DIASPORIC AFFECTIONS
EVENTS
Opening
January 16th - 5:30 pm:
Free, no registration
It's also Rentré du Belgo!
Come and discover all the galleries, art centers and artists' studios opening their doors on the evening of January 16. For a list of the venues, visit belgo.art
More events to come!
Stay tuned for more information.
16.01.2025 - 15.03.2025
Curated by Nicholas Dawson
With Phorie collective
Bringing together the works of artists Hamza Abouelouafaa, Gem Chang-Kue, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Poline Harbali, and Laïla Mestari, Diasporic Affections presents diasporic narratives as micro-stories in motion. This curatorial project, the result of a collaboration between writer Nicholas Dawson and the Phorie collective, invites us to think of diasporas as spaces that generate affective experiences—shifting, unstable constellations that transform both migrant subjects and their cultures, resulting in processes of "diasporization."
« Las fronteras son siempre lugares que sangran. »
Jorge Díaz et Johan Mijail,
Inflamadas de retórica.
Diasporic Affections is not an endpoint. Born out of a collective curatorial and artistic gesture that reexamines borders, this exhibition arises from the intersection of different trajectories, where coexist narratives that never occur on their own. This is the essence of diasporic narratives: they can only be read, seen, and heard when transformed, displaced, and reinvented by what surrounds them—memories, voices, materials, struggles, songs, poems, and others. It is almost a sentence. Diasporized individuals wrestle with magnificent stories, constantly retold as they move through the history of their lives.
This exhibition addresses this condition, this sensitivity that makes us desperately reluctant to fossilized and coagulated discourses that seek to contain our cultures, journeys and languages, to singularize our origins, and to separate our emotions from all struggle and thought. We may then react viscerally to this tendency in our civilization to separate everything: we return to our old stories, or rather, we turn our old stories over to turn the world on itself, showing that for us, nothing is still and that everything moves us. It is an extraordinary affection that, from our diasporas, transfigures our narratives.
Diasporic Affections is my response to the invitation from the Phorie collective (formed by Benoit Jodoin and Félix Chartré-Lefebvre) to move beyond my comfort zone—literature—and enter the realm of exhibition, drawing inspiration from the work of artists to continue my exploration of diasporic issues, which I began in 2017 with Vueltas. In this vast interdisciplinary research-creation project, diasporas are conceived as spaces that generate affective experiences, shifting, unstable constellations that provoke transformations in migrant subjects and their cultures—processes of diasporization.
With this exhibition, I wanted to imagine a relational diasporic space where identities and cultures crystallize into micro-narratives of various forms, meeting, transforming, celebrating the opacity of languages, and experimenting with the dead ends of translation, all while revealing the imperialist, colonial, and bloody ways in which nations draw borders and recount migratory routes. The aim is to go beyond the simple question of immigration and, on the margins of the dominant discourses of Western history, explore the complexity of the stories produced by an intimate and affective relationship with diasporas. The works of Hamza Abouelouafaa, Gem Chang-Kue, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Poline Harbali, and Laïla Mestari intersect these three notions—diaspora, narrative and affect. By bringing them together, we invite visitors to appreciate in a holistic way phenomena such as memory, migration, and the infinite transformations they encourage.
Nicholas Dawson
THE ARTISTS
Hamza Abouelouafaa
Trained as a historian, Hamza Abouelouafaa is a photographer born in Marrakech, Morocco, who settled in Montreal in the early 1990s. His journey, shaped by immigration and social mobility, leads him to explore the realm of identity with the aim of shedding light on marginalized people and stories. Through portraiture, an intimate practice, he fosters dialogue and evokes confessions.
Photo: Fatine-Violette
Photo: Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
Gem Chang-Kue
Gem Chang-Kue resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, the traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Her creative and research interests are fuelled by displacement woven into her multi-generational family story of migration from China to South Africa to Canada. Through a multidisciplinary art practice, she explores themes of migration, place, and belonging. She researches colonial history and makes visible narratives that have been marginalized.
Gem Chang-Kue recently completed a Master of Fine Arts program at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Québec, where the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation is recognized as the custodians of the lands and waters.
Photo: Francisco-Fernando
Granados
Francisco-Fernando Granados
Francisco-Fernando Granados was born in Guatemala and lives in Toronto, Dish With One Spoon Territory. Since 2005, his practice has traced his movement from convention refugee to critical citizen, enacting abstraction site-specifically and relationally to create projects that challenge the stability of practices of recognition. His work has developed from formal painterly training, working in performance through artist-run spaces, the study of queer and feminist theory, and early activism as a peer support worker with immigrant and refugee communities.
Poline Harbali
Originally from France and Syria, Poline Harbali has lived in Montreal for 8 years. Working mainly with archival material, she tells stories of love and intimate ties in a variety of forms and media.
Her work has been exhibited internationally and in Quebec, including at the Artist Centre VU (Quebec City), Stewart Hall Gallery (Pointe-Claire) and Livart (Montreal), but also at the Benaki Museum (Athens, Greece), the 104 Art Center (Paris, France) and the Mattatoio Contemporary Art Museum (Rome, Italy).
Photo: Clara Houeix
Laïla Mestari
Laïla Mestari is an artist born in Casablanca, Morocco and living in Montreal. Her work with textiles, drawing, video and print media explores notions of cultural/material hybridity and up/rerooting. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2023) where she was awarded the Joan Livingstone Merit Scholarship. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions locally and internationally and is part of the permanent collections of the Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) and the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal (MAC). In 2024, Mestari is a finalist for the Pierre-Ayot Award.
Photo: Mike Evariste
THE CURATOR
Photo: Justine Latour
Nicholas Dawson
Born in Chile and based in Tiohtià:ke / Montreal, Nicholas Dawson is a writer, editor, scholar and curator. He is the author of several award-winning books in various genres. He holds a master's degree in literature and a PhD in arts studies and practices (UQAM) and specializes in queer, diasporic and affect studies, as well as in self-narratives and research-creation. He has been director of Éditions Triptyque since 2021.
Phorie
Phorie seeks to intersect research-creation with curatorial thinking in an undisciplined practice where art and theory intertwine with experiences, narratives, and fictions. Beyond exhibition space, the collective fosters encounters between artworks, people, and ideas around contemporary political concerns. Initiated by Félix Chartré-Lefebvre and Benoit Jodoin in 2021, Phorie welcomes individuals interested in joining its projects, allowing other subjectivities to shape its research directions.
OUR PARTNER
