moving from her healing journey to frameworks for communal well-being, she highlights the possibility for racialized women to mobilize toward the repair of shared wounds.

The audience is called upon to identify the generative power of spaces of vulnerability, where collective mourning awaits healing.

Opening : September 5th from 5pm to 8pm
Free entrance — Tuesday to Saturday from 12pm to 6pm.

PUBLIC+

+ Discussion evening :

Connecting from the Inside Out; support network
→ October 4th at 6pm | MAI Café-bar
Bilingual discussion
With My-Van Dam, Nadia Louis-Desmarchais, Be Heintzman Hope, Jeimy Quesada Oviedo
Animation: Geneviève Wallen
Link to event

+ Exhibition tour schedule :

Guided tours by My-Van Dam & Geneviève Wallen
→ Friday, September 13th at 4pm (FR) | Mandatory sign-up here
→ Friday, September 27th at 6pm (EN) | Mandatory sign-up here

Commented tours by Marguerite Chiarello, MAI’s cultural mediator for the exhibitions
Every Saturday at 4pm and 6pm (in French only)
→ September 7 + 14 + 21 + 28
→ October 5 + 12 + 19 + 26

agency

agency is the latest collaboration by parent-child duo tīná gúyáńí, comprised of Glenna Cardinal and seth cardinal dodginghorse. It chronicles the loss of their ancestral home in tsuut’ina nation due to a land transfer agreement for the Southwest Calgary Ring Road. Their forced removal serves as the backdrop for an exploration of land, displacement, and reclamation through healing.

With film, music and visual arts, the pair critique colonial institutions that continue to destroy matrilineal homes, dividing families and communities. Through a heartfelt tribute to their land/home, and kinship, this exhibition envisions a new kind of agency: one that is self-determined, non-colonial, and non-patriarchal.

Opening : March 6th, 2025 at 5pm
Free entrance — Tuesday to Saturday from 12pm to 6pm.

→ Guided tour in ASL and LSQ + English
March 22nd 2025 — 2pm to 4pm
Free — Registration required
Cultural mediators Dominique Ireland and Caroline Hould offer a tandem tour of the exhibition agency. Offered entirely in ASL and LSQ, the tour focuses on the journey of mother-child artist duo Glenna Cardinal and seth cardinal dodginghorse, and then on each of the works presented in the exhibition. A self-determined, non-colonial, non-patriarchal and non-audiocentric tour.

register here

the traces that remain

© Po B. K. Lomami, aksanti 33 (part 2.01), 2023

The Traces That Remain explores the after-effects. The exhibition asks: what reverberating repercussions remain in the body and mind following significant events that have affected us? Are we the only ones affected? How do these traces manifest over the course of a minute, a year, a lifetime? Are they always obvious, or do they slip into the subconscious in the form of memories and nightmares? Do they always eventually become experience, resilience? Addressing these questions, this exhibition brings together artists who reflect on what lingers after the fact/the effect.

Shaya Ishaq introduces these questions through her interest in the liminality of rites of passage; Po B K Lomami fashions an intimate experiment to interrogate how grief remains; Zinnia Naqvi exposes the scars left by institutions that choose not to support visible minorities; and Lan “Florence” Yee probes the painful consequences that follow difficult situations. On top of this, The Traces That Remain also explores the form archives can take, as well as who and what is remembered.

Curated by: eunice bélidor

Featuring work from : Po B. K. Lomami + Zinnia Naqvi + Shaya Ishaq + Lan “Florence” Yee

These Traces Will Remain, May 29th, 6:30pm

The public is invited to witness the dinner-performance.

To premiere naakita f.k.’s film miss nothing that flies or swims, the dinner-performance These Traces Will Remain will be held at the MAI café-bar. Partly inspired by The Feast (Black Wimmin Artists, AGO, 2019), International Dinner Party (Suzanne Lacy and Linda Pruess, worldwide simultaneously, 1979), and eunice bélidor and Marie Ségolène Brault’s own dinner parties, These Traces Will Remain activates the many spaces of the MAI, and extends the concept of performance by engaging with the intimate gesture of the dinner party. How do we gather, show care, have fun, and how does it sustain artistic and curatorial practices? With readings from Marilou Craft and Jamilla Touré, wine by Jordan Crosthwaite, and food by Sophie Christinel.

