Visiting Curators Series.

Helping Quebec artists access new markets and opportunities.

Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, ELAN’s Visiting Curators Series created links between Quebec artists and cultural centres outside Quebec, to increase career opportunities and market awareness.

For the 2017 edition, three curators from NYC and one from Toronto viewed the work of 12 artists from Montreal and West Quebec. Scroll down for bios of this year’s participating curators.

The curators presented topics on strategies for artists to get their work seen and exhibited, observations of the art markets they participate in, and their own curatorial practices at a networking event that took place on Sunday October 22, 5-8:30 PM at Parisian Laundry (3550 Saint-Antoine West; Facebook event).

The selection of artists was juried by a panel of professional art jurors who considered the quality of the artist’s work, and aimed for a broad spectrum of representation and cultural diversity in their selection.

Travel and accommodation subsidies were provided to artists chosen from the regions to attend the talk and networking event, and for those artists from West Quebec who were selected for visits with the curators.

2017 Visiting Curators

Emelie Chhangur

Emelie Chhangur

Emelie Chhangur is an artist and award-winning curator and writer based in Toronto, Canada. She is known for her process-based, participatory curatorial practice and the creation of long-term collaborative projects performatively staged within and outside the gallery context. Chhangur has developed an experimental approach to curatorial writing with an interest in how texts perform to create unique interpretative experiences. Over the past decade, she has been committed to finding inventive ways to enact activisms from within an institutional framework, questioning the nature and social function of the contemporary art gallery through embedded criticality and new methods of gallery “in-reach.” She currently holds the position of Assistant Director/Curator at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), Toronto and is the founder of the AGYU’s residency program. Chhangur makes single channel videos, installations, and performances that are shown nationally and internationally.

Photo: Bradley Hart

ashley kolodner portrait

Alex Fialho

Alex Fialho (NYC), Programs Director at Visual AIDS in New York City, has facilitated projects and conversations around both the history and immediacy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, utilizing art to maintain HIV/AIDS visibility, consider its legacy, and galvanize contemporary response. Fialho’s extensive oral histories with Ron Athey, Lyle Ashton Harris, Nayland Blake, Gregg Bordowitz, Douglas Crimp, Lia Gangitano, Nan Goldin, Jack Pierson, Marguerite Van Cook, Carrie Yamaoka and more will be part of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art’s forthcoming Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic Oral History Project. He also curates exhibitions for Lower Manhattan Cultural Council as Research and Curatorial Associate, including Michael Richards: Winged; Trisha Brown: Embodied Practice & Site-Specificity; and Counter(Public) Art, Intervention and Performance in Lower Manhattan from 1978–1993. Fialho is a frequent contributor to Artforum.

Photo: Ashley Kolodner

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Larry Ossei-Mensah

Larry Ossei-Mensah (NYC) is a Ghanaian-American independent curator and cultural critic who has documented contemporary art happenings for various publications including NeueJournal, Uptown and Whitewall Magazine. His writings have profiled some of the most dynamic visual artists working today—Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, Lorna Simpson and street artist JR. As a curator, Ossei-Mensah uses contemporary art and culture as a vehicle to redefine how we see ourselves and the world around us. He has organized exhibitions at commercial and nonprofit galleries throughout New York City featuring a roster of critically acclaimed artists including Firelei Baez, ruby amanze, Hugo McCloud, Brendan Fernandes, and Derek Fordjour to name a few.

Ossei-Mensah is also the Co-Founder of ARTNOIR, a global collective of culturalists who design multimodal experiences aimed to engage this generation’s dynamic and diverse creative class. ARTNOIR serves as a tangible extension of Ossei-Mensah’s curatorial vision of “bridging gaps.” ARTNOIR’s inaugural event was a conversation on art and gender justice featuring Wangechi Mutu, Julie Mehretu and Adrienne Edwards.

Recently, Ossei-Mensah has been named the 2017 Critic-in Residence at ART OMI in addition to serving as Co-Chair on Russell Simmons’ RUSH Artist Advisory Board and as a member of MoMA’s Friends of Education.

Photo: Andre Boyle

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ELAN is an official minority language organization within a country that recognizes two languages as official. ELAN is located in Tiohtiak:ke, the original name for Montreal in Kanien’kéha, the language of the Mohawk—also known as Mooniyang, which is the Anishinaabeg name given to the city by the Algonquin. While we are based in this city, our projects have also taken place in many regions across Quebec.

We acknowledge the colonial origin of English and French in Canada, and recognize that both languages benefit from official status throughout the land. The province that we know as Quebec is an amalgamation of the traditional territories of the Innu and Inuit nations, Algonquian nations, as well as the Mohawk nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Kanien’kéha and Anishinaabeg are but two of the original languages of this province; Atikamekw, Cree, Inuktitut, and Innu-aimun are also among the many Indigenous languages spoken across Quebec as majority languages, all well before French and English.

ELAN acknowledges the important work being done by First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples to revive the traditional languages of these territories, and their advocacy for the official status of Indigenous languages.