Speculating, veering, bifurcating: Galerie de l’UQAM unveils its program for the 2026–2027 season
June 9, 2026 — For its 2026–2027 season, Galerie de l’UQAM brings together artists and curators who delve into the depths of the world to reinvent its narratives. Some projects probe the extractivist dimensions of exploration—from spatial imaginaries to the deep strata of the earth—while others re-enact the past to shed light on the present: they question narratives of conquest, mechanisms of exploitation, and forms of resistance that permeate our relationships with technology, territory, and memory. The program also presents failure and collapse not as definitive verdicts, but as spaces for divergence, refusal, and the reinvention of possible futures. This year, the Gallery is also presenting off-site exhibitions, thereby extending its reach across Quebec, the Maritimes, and internationally.
On-site Exhibitions
September 4 — October 17, 2026
Opening: Thursday, September 3, 5:30 pm
Une assemblée pour le cosmos
An exhibition co-produced by Galerie de l’UQAM and SBC galerie d’art contemporain, in partnership with Espacio México and Planétarium de Montréal – Espace pour la vie
Curator: Antoine Bertron
Artists: Marcela Armas & Gilberto Esparza, Tabita Rezaire, Skawennati, Suzanne Treister & Patricia Domínguez, Jesse Tungilik
With the powerful influence of the private sector and the resurgence of grand national ambitions, the prospect of space colonization—as described in the rhetoric of industry magnates—seems increasingly prominent and inevitable. It is therefore imperative to understand the origins of these formative imaginaries and to grasp the vast array of alternative relationships with the cosmos that they obscure. Thus, the enrichment of worldviews and the amplification of anti-colonial and non-extractivist perspectives, for the building of shared, sensitive, and plural futures, are becoming increasingly urgent. Une assemblée pour le cosmos seeks to raise the following questions: How can we bring forward imaginaries, sociocultural singularities, and ancestral, Indigenous, communal, and non-human knowledge in our relationships with the cosmos? By re-centering these ontologies and planetary sensibilities through contemporary art, is it possible to establish an assembly for the cosmos grounded in intra- and interplanetary solidarities?
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Gabrielle Turbide. Dystrophe
Graduating master’s student in Visual and Media Arts, UQAM
Dystrophe is an art-science installation in which photosynthetic microorganisms and electronic components interact within a constructed salt marsh. Created using chlorophyll printing devices—a photographic process that exploits the green pigment’s sensitivity to ultraviolet light—the work explores the interactions between plants and their environment, as well as the processes of transformation, adaptation, and resilience inherent to living organisms. The project draws inspiration from eutrophication, a process in which aquatic environments become enriched with nutrients, leading to algal blooms. Accelerated by human activities, this phenomenon causes an imbalance: the water becomes oxygen-depleted, biodiversity declines, and the environment suffocates. This degradation, known as dystrophization, marks the transition to other ecological forms where disappearance becomes a condition for renewal. Mirroring these transformations, the prints act as sensitive bioarchives, reacting to their environment. Dystrophe thus portrays a precarious ecosystem in constant transformation, revealing the dynamics of co-evolution between the living and technology.
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November 6, 2026 – January 16, 2027
Opening: Thursday November 5, 5:30 pm
Anahita Norouzi. Rift
A co-production of Galerie de l’UQAM and Musée d’art de Joliette, presented in two parts in the fall of 2026, and subsequently shown at Galerie UQO (Gatineau, 2027) and VOART (Val-d’Or, 2028).
Curators: Ariane De Blois and Louise Déry
Artist: Anahita Norouzi
Anahita Norouzi. Rift examines the notion of “progress” as an instrument of colonial domination through the history of oil exploitation in Iran. Although Norouzi’s project stems from the targeted examination of a particular geopolitical and historical context, it contributes to a broader reflection on the current context, as the intersecting issues of rising imperialism and the abusive extraction of the planet’s resources lead to a global imbalance that threatens populations and jeopardizes humanity’s future. In their new film and installation works, the artist adopts a counter-prospecting approach to examine how oil and cultural infrastructures have been jointly used to control bodies and minds. Woven from original field recordings and film archives, the works intertwine historical upheavals, cultural tragedies, and tensions between expansionist ambitions and revolutionary upheavals. Furthermore, the pieces explore how colonial modernization transformed the region into a spectral space marked by ecological ruins and dispossession, thereby revealing what persists today of the dynamics of the past.Rift also explores the concepts of circulation and spillover through “imperial debris,” viewed as active mechanisms that perpetuate modes of control rather than paving the way for a post-imperial configuration.
