Join us for the first installment of our series Documents of Displacement, during which Marisa Portolese, Jinyoung Kim, and Pedro Barbáchano will present photographic projects that focus on the spatial displacement of people, objects, and monuments, questioning the effects of these contextual changes on their meanings and on collective memory. From research to documentation, portraiture, narrative, and installation, the artists will describe the methodologies and processes they have developed while working on their projects. The presentations will be followed by a discussion with the artists.

Marisa Portolese will present Goose Village (2022), where she has documented the lost history of a neighborhood decimated by urban developments in the 1960s situated in Pointe-Saint-Charles, Montréal, Québec. The project highlights the destructive consequences of short-term political agendas and capitalist ideals that cause community displacement while also commemorating the memories of the borough’s residents.

With Sustained (Temporary) Condition (2021), Jinyoung Kim presents an assemblage of everyday objects that had once occupied the world of transient residents of Tiohti:áke/ Mooniyang/ Montréal area during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project brings these objects into the public square of Place des Festivals as a reminder of migrant communities that moved from one place to another, either voluntarily or through force.

Philae, a photographic series on which Pedro Barbáchano has been working since 2017, deals with the archaeological monuments once found in the area of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, before being partially submerged in the 1970s after its construction. The project documents one of these archeological complexes, the Philae temple, which was completely dismantled and rebuilt on the nearby Agilkia Island in order to be preserved. However, the addition of sound and lighting systems modified the ideological structure and completed the temple’s transition from a place of worship to a site of industrial extraction.

Documents of Displacement proposes to explore the notion of displacement and its diverse meanings and effects in photographic and video works of artists through the subjects documented or through their methodologies and processes. The artists invited for this series all live in North America, but their work develops from a sense of displacement from their cultural or geographic origins. These presentations and discussions are part of a series of events accompanying the exhibition The Lives of Documents—Photography as Project, which looks at the processes and methodologies of artists and photographers in constructing visual arguments, critiques, research, and observations on our built environment.

Marisa Portolese is a Canadian-Italian visual artist born in Montréeal, Quebec. She is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University, where she obtained an MFA in 2001. Portraiture, representations of women, autobiography and familial and cultural heritage are recurrent subjects in her artistic practice. She has produced photographic projects featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada, Europe and the United States. From 2017 to 2019, she was the Artist in Residence at the McCord Museum in Montreal. Portolese’s works have been published in magazines and journals as well as in three monographs: Un Chevreuil à la Fenêtre de ma Chambre, Antonia’s Garden, and Goose Village (2023). She has been awarded grants from the Canada and Québec Arts Councils and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and has received a Concordia University Research Fellow Award in 2022. Her works are included in various corporate, museum and private collections.

Jinyoung Kim is a visual artist and educator whose work explores a sense of place and material culture as a core condition where personal and collective memories coalesce, expanding on an imaginary realm bridging the past and the present. She utilizes photography, video, and object-based installations to weave together an inventory of lived experiences that stem from the perspective of a diaspora. Her works have been exhibited and screened across Canada and internationally. She was the recipient of the Prix Lynne Cohen in 2019 from the Estate of Lynne Cohen and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and she was shortlisted for the Prix Pierre-Ayot in 2018.

Pedro Barbáchano is an artist, cultural worker, and educator in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. His photographic practice observes speculative archaeology, the critique of documents, historical evidence, monuments, and issues with the representation of subaltern identities. Barbáchano identifies case studies that exhaust the photographic language and question private, public, personal, and institutional archives. His work has materialized as exhibitions, sculptural installations, books, and augmented reality experiences stemming from the photographic image. He has displayed his work in Canada, and internationally. Barbáchano is a recipient of several awards, like the Roloff Beny Fellowship and Gabor Szilasi Prize in Photography, Post Image Research Fellowship, Steven Goldberg Bursary, John W. O’Brien Graduate Fellowship, and the Heather & Erin Walker Humanitarian Award. His work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and is housed in private collections in Canada and Spain.