Image fournie par Felicity Tayler.

The exhibition Fault Lines / Lignes de faille launches the first of SBC’s long-term research programs. These programs will focus on specific topics pertinent to contemporary society and will unfold over a series of related exhibitions, workshops, conversations, publications and other events, providing a forum for socially-engaged cultural practices.



The first program centers on pressing questions related to the topic of sovereignty and the sovereign self. SBC will present work from all parts of the world that analyzes the mechanisms and operations at play in political life. Exploring contemporary notions of the political subject, areas of research in the sovereignty program will be loosely grouped under the themes territories, language, representation, governance, the institutional and law. The sovereign self lies at the heart of the research.



Fault Lines / Lignes de faille presents work that focuses on the power of speech, particularly in relation to dominant institutional discourse. Peopled with characters who come up against mechanisms of control of all sorts, work in the exhibition explores territorial, judicial and psychoanalytical grey areas: potential productive zones where alternative modes of resistance and of subjectivity can be constructed.



Exploring both historical and present-day political paradigms, imposed forms of governance and established notions of citizenry are revised. The work in the exhibition offers glimpses of the potential for generating alternative models of political participation, critical to the opening of conceptions of sovereignty and of the political self.



The exhibition will include video, audio, archival material and an ongoing series of workshops.

A trilingual publication for Fault Lines / Lignes de faille will be produced in conjunction with Casa del Lago Juan José Arreola and will serve as an extention of research conducted in 2011/2012 with México City’s Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, el instituto and Casa del Lago.



SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art wishes to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the ministère de la Culture, des Communications et de la Condition féminine, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Casa del Lago Juan José Arreola, Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo, Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, el instituto, Oboro, Proyectos Monclova, the Centre for Canadian Architecture and Smithsonian Folkways.

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FAULT LINES is part of the 2012-2014 research program on sovereignty.