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Lucia Choulakian. Le ciel était d’un bleu éclatant
Graduating master’s student in Visual and Media Arts, UQAM
Le ciel était d’un bleu éclatant is a photographic exhibition that explores, from a gendered perspective, transgenerational trauma within families who experienced the 1915 Armenian Genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire. It sheds light on this transmission, which is conveyed through bodily experience and archival documents. Drawing on the account of Pailadzo Captanian (1919), the first published testimony of an Armenian survivor, the exhibition recalls the extreme violence inflicted on women during the deportation. As a fourth-generation descendant, the artist returns to the sites of the crimes in Turkey and creates photographic reenactments based on archival images, thereby giving tangible form to the persistence of trauma. The installation recreates the scenography of a room in the Armenian Genocide Museum in Yerevan, where large-format projected images confront the public with their memorial significance. Against a backdrop of denialism, these immaterial images, looping endlessly, explore the complexity of memory and archives.
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February 5 — April 3, 2027
Opening: Thursday, February 4, 5:30 pm
Refuser le verdict
Curators: Martine Delvaux, Michèle Magema et Thérèse St-Gelais
Artists: Maria Friberg, Sophie Jodoin, Michèle Magema, Myriam Mihindou, Monique Régimbald-Zeiber, Carolyne Scenna, SMITH
Refuser le verdict means resisting the very notion of failure in order to reclaim imperfection, experimentation, and wandering. A work that fails—because it is unfinished, fragile, altered, or accidental—is a work in progress, an open-ended process that refuses to close off meaning. The resulting uncertainty then becomes a way of welcoming the unexpected, acknowledging the uncontrollable, and embracing imperfection. In this context, to fail is to reject the demands for stability and control that structure the dominant narratives of art, identity, and history. Failure reveals what is marginalized, what wavers, yet persists. Where hegemonic narratives impose models of success, failure opens fissures, where the undefined and the transitory become territories of affirmation, subversion, and resistance. This exhibition refuses to view failure as a verdict, choosing instead to see it as a force: a space of openness where possibilities are constantly replayed, and where art, by failing, reinvents itself.
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Anne Isabelle Leonard. École de glisse
Graduating master’s student in Visual and Media Arts, UQAM
École de glisse is a multidisciplinary performance installation that brings together action art, drawing, video, and sound. It is part of an ecosomatic study that takes the avalanche as a starting point to explore the phenomena of falling and rupture as relational dynamics that generate knowledge. Rooted in a direct experience of the Alpine territories, this research-creation approaches the avalanche not as a catastrophe, but rather as a mentor and thinking partner. It seeks to inhabit Alpine environments—dominated by logics of conquest and performance—in a different way by embodying an alternative stance: that of a body that echoes experiential knowledge and weaves solidarity within instability itself. The installation presents a living laboratory where testimonies, performative traces, drawings, somatic annotations, and geomorphological surveys coexist. École de glisse thus attempts to open up spaces of tenderness and reciprocity where the possibility of a “we”—both fragile and tenacious—is defined. From this emerges a collective that learns to coexist amidst rupture, to form a community at the very heart of collapse.
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April 23 — May 1, 2027
Opening: Thursday, April 22, 5:30 pm
Passage à découvert 2027
Graduating bachelor’s students in Visual and Media Arts, UQAM
Passage à découvert is an opportunity to discover the work of tomorrow’s contemporary artists and teachers who will one day occupy our museums, galleries and schools. The exhibition illustrates the creative energy, curiosity and freedom of these graduating students and demonstrates their professionalism as well as the enthusiasm generated by their projects. An annual event, this exhibition also highlights the richness and diversity of the programs offered by the École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’UQAM, which fosters multidisciplinary training.
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Septembre 2026 — mai 2027
Replaying La Petite Collection
La Petite collection will be on view starting this September in the Gallery’s reception area. Curated by Anne Philippon, Assistant Curator at Galerie de l’UQAM, a collection of small objects of varied shapes and functions will be presented to complement the exhibition program.