Extended opening hours on May 30th + 31st until 8pm.
A new work is added to the exhibition from May 30 to June 1st: the film miss nothing that flies or swims by naakita f.k. Available in the MAI theatre during the exhibition’s opening hours.

Come and get more infos about the works with Marguerite Chiarello, our cultural mediator of the exhibition!
Saturdays : May 11th + 25th & June 1st + 8th + 15th
Free entry | No reservations

→ Guided visit of the exhibition with eunice bélidor
May 8th at 5:30pm
In French, for cultural workers and curators

registration

→ Conversation with artists Shaya Ishaq, Po B K Lomami, Zinnia Naqvi and Lan “Florence” Yee hosted by eunice bélidor
May 3rd at 6:30pm
English + ASL

hybrid condition

Trois portraits de Tam Khoa Vu sont disposés côte à côte en format paysage. Chacun sur fond bleu, on voit de gauche à droite : Tam portant une camisole blanche et un chapeau beige ; Tam portant une camisole blanche, une casquette et un drapé qui ne laisse voir que ses yeux ; Tam portant un chandail noir à col en V et une casquette noire. — © Tam Khoa Vu

In Hybrid Condition Vietnamese-Canadian artist Tam Khoa Vu explores cultural hybridity through multiple video and audio installations using a blend of personal, archival, and modern-day footage. Vu’s work is playful, even mischievous, as the artist aims to create spaces of abundance, possibility, and nuance around the issues involved in representing liminal Vietnamese identities. Vu navigates a diasporic “third space” between Vietnam and Canada. In Hybrid Condition, footage emphasizing Vietnamese identity and diaspora allows the artist to dig into the roots of cultural, ethnic, and national identities in such a way as to call into question Western hegemony and its influence over Vietnam, Vietnamese, and Vietnamese-Canadian identity.

Opening on February 29th at 5pm with music by Transpacific Express + Mollygum.

credits

Jacob Payne Barber, video editor (HC003)
Ngo Kim Thanh, audio composer (HC003)
Nguyễn Vũ Trụ, artist contribution (HC003)
Dennis Nguyễn, artist contribution (HC003)
Liam O’ Keefe, writer (HC003)
Barry Williams, filmer (HC003)
Fan Wu , writer (HC003)
Nikki Celis, writer (HC003)
Francis Goodship, Hybrid Condition install team
Myles Perkins, Hybrid Condition install team
Maka Ta, Hybrid Condition install team
Josh Holung, Hybrid Condition install team
Lam Dam, Hybrid Condition install team
Taylor Smith, Hybrid Condition install team
Rachel Nam, audio composer (HC002)
Anita Hwahmee Joh, writer (HC002)
Warren Goodwin, video editor (HC002)

→ Guided tours of the exhibition by the artist Tam Khoa Vu on Saturday March 9th, 2pm (English) & 4pm (French).
Free entry- reservation required here.

→ Commented tours of the exhibition by Marguerite Chiarello on Saturdays March 16th, 23th and 30th, 3pm (French only).
Free entry — No reservation required

driving in palestine

Palestinian-born and Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist Rehab Nazzal employs a variety of media to examine the devastating effects of settler-colonial violence on the Palestinian people, land and non-human life. Driving in Palestine is a multimedia installation that combines photography, video, printed matter, and sound to offer glimpses of Israel’s structures of segregation, confinement, surveillance and restriction to freedom of movement that proliferate the occupied West Bank. Captured from moving vehicles on Palestinian roads spanning 2010 to 2020, a decade of images compels viewers to question the link between suppression and debilitation of Indigenous people and the attempts to expropriate and destroy their land. Nazzal’s work reveals a regime that suffocates, surveils and controls the Palestinian’s mobility within and beyond their territories. It invites viewers to witness manifestations of this regime including the apartheid wall, military checkpoints, gates, fences, watchtowers, and roadblocks that Palestinians have had to navigate for the past 70 years.

➞ Curatorial text by Stefan St-Laurent