New Season: Galerie de l’UQAM Unveils Its 2025–26 Programming
Montreal, July 14, 2025 — Galerie de l’UQAM is pleased to unveil its 2025–26 programming, which invites viewers to explore rich and highly diverse terrains that praise the missing image, show physical and psychological metamorphoses, perform the self in the virtual era, and display past rituals and myths that resonate in the present.
The season’s highlights include the return of sculptor and UQAM graduate David Altmejd to Galerie de l’UQAM and the very first North-American exhibition of Uzbek artist Saodat Ismailova.
Loyal to its longstanding collaboration with MOMENTA Biennale d’art contemporain and UQAM’s School of Visual and Media Arts, the gallery will also present three solo exhibitions as part of the 19th edition of MOMENTA, focused on the theme In Praise of the Missing Image, as well as projects by graduating master’s students Jules Mayrand and Océane Buxton.
GALLERY EXHIBITIONS
Raphaël Barontini, Queen Amina, 2023, acrylic, ink, glitter, and screen print on canvas, 170 × 140 cm. Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, Mexico City) © Raphaël Barontini / ADAGP, Paris / CARCC, Ottawa, 2025
September 5 – October 25, 2025
Opening: Thursday, September 4, 5:30 p.m.
MOMENTA Biennale d’art contemporain: In Praise of the Missing Image
Curator: Marie-Ann Yemsi
Artists: Raphaël Barontini, Gabrielle Goliath, Caroline Mauxion
In a world saturated with images, some, strangely, are lacking. This edition of MOMENTA seeks to situate these lacunae in a historical perspective. Ever since the invention of photography and film, and their proliferation during the colonial expansion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an ideological link was formed between these media and the construction of dominant narratives. This connection has been particularly evident in the production of figures of alterity—geographic, cultural, racial, economic—and in certain resulting historical blind spots. Narratives that fell outside this frame were swept away, and these stories have been either truncated or simply disappeared. With a focus on what is beyond our view—the silences and breaches in individual and collective memory—In Praise of the Missing Image will explore both contemporary challenges in relation to the image and the current consequences of the complex dynamics involved in constructing narratives. Which stories are told, how, and by whom?
Jules Mayrand, maybeTomorrow, 2023, game-based installation. Photo: Sébastien Huot
Jules Mayrand. GG no RE, j’espère que tu vas bien
Graduating master’s student in Visual and Media Arts, UQAM
GLHF – GG no RE, j’espère que tu vas bien is a multimedia installation that explores the human relationships formed in gamer culture and its communities. As Jules Mayrand is himself a gamer, the exhibition becomes a means for understanding the place he occupies in this culture. To do this, he has sought out people whose main hobby is gaming, entering into dialogues with them directly in the games. The exhibition draws a sensitive portrait of these communities from identity-based, political, and relational perspectives. Interviews carried out in VRChat examine the performance of the self made possible by virtual reality and the links between physical and digital space. A logbook taking the form of an artistic video game relates Mayrand’s attempts and failures to connect with gamers. The exhibition also explores the nature of male friendships that form through online games.
David Altmejd, Shaman, 2023, epoxy clay, epoxy gel, expanding foam, glass eyes, acrylic paint, quartz crystals, human hair, glassrhinestones, pencil, steel, concrete, and resin, 87,6 x 41,9 x 41,9 cm. © David Altmejd
November 7, 2025 – January 24, 2026
Opening: Thursday, November 6, 5:30 p.m.
David Altmejd. Agora
Curator: Louise Déry
In the agora developed by sculptor David Altmejd and curator Louise Déry, more than twenty heads and busts cohabitate as allegorical presences embodying different roles and positions in the universe. By means of a surprising number of mythological and real characters, spiritual and terrestrial figures, as well as human and non-human creatures, the very foundation of Altmejd’s art is expressed: he constructs a world through a metamorphosis induced by creative energy and unconscious forces. From the first werewolf skulls to more recent heads and busts, a thread is woven between the breath and the spirit, the genie and the shaman, the nymph and the magician, the hare and the snake. All these fabulous creatures crowd together: bearing the weight of the world is demanding. The exhibition also offers an opportunity to show La charge (2016), a bronze recently acquired by UQAM with the support of the UQAM Foundation.
Saodat Ismailova, Melted into the Sun (video still, detail), 2024, video, color, sound, 35 min © Saodat Ismailova
February 6 – April 4, 2026
Opening: Thursday, February 5, 5:30 p.m.
