Cultural Season 2025

Artist-run-centre OBORO is proud to present its program of exhibitions and activities for fall 2025.

Memory, Matter, and Presence: A Vibrant Season of Exhibitions, Residencies, and Performance 

This fall, OBORO launches a powerful artistic season exploring memory, embodied experience, and nature. From October 3 to November 29, 2025, our exhibition and production centre dedicated to visual, media, and digital arts will unveil two exhibitions, two artist residencies, and highlight its ongoing partnership with the VIVA! Art Action festival, whose 9th edition will be presented this fall. 

EXHIBITIONS

Stanley Wany — Corps matériels
Curator: Michèle Magema
Salle Daniel-Dion et Su Schnee 
From October 3 to November 29, 2025
Opening: Friday, October 3, 2025, at 5 pm

Recipient of the prestigious Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art 2025, Stanley Wany presents a body of sculptures, large-format drawings, and videos offering an immersion into the diasporic memory of African descent through a symbolic return to Ilé-Ifẹ̀, the mythical city of Yoruba cosmology. Through oral narratives, ancestral references, and contemporary aesthetics, the artist explores scattered legacies and forms of resistance to colonial violence.  

A new performance conceived with curator Michèle Magema will activate the exhibition by highlighting the embodied power of gesture and physical transmission.  This performative encounter between Wany and Magema gives rise to a powerful dialogue between two complementary approaches: one delving into the visual layers of the Afro-descendant unconscious, the other deconstructing colonial archives through an embodied and political aesthetic.   

Anne-Marie Bouchard & Manon Sioui — Yahndawa’ : Vertige et Les sept feux 
Small Gallery
From October 3 to November 29, 2025
Opening: Friday, October 3, 2025, at 5 pm

In this video and sculptural installation, artists Manon Sioui and Anne-Marie Bouchard, with the collaboration of France Gros-Louis Morin, stage a layered landscape in which a river of pearls and light unfolds. Carried by the sounds of nature and animated with phytogram images, the installation resonates with the Prophecy of the Seven Fires—a story of strength and hope rooted in Anishinaabe culture. It celebrates the fluidity of living memory, the relationship to the land, and intergenerational transmission through a sens-based and committed approach. 

Presented for the first time in Montréal, this immersive exhibition follows the larger Yahndawa’ project, which has unfolded in several venues since 2022 in a spirit of dialogue and co-creation between artists from Wendake and Québec City. Yahndawa’—which means “river”—symbolically follows the course of the Akiawenhrahk / Saint-Charles River, linking the two communities. In this initial context, seven artists from each territory were invited to share their practices, visions, and cultural backgrounds, supported by seven arts organizations in a spirit of respectful exchange and lasting collaboration. 

RESIDENCIES

Sarah Wendt + Pascal Dufaux : Sound object and Film soap model
From September 1st to October 7, 2025
End of residency presentation: Friday, October 3, 2025, at 5 pm

During their production residency, the prolific Montréal-based duo of Sarah Wendt and Pascal Dufaux is developing a series of sound sculptures within an environment that engages the moving body. Their project Sound Object and Film Soap Model follows their practice at the intersection of sound, movement, sculpture, and installation. 

By creating new sound sculptures, the artists further their shared exploration of multisensory perception and the transformation of materials into immersive experiences. In keeping with the interdisciplinary trajectory that has driven them since 2017, the duo will welcome dancers throughout the residency to generate movement-based dialogues with their sound and visual creations. The residency will conclude with the unveiling of their project on the same evening as the opening of the fall exhibitions, inviting the public to step into their ever-evolving universe.

Nelly Mironchuck — Le jardin de ma mère 
From October 15 to 31, 2025
End of residency presentation: Thursday, November 13, 2025, at 5 pm
In partnership with École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’UQAM

Developed through OBORO’s new media creation grant awarded to a student from UQAM’s School of Visual and Media Arts, this residency project highlights the attuned work of emerging artist Nelly Mironchuck. Centered around a family garden in the Laurentians, the artist observes, documents, and interacts with a domesticated natural ecosystem, in harmony with her ecofeminist approach imbued with care, poetry, and slowness. 

At OBORO, she will continue the post-production of an immersive installation using video, sound, drawings, and texts produced in the field. A delicate approach that reflects a generation attentive to the relationships between living beings, the land, and invisible narratives. 

EVENT

VIVA! Art Action 2025 – Irma Optimist (Finland) 
From October 7 to 11, 2025 at Union Française, Montréal

As part of the 9th edition of VIVA! Art Action, OBORO is thrilled to present a performance by Irma Optimist. A major figure in Finland’s performance art scene for over 30 years, Optimist blends scientific rigor with subversive embodiment. A mathematician specializing in chaos theory, she uses performance to disrupt formal language, reclaim the symbols of the body, desire, and identity, while questioning the boundaries between science, art, and femininity. 

Since 1989, she has presented over 160 performances in Finland, the United States, Japan, Canada, Germany, Austria, Poland, France, Lithuania, Estonia, Belarus, Romania, Denmark, Sweden, Slovakia, Hungary, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. 

Her presence in Québec this year is an opportunity not to be missed! 

Fall at OBORO: Encounters, Embodied Archives, and Artistic Transformations 

OBORO invites the public, media, and arts professionals to join us on Friday, October 3, 2025, from 5 pm, for a special opening event featuring exhibitions, performative activations, and sound installations that highlight a diversity of voices, perspectives, and artistic approaches. 

ABOUT OBORO   

OBORO is an artist-run center dedicated to the presentation and production of current practices in visual, media and digital arts. OBORO’s field of action covers visual and media arts, new technologies, performing arts and emerging practices. The centre’s two main galleries are dedicated to the presentation of solo and group exhibitions. The New Media Lab offers a variety of services and specialized spaces for digital and media art production.

MEDIA RELATIONS 

Audrey Bilodeau Fontaine | Communications Manager | communications@oboro.net  

ACCESSIBILITY   

OBORO strives towards removing structural barriers to access and participation and is committed to treating all artists and members of the public with equity. More information in this detailed document.

OBORO would like to thank all of its collaborators and partners who make the production and dissemination of our projects possible. OBORO’s mission affirms our support for creation from diverse cultures, with the aim of contributing to a culture of peace. In this spirit, we acknowledge that we are located on unceded Indigenous territory, not covered by treaty, known as Tiohtiá:ke / Mooniyang / Montréal. We recognize and thank the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation, custodians of the lands and waters on which we gather. 

4001 rue Berri, Suite 301 Montréal (Québec) Canada H2L 4H2  

514 844-3250 www.oboro.net