Atom Cianfarani Marie-France Giraudon Johannes Heldén Håkan Jonson Laurent Lévesque Olivier Henley Shannon Lynn Harris Gunzi Holmström Angela Marsh Nelly-Ève Rajotte Curator: Tamar Tembeck Human Nature
Laurent Lévesque and Olivier Henley, still from Le Conservatoire : Première randonnée, 2017
In partnership with Ada X and Groupe Intervention Vidéo
The group exhibition Human | Nature addresses the many forms of relationships that human beings entertain with what our languages refer to as “nature”. Whether they are oppositional, symbiotic, utopian or extractive, these relations are often based on the implicit premise of a distinction between the two parties named in the title of the exhibition. The vertical bar inserted in the title can either be read as a division, establishing a more or less porous border between the two parties, or on the contrary as a mirror, implying that these two parties, in reflecting each other, may in fact be one.
The installations in the exhibition all point to the actions we humans take towards nature, be it material or imaginary. The desire to understand nature, to reclaim it, to classify or to embrace it are all impulses reflected in the projects of Atom Cianfarani, Angela Marsh, Laurent Lévesque & Olivier Henley, as well as Johannes Heldén & Håkan Jonson. A selection of videos from Groupe Intervention Vidéo’s catalogue complements the exhibition with works by Marie-France Giraudon, Shannon Lynn Harris, Gunzi Holmström and Nelly-Eve Rajotte.
Further readings:
Laurent Lévesque and Olivier Henley, still from Le Conservatoire : Première randonnée, 2017
Atom Cianfarani is a queer artist and designer. Their work focuses on DIY ecological restoration. Materials rescued from the detritus of a consumer-crazed society act as lead characters in the work of Cianfarani, who is profoundly dedicated to underlining the ideological weight of “garbage.”
Marie-France Giraudon was born in France and lives in Canada. For the past 30 years, the artist has developed a body of work around the notions of landscape, site and territory. Her installations and videos aim to rethink the growing physical and philosophical gap between humans and nature. She revisits certain wilderness areas to question the de-naturalized relationship we have with them as urban individuals.
Johannes Heldén is a visual artist, writer and musician. His interdisciplinary works deals with poetry, ecology, AI, sentience and narrative structures. He has published seventeen books, four music albums, and seven digital works of poetry/visual art. He was awarded the 2018 ISCP New York Fellowship and is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Hawthornden Castle, CCA Andratx, NKD Norway. Prizes include the inaugural N.
Håkan Jonson is an artist, programmer and publisher whose work includes digital art, printmaking, book crafting and paintings. In his digital works Jonson often explores the possibilities of language and artificial intelligence, with recurring thematics concerning authenticity, reproduction and the distinction between life and machine.
Laurent Lévesque is a self-taught visual artist who explores spaces of tension between natural and artificial. He is interested in our reports to nature, space and time, in a context of environmental insecurity as well as facing technologies authority, market mundialization and the omnipresence of Internet. Since his first exhibition in 2011, he has shown his work all around Quebec and Canada, as well as in France and in the United-States.
Olivier Henley is an engineer and programmer who specializes in video games. He explores gaming as a political instrument. He has worked for Ubisoft from 2010 to 2016 and now focusses on independent projects. He holds a diploma in Films from Concordia University and a diploma in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnique.
Shannon Lynn Harris is an artist whose film and video work reflects a creative practice that draws from the particulars and subjectivities of personal experience and landscape. The ways in which documentary and experimental film/video practices intersect, the potential of expanded notions of cinema, and the experientiality of image are areas of interest to her. Shannon’s work has been screened in North America, New Zealand and the EU.
Gunzi Holmström is a visual artist and filmmaker from Finland. She is most known for her warm and intimate video portraits of people living on the edge of society. Her message is that by examining what appears to be odd one can experience a truth that applies to most. The spiritual quest and psychological dimension are the underlying themes in all her works.
Angela Marsh is a Canadian visual artist, a mother, an activist and a creator of community projects. She is interested in the vertiginous complexities of nature and in dethroning the culture-nature binary, her ecological and relational artistic projects being the residue of a continual seeking of intimate reciprocity and learning with the natural world. She holds an MA in Visual Arts from Université Laval (2019), an MA in Education (2004) and a BA in Art History and Environment and Society (2000) from University of Toronto.
After obtaining a master’s degree from the School of Visual and Media Arts at UQÀM, Nelly-Eve Rajotte, a multidisciplinary artist, investigates the relationship to space and explores the arborescence of physical sensations and psychological states through sound and image. She borrows from cinematographic strategies of editing and staging effects that not only transform, but also aestheticize reality. The sound environment doubles the sensitive potential of the work by denying or exalting the discourse of the image.
Tamar Tembeck, PhD, is an art historian with a professional background as a performing artist and exhibition curator. Before joining OBORO in 2018 (after many years of involvement with the organisation), Tamar held an academic appointment within an interdisciplinary university research hub in media studies. Tamar notably coedited the publications The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age (U. of Minnesota Press) and Conflict[ed] Reporting (Photography & Culture). With a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), she also led a research project on public art in hospitals. Tamar continues to be involved in both research and research-creation projects at the intersection of art and medicine, with collaborators stemming from diverse artistic and scientific disciplines. At OBORO, she has held the positions of General and Artistic Director (from 2018 to 2020) and Artistic Director (since 2020).
Human | Nature, exhibition views, 2021. Photo: Paul Litherland