Saodat Ismailova. Filming in Golden Threads
Curator: Louise Déry
Filming in Golden Threads, Saodat Ismailova’s first North-American exhibition, focuses on ancestral traditions, rituals, myths, and the post-Soviet heritage in Central Asia. Her video installations and documentary films often associate archives and oral accounts with scenes she creates and films in different places in Central Asia, particularly in her country Uzbekistan. The themes of memory, spirituality, immortality, and extinction, especially in regards to the position of women, play an essential role in this work marked by history and poetry. Ismailova’s career is currently flourishing with recent exhibitions at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam (2023) and the Pirelli Foundation in Milan (2024–25), as well as presentations at the Venice Biennale (2013, 2022, 2024) and Documenta 15 (2022). She divides her time between Paris and Tashkent.
Océane Buxton, Modeste à Miami, 2024, digital print, approx. 114 x 76 cm. Photo: Océane Buxton and Sera Davis
Océane Buxton. Prophétesse
Graduating master’s student in Visual and Media Arts, UQAM
Prophétesse is a photography and video art exhibition that underscores the ambiguity between reality and fiction, both in how individuals perform in the public space and in how stories fueling the collective imagination are constructed. Combining documentary investigation and gossip, it examines the links between celebrity culture and urban legends. The exhibition’s protagonist is an enigmatic local celebrity in Thetford Mines named Modeste Niquette. This polarizing woman claimed that she had recurring extraterrestrial encounters, which she documented through photographs. She circulated her photos around town and told prophesies that were met with strong reactions from the inhabitants. In the end, she went missing under mysterious circumstances, yet her story received little media attention. Based on her photographic archives, the exhibition retraces the glorious and controversial moments of her life, painting the portrait of this spectral figure whose unexplained disappearance only reinforced her mythical status in the folklore of her hometown.
April 24 – May 2, 2026
Opening: Thursday, April 23, 5:30 p.m.
Passage à découvert 2026
Graduating bachelor’s students in Visual and Media Arts, UQAM
Passage à découvert is an opportunity to discover the work of contemporary artists and educators who will occupy museums, galleries, and schools in the future. The exhibition illustrates the creative vibrancy, curiosity, and freedom of graduating students and attests to their professionalism as well as the enthusiasm generated by their projects. Presented annually, this exhibition emphasizes the richness and diversity of the programs offered by UQAM’s School of Visual and Media Arts, which fosters a multidisciplinary education.
Exhibition view, Françoise Sullivan. The 1970s, 2021, Galerie de l’UQAM. Photo: Paul Litherland
VIRTUAL EXHIBITION
Until May 2028
Françoise Sullivan. An Imaginary Line
Curator: Louise Déry
sullivan-uneligneimaginaire.ca
Building on the exhibition Françoise Sullivan: The 1970s, presented in June 2021 at Galerie de l’UQAM, the virtual exhibition Françoise Sullivan. An Imaginary Line grew out of the discovery of new information and unknown works from the 1970s. During those years, Sullivan discovered several conceptual and Arte Povera artists in Italy, leading her to explore new correlations between thought, text, image, and gesture. Her work at the time was based in photography, film, text, and performance, embracing the realities that prolonged the impulse of Refus global from 1948. Her artistic activity was permeated by the student, feminist, union, social, and political unrest that unfurled before her eyes. Curated by Louise Déry, an “imaginary line” is drawn on a horizon that merges art, life, time, and the world in every moment.
EDUCATIONAL KITS
L’art cultive
L’art cultive is a series of educational kits developed by Galerie de l’UQAM team. Through this initiative, the gallery wishes to provide Quebec teachers with resources and tools they can use to introduce their students to contemporary art. The kits aim to show the scope and variety of the issues addressed by artists today, as well as emphasize art’s vital place in the conversations animating our living, educational, and working environments. Built around exhibitions recently presented at Galerie de l’UQAM, the L’art cultive kits offer reproductions of works, exhibition views, video clips, textual information, as well as directions for initiating discussions and creative projects with young audiences.
The 2025–26 programming at Galerie de l’UQAM is produced with the support of:
Address and opening hours
Galerie de l’UQAM
Judith-Jasmin Pavilion, Room J-R120
1400 Berri, corner of Sainte-Catherine East, Montreal
Berri-UQAM Metro
Free admission
As of September 5: Tuesday – Saturday, noon – 6 p.m.
Information
Tel.: 514 987-6150
galerie.uqam.ca / Facebook / Instagram
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Source :
Julie Meunier
Communication Officer
Press Relations and Special Events Division
Communications Service
Tel.: 514 987-3000, ext. 1707
Cell.: 514 895-0134
meunier.julie@uqam.ca