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Spheres ukraine jour2
Nikolay Karabinovych, Sans titre (Croquis du projet), 2026. Courtesy of the artist

SPHERE(S) WITH UKRAINE AT PHI — Day 2

  • Event
  • Contemporary Art
  • Discussion
Discover Day 1 ↗ Discover Day 1 ↗
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407 Saint-Pierre Street

Montréal, QC H2Y 2M3
Espace 1

Tickets

Regular $12.50
Reduced $10
Soft $6.50
Supportive $20
Fees included, taxes not included.

The discussion laboratories will take place in French and English.

All ages

For accessibility information, please refer to our Plan Your Visit page.

Discussion laboratories and performances

MILE END UKRAINE EN Vert

About the Event

As part of SPHERE(S) MILE END / WITH UKRAINE – Moving Spheres and Returns, PHI presents two days of performances and discussion labs on June 6 and 13. The program also extends beyond PHI’s walls: the Ukrainian Federation of Montreal hosts performances by Nikolay Karabinovych and Adam Kinner, along with other activities, on June 12 and 14, in its own spaces.

SPHERE(S) MILE END / WITH UKRAINE – Moving Spheres and Returns takes the Mile End neighborhood as its starting point, along with the shared histories between Ukrainian communities and the trajectories of Quebec and Canada. In the spirit of SPHERE(S)—a new kind of international contemporary art event—this “test sphere” highlights the enduring role of migration as a source of cultural, social, and human metamorphosis, while also examining the challenges of coexistence, both past and present, within our societies.

The proposed investigation, through art, begins with the socio-political conditions that make these migratory trajectories and the emergence of diasporas possible—or necessary. We trace these paths while also inventing new ones. Here, you are invited to discover a series of artistic interventions, discussions, workshops, and guided tours.

With the contributions of artists Adam Kinner et Alisi Telengut, and, for the labs, the invited participants: Sasha Baydal, Jonathan Durand, Céline Galipeau, Vincent E., Daria Hetmanova, Adam Kinner, Dominic Marion, Chantal Pontbriand, Eugénia Reznick, Alisi Telengut, Alexandra Tsay and others.

All members of the public are invited to take part in the discussions.

Founder and Artistic Director of SPHERE(S) Art Contemporain International: Chantal Pontbriand
Curator of SPHERE(S) MILE END / WITH UKRAINE – Moving Spheres and Returns: Sasha Baydal

This “test sphere” is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

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Schedule

With contributions from artists Adam Kinner and Alisi Telengut, as well as invited participants including Sasha Baydal, Julia Eilers Smith, Céline Galipeau, Vincent E., Daria Hetmanova, Adam Kinner, Chantal Pontbriand, Eugénia Reznik, Alisi Telengut, Alexandra Tsay, and others.

All members of the public are invited to take part in the discussions.

The SPHERE(S) program at PHI, launched on June 6, continues with a new series of discussions and artistic propositions.

1:30 PM
Welcome: Chantal Pontbriand and Sasha Baydal

1:45 PM
Prelude: Céline Galipeau

2:15 PM
Lab I: Infrastructures of Movement: Forms of Resistance, Persistence of Memory and Language
The animated film Baigal Nuur - Lake Baikal (2023) by artist Alisi Telengut will be screened following the discussion.

3:45 PM
Break

4:00 PM
Lab II: Returns: Circulation and Transformation of Cultural Forms
This session explores the notion of return: how cultural forms circulate through heritage, nationalist, and institutional infrastructures, and how acts of return transform both the forms themselves and the structures within which they are re-embedded.

5:30 PM
Break

5:45 PM
Around SINOMS by Michael Snow

This collaborative session led by artist Adam Kinner extends reflections on circulation, transformation, and return through language, using Michael Snow's SINOMS (1989), a landmark work of Canadian art, as a starting point. An unsolicited sequel of the work, with contributions from artists Lisa Conway-Bühler and Aman Sandhu, will conclude the day. Lisa Conway-Bühler is a Swiss-Canadian composer, sound artist, songwriter, researcher, recordist, and mixer. Her recordings and sound installations make use of analog synthesizers, drum machines, and electronics, often alongside arrangements for strings and woodwinds. Aman Sandhu is an artist and writer working between Montreal and Glasgow. His installations often include drawing, moving image, sculpture, and text. He considers them as ensembles of objects that come into view through improvisation.

We would like to thank Peggy Gale for her permission to present an excerpt of the original work.

Biographies

Participants

Céline Galipeau

Céline Galipeau, Montréal, is one of the leading figures in Quebec and Canadian journalism. A journalist, international correspondent, and seasoned broadcaster, she has contributed for several decades to shaping public understanding of major contemporary geopolitical upheavals. Her fieldwork has taken her to the heart of numerous conflicts and crisis zones—from Eastern Europe to the Middle East, including the Balkans, Russia, Afghanistan, and more recently, Ukraine. Her perspective has consistently stood out for its rare ability to articulate the human, political, and historical dimensions of events, giving voice to the lived realities of populations affected by war, displacement, and violence.

