SCREENING

B.L.U.S.H. is a Quebec City-based, feminist, multidisciplinary collective composed of visual artists Annie Baillargeon and Isabelle Lapierre, and musician and sound designer Marie-Hélène Blay. Their multimedia approach to action-art has resulted in videos, installations, and audio works. Since 2015, their projects have been presented in a variety of events and exhibitions throughout Québec (including the Musée National des beaux-arts du Québec in 2015 and 2016, TEMPO/Vertical in Laval in 2015, the Biennale d’art performatif in Rouyn-Noranda in 2016, Mieux vaut tard/ Recto-Verso in Quebec City in 2019, le Festival PHO à Matane en 2022), in France (instants Vidéo in 2016 and the Festival Ondes Croisées in 2024) and in Serbia (IMAF, 2015 and 2025). The members of B.L.U.S.H. have long been involved in performance as cofounders (Annie Baillargeon) and members (Isabelle Lapierre, Marie-Hélène Blay) of the collective Les Fermières obsédées.

Born in Nanchang in 1995, Dédé Chen lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, and is interested in the performance of filiation. As an anthropologist, she draws on autoethnography as a source of creative inspiration.

Charline Dally is an artist based in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, and half of the duo desert mauve. Her practice combines analog video signals, image synthesis, textiles, and glass, which result in films, installations, and performances. Inspired by her research in astromineralogy and hydrofeminism, she creates work that seeks to generate introspective states that heighten our awareness of subtleties. A graduate of Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporain, and of UQAM’s Visual Arts program, Dally presented her first solo exhibition this womb of things to be at Diagonale in May 2024. Her work has been shown in such venues as MOCA Toronto (CA), MAJ (CA), Place des Arts (CA), FNC (CA), FIFA (CA), Festival HTMlles (CA), Curtas Vila do Conde (PT), Ann Arbor FF (USA), VIFF (CA), CTM Festival (DE), Beijing ISFF (CN). She has presented her audiovisual performances at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (CA), the Musée du Bas Saint-Laurent (CA), the SAT (CA), MUTEK (CA, SP, AR), Transart (IT), and Dour (BE).

Julia E. Dyck is an artist, hypnotist, and radio producer originally from Treaty One Territory/Winnipeg who currently works and lives between Brussels and Montreal/Tiohtià:ke. Julia’s relational and speculative practice explores the possible connections between the body, (sub)consciousness & technology through performance, composition, installation, and transmission. Trained as a hypnotherapist, Julia creates experiences of collective transformation and somnambulism with a focus on the sonic. Using sound, vibrations, and waves as important levers of healing, Dyck considers real listening, to the environment and to others, a possible anti-normative and queer act.

Dyck’s practice includes her own modes of transmission and dissemination, such as the monthly hypnosis sessions with live sound that she conducts in her Brussels studio with Diana Duta, the lecture-meditations she offers, and the personalised sound prescriptions made up of poetry, sound creations, binaural beats and ASMR that she produces with the Audio Placebo Plaza collective (with Erin Gee and Vivian Li).

Ralitsa Doncheva is a Bulgarian artist and filmmaker based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Drawing on experimental analogue film traditions and intuitive, poetic approaches, her Balkan heritage and mythology, her films evoke shimmering worlds on the verge of disappearance. Between 2013-2018, Ralitsa created a series of short films and writings using archives and representations from Eastern Europe. The final project (almost) impossible worlds was exhibited at Dazibao gallery and later presented as a performative lecture during the 2022 Experimental Cinema Symposium at the Cinémathèque Québécoise. Her films and video installations have screened globally in festivals, galleries, and micro-cinemas. In 2016 she received The Eileen Maitland Award at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival for her film, Baba Dana Talks To The Wolves. Her recent project Desert Islands, shot with her father, screened at the Festival de Nouveau Cinema and at the Images Film Festival in Toronto, among other festivals. Ralitsa is ardently involved in local film and artistic communities, where she contributes as a director and editor.

Lee Ingram is a multi/inter-interdisciplinary artist and movement facilitator based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Lee is a queer Black/mixed-raced womxn of the African-Caribbean Diaspora, exploring the ways their body can contradict expectations of dance, performance, and identity, while also remaining open to the experience of ancient and ancestral ways of moving. Prioritizing observation, listening, improvisation, and experimentation allows the unfolding of time to be present in their performance work. Lee is curious about the subtleties of movement and sound within the body and its environment, as well as the ghosts that haunt, and the nightmares that live. They are attuned to how these themes manifest in the sociopolitical realm, where we must all navigate our desires, fears, and grief about the past, present, and future.

Joyce Joumaa (she/her) is a visual artist working between Beirut, Montréal and Amsterdam. After growing up in Tripoli, Lebanon, she pursued her studies in Film at Concordia University.

Working primarily with video, Joumaa’s work engages with histories shaped by conflict and crisis while specifically investigating the phenomenology of political performance, often rooted in her native Lebanon or diasporic experiences. Through documentary and experimental filmmaking, archival research, and photography, her practice attempts to create narratives that reimagine our relationship to past events, historical figures, or emblematic sites, examining how they continue to act upon us in the present. Joumaa has exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, E-flux screening room, Galerie Stewart Hall, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the 60th Venice Biennial, and the 35th edition of Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Plein Sud Centre D’exposition and Eli Kerr Gallery. She is the recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists and the 2023 Plein Sud award.

Rojin Shafiei (b.1993) is an Iranian interdisciplinary artist/filmmaker living and working between Toronto and Montréal. In her works, art is a vehicle for the translation of cultural messages and is used to present diverse feminine subjectivities. She presents these themes both through a literal documentary style and as symbols. Rojin received her BFA in Intermedia from Concordia University in 2017 and her MFA in Film Production from York University. She has screened her work internationally in various festivals such as les Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma (Canada), Festival International de Vidéo de Casablanca (Morocco), Limited Access Video Festival (Iran), and Instant Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques (France). In 2019 she was the Venice Arte Laguna Prize candidate in Treviso, Italy, and she won the grand prize of Startupfest/Artupfest section in July 2018 for her piece I wait for the time.

Florencia Sosa Rey works in the visual arts and is based in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. Through a multidisciplinary approach rooted in bodily awareness, she uses abstract drawing, performance art, and video to question the socio-cultural history her body has absorbed. Sosa Rey views solidarity and nostalgia as reflexive resources through which to examine hybrid identity, and pays particular attention to the physical and psychic spaces of distance in the transmission of knowledge and interpersonal relationships. Her work has been presented at the Fonderie Darling, the PHI Foundation, Centre Plein Sud, Livart, as well as in Toronto, Sudbury, Iceland, and in Argentina. Sosa Rey has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, ARTCH, and LOJIQ.

Romanian-born Canadian artist Laura Taler began her career as a contemporary dance choreographer before turning her attention to filmmaking and visual art. Throughout her career Taler has explored the links between movement, voice, memory, and history by using cinematic and choreographic devices to articulate how the body is able to carry the past without being oppressed by it. Her work has been praised for its unique combination of emotional resonance, wit, and striking visuals. Awards include a Gold Hugo (Chicago International Film Festival), the Best Experimental Documentary award (Hot Docs!, Toronto), Best of the Festival (Dance on Camera, New York), and the Dennis Tourbin Prize for New Performance (SAW, Ottawa). Her new public art audio work MONAHAN was awarded the 2024 Creative City Network of Canada’s Public Art Legacy Award.