This new initiative brings to light a more discreet aspect of the Gallery’s activities by showcasing several curiosities from Collection d’œuvres d’art de l’UQAM. It opens a space for reflection on recognized contemporary artistic practices that occasionally extend into the production of multiples, most often small-format works in limited editions, signed and numbered.
Developed since 2009 and comprising nearly 300 pieces, the Petite collection constitutes an evolving body of study that invites consideration of the status of objects and how to categorize them, while experimentally exploring new modes of collecting and presentation. Through constantly reconfigured arrangements, this initiative will thus offer a space where relationships of scale, proximity, and co-presence between the works will unfold.
Touring Exhibition
September 19, 2026, to January 10, 2027, at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island
Emmanuelle Léonard. Deployment
Curator: Louise Déry
Artist: Emmanuelle Léonard
Deployment presents a body of work by Montréal-based artist Emmanuelle Léonard, initiated within an artist residency in Northern Canada, as part of the Canadian Forces Artists Program. In pursuing the photo and video work she has been undertaking for the past 15 years, based on a variety of visual archives and data surrounding different systems – judicial, administrative, military or religious –, Léonard continues to harbour an active interest in authoritative functions and the subversion mechanisms they generate.
Virtual Exhibitions
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, Françoise Sullivan discovered several conceptual and Arte Povera artists in Italy, leading her to explore new correlations between thought, text, image, and gesture. At that time, her work was rooted in photography, film, text and performative actions, embracing the realities that prolonged the impulse of Refus global from 1948. Her artistic approach was shaped by the student, feminist, labour, and political protest movements that unfurled before her eyes. Curated by Louise Déry, an “imaginary line” is drawn on a horizon that merges every moment of art, life, time, and the world.
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Until May 2031
David Altmejd. Agora
Curator: Louise Déry
davidaltmejd-agora.ca
David Altmejd. Agora is the first virtual exhibition to date on the artist’s work. Designed to ensure wider dissemination of his heads and busts created over the last thirty years, it follows on from the exhibition of the same name presented at the Galerie de l’UQAM from November 7, 2025 to January 24, 2026 and the catalogue published on the same occasion. In the agora representing the concept of the exhibition, he displays independent busts and heads that seem linked by an unlikely genealogy, a filiation asking to be deciphered. Forming a remarkable assembly of mythological and real characters, spiritual and terrestrial figures, as well as human and non-human creatures, this body of work reveals the extent to which Altmejd brings about a metamorphosis of the living, induced by creative and unconscious forces, to construct a world.
International Projects
May 20–September 23, 2026, at the Prince Takamado Gallery, Canadian Embassy in Japan, Tokyo, Japan
Opening reception on Thursday, May 21, 2026, at 5:30 pm
Kim Waldron. No hero
Curators: Louise Déry, Michèle Magema, Anne-Marie Ninacs
Artist: Kim Waldron
In collaboration with Galerie de l’UQAM
In light of the climate crisis, Kim Waldron examines our attachment to the hero figure. Her work explores how local initiatives, driven by individuals and communities, fit within broader dynamics of environmental transformation. No Hero brings together concrete and cumulative actions observed in different cultural and geographical contexts: in Japan, Australia and Québec. For more than twenty years, Kim Waldron has depicted herself in her works, not through a conventional logic of self-portraiture, but through mechanisms that place her at the heart of real social situations. The images highlight the shared effort required to fight climate change, while questioning the persistent, often unconscious belief in the advent of a heroic savior.
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AWARE X CANADA
The AWARE X CANADA initiative, whose scientific committee is chaired by Louise Déry, has received support from the Quebec Government Office in Paris as part of financial assistance for the partnership between the French association AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions) and Galerie de l’UQAM. The goal is to increase the visibility of Quebec women, trans, and non-binary artists. New biographies of Quebec artists will soon be added to the site’s index. AWARE’s recent integration into the Centre Pompidou will help significantly expand the reach of this initiative.
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 2026–27 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 4: Tuesday – Saturday, noon – 6 p.m.
Information
Tel.: 514 987-6150
galerie.uqam.ca / Facebook / Instagram
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Source:
Olivier Lapierre
Media Relations Consultant
olivier.olpr@gmail.com
514 583-3868