Vincent E.

Vincent E. writes, curates, teaches, moderates, organizes, dreams, and plots. They live as an uninvited settler in Katarokwi (Kingston), on land stolen from the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, and Huron-Wendat peoples. In their doctoral research at the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University they examine the Cold War-era nuclear optimism from a decolonial perspective, focusing on the ways how Soviet nuclear colonialism was made legible through the forms of international communication.

Dominic Marion

Author of a dissertation on the reception of Marquis de Sade (Sade et ses lecteurs. Une historiographie critique [XVIIIe-XXIe siècle], Hermann, 2017), Dominic Marion also edited the illustrated book-record Ouverture du cadavre de Sade (Possibles Éditions/Tour de Bras, 2016) and the collective volume Logiques de la transgression. Hubert Aquin et Georges Bataille (Otrante, 2025). He teaches literature, theatre, and Québécois cultural studies at the Université de Montréal. A guitarist, improviser, and composer, he also creates original music through projects such as Totenbaum Träger, Marion/Mucci, and Maquereau Dose.

Jonathan Durand

Jonathan Kolodziej Durand is a Montreal photographer and filmmaker focusing on erasure and oral history. His 2019 documentary, Memory Is Our Homeland (Al Jazeera Witness), documents Polish WWII deportees to Siberia who became refugees in East Africa, and whose history was erased after the war. Driven by this legacy, he has volunteered and filmed in Ukraine with humanitarian groups since 2022, intending to release his next film, The Paradox of Motion, in 2027.

Alisi Telengut

Alisi Telengut is a Canadian artist of Mongolian roots. She creates frame-by-frame, under-the-camera animations using mixed media, exploring painterly, handmade aesthetics and human–nature relationships. Her work has screened internationally, including at Sundance, the Whitney Biennial, TIFF - Toronto International Film Festival, and Annecy. A Canadian Screen Award nominee and Prix Iris winner, her films have received numerous international awards. She is Assistant Professor in Film Animation at Concordia University.

Daria Hetmanova

Daria Hetmanova is currently pursuing their PhD at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, which is situated on the Traditional Coast Salish Lands including the Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ), Kwikwetlem (kʷikʷəƛ̓əm), Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw) and Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) Nations. Operating at the intersection of STS and critical infrastructure studies, Daria’s current project focuses on mapping—both spatially and temporally— the Russian-established system of “filtration” of Ukrainian civilians during Russia's war against Ukraine.

Adam Kinner

Adam Kinner is an artist based in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, originally from Washington, DC. His practice shifts across forms according to context taking a research-based, improvisatory and collaborative approach, often working with artists from dance and music. His work takes the form of concerts, writing, exhibitions, stage works, films, and in situ performance. MANUAL, a performance he co-created with Christopher Willes, has been presented extensively throughout Canada and internationally in Japan, the UK, Finland, Norway and Thailand. He co-leads the Montreal-based orchestra The Air Contains Honey with Jacob Wren.

Alexandra Tsay

Alexandra Tsay is an independent curator and a PhD candidate in the Interuniversity Doctoral Program in Art History at Concordia University. Her FRQSC-funded doctoral research examines contemporary art in Kazakhstan from the late Soviet to the post-independence period, tracing and theorizing shifts in aesthetic strategies while situating artistic developments within the global context. Alexandra is a co-editor of Stalinism in Kazakhstan: History, Memory, and Representation (2021) and a contributor to The Nazarbayev Generation: Youth in Kazakhstan (2019). Her recent curatorial projects include Suture: Reimagining the Ornament (2023) in Hong Kong and Living Memory in Almaty.

Eugénia Reznik

Eugénia Reznik is a Ukrainian-French-Canadian artist. Working within a research-creation approach, she brings together sociological perspectives with performative and documentary practices, digital arts, and botanical research. Her work explores issues of uprooting, the transmission of memory, as well as the connections between the migration of plants and humans. A recipient of several grants, she has presented her work in numerous exhibitions and events across Canada, Europe, and the United States.

Marko Kolomytskyi

Marko Kolomytskyi’s trajectory has been shaped by multiple displacements: first, a childhood in Ukraine’s Donbas region marked by the Russian occupation since 2014, and later a life of migration, from Donbas to Asia and Japan, then to Canada, before a recent move to Paris. His artistic practice revolves around language, which he considers his primary medium, and unfolds through installation, printmaking (lithography and linocut), performance, theatre, and film. Drawing on conceptual approaches as well as the philosophies of Cosmism, his work reactivates these legacies through the lens of the contemporary moment, while placing questions of sensitivity, fragility, and tenderness at the center.

Acknowledgements

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