The Body in Question(s)²

Performers : Marie Brassard, Sophie Breton, Marie-Ève Lafontaine, Robin Poitras, Georges-Nicolas Tremblay, Brian Webb.
Video credit : Jérôme Delapierre

A cross between choreography, spatial and acoustic architecture, exhibition and interactive digital technology, Le corps en question(s)2/The Body in Question(s)2 explores the ways in which the massive social, cultural and technological changes in modern societies are affecting how we conceptualize and interpret the body.

Transforming the seven rooms of Enterprise Square Galleries in Edmonton, Isabelle Van Grimde has created an organic space that she invites us to inhabit rather than pass through. Within it, she sets up a dialogue between the living body and its genome, its digital conversion, its virtual image and oneiric dimension. She instils tension between the primitive body and the future body, pondering the status of the physical body in an increasingly virtual world, and the impact of computers on our mental and physical processes. This questioning becomes all the more poignant, since a digital platform allows visitors to get a live, behind-the-scenes view of the creation and to make a web recreation of the very work that surrounds them. From one room to the next, visitors discover works by nine visual and media artists, essays by two scientists, and the subtle movements of six dancers aged 23 to 60. Video installations relay their performances in the rooms they no longer occupy, maintaining a constant choreographic presence in the exhibition.

Defying the notions of space and time, this intriguing work uses the viewer’s body to reinvent itself. An intimate experience whose duration and nature is determined by each visitor. Intelligent, sensitive, monumental.