In connection with the exhibition Lili Reynaud-Dewar: I Want All of the Above to Be the Sun, the MAC presents a lecture by the artist on Tuesday, May 16, at 6 p.m. at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Never Alone
Drawing from an abundance of images, and taking as her starting-point the work of American writer Kathy Acker (1947-1997), from which the title of her MAC exhibition is borrowed, Lili Reynaud-Dewar will discuss aspects of her sculpture and film practice, including its use of literature, quotation, fragment and repetition, as well as her search for a form of balance resulting from constant oscillations between affinity-based collective work (anchored in family bonds or friendships) and the most complete solitude. Reynaud-Dewar will also address her use of artistic strategies of embodiment, interpretation and parodying of leading male figures of the 20th and 21st centuries (writers Pier Paolo Pasolini, Guillaume Dustan and Jean Genet, painter Bjarne Melgaard, musician Sun Ra, architect Frederick Kiesler), as well as her in-depth study of the works, attitudes and methodologies of women writers and artists such as Cosey Fanni Tutti, Joséphine Baker, Marguerite Duras, Maïa Izzo-Foulquier and, of course, Kathy Acker. The lecture will also explore the ways in which the voice may be thought to proliferate to the point of total silence, as well as the state of never being alone.
Biography
Lili Reynaud-Dewar is a French artist born in 1975, in La Rochelle, who currently lives and works in Grenoble. After having studied classical dance and later public law at Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, she enrolled in the Master of Fine Art program at the Glasgow School of Arts (2001-2003). Since then, she has adopted diverse production approaches, variously discursive, pedagogical, contemplative, or aestheticizing. Avoiding guiding principles and specific themes, her work persists in introducing social issues into the artistic field and in making visible the contradictions this entails. Since 2010 Reynaud-Dewar has been a professor at the Haute École d’Art et de Design in Geneva, where she founded the evolutive group “Teaching as Teenagers,” with which she created a number of films, exhibitions and seminars. Co-founder (with Valérie Chartrain and Dorothée Dupuis, 2009) of the feminist art and culture magazine Petunia, Reynaud-Dewar also works regularly as part of open collectives (Wages For Wages Against, Gruppo Petrolio, Maladie d’amour), within which she operates simultaneously as hostess, pedagogue, eccentric, witness and activist.
Collaboration
The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal thanks the Canadian Centre for Architecture for its collaboration.
