02 Dec 2011

Manif d'art 6 : The main site will be Espace 400e Bell

From May 3 to June 3, 2012, the Manif d’art will welcome around 10 artists at the event’s main site: Espace 400e Bell. For Manifestation internationale d'art de Québec, the event’s organizer, this showcase venue will provide contemporary art with outstanding visibility.

For the first time, the Manif d’art is including a site among the features it incorporates to attract a broad audience. Claude Bélanger, general and artistic director of the event, puts it this way: “Espace 400e Bell is well known, well located and inviting. I have no doubt but that it will incite the curious to succumb to the temptation to check out the event.” He adds that the building’s versatility offers excellent conditions in which artists can exhibit their work, enhancing their presentations—to the public’s delight.

Nicole Gingras, the event curator, is overjoyed to be able to present a sizeable group exhibition in
Espace 400e Bell. The public will be able to discover various conceptions of the machine and the movement that brings it to life, including several previously unseen works.  

The Manif d’art will count on Espace 400e Bell and on the support of its collaborators to present the work of all the artists included in the event. The result: a major contemporary art event presented in 20 exhibition sites in Québec City, Wendake and Lévis.

lg2 signs the poster
The agency lg2 is responsible for the image representing this edition’s theme: Machines: The Shapes of Movement. To create the background montage, Jacques de Varennes, lg2’s vice president graphic design, disassembled an alarm clock, an audio cassette player and a watering can. He explains his approach: “When we think of machines, we often merely think of a motor. Yet everything that surrounds us is a machine, including our daily actions and ourselves! To create the “6” in the background, I assembled parts taken from various everyday objects, articulating a new mathematical and communicational functionality, which reflects the theme of the Manif d’art 6.”

lg2 hopes to enter the Manif d’art 6 poster in the Graphika competition, which rewards the best graphic design work in Québec.

A first artist revealed
As announced last September at the launch of the Musée de la civilisation’s upcoming programming, Diane Landry will exhibit her work at the Musée de l’Amérique française as part of the Manif d’art 6. The internationally known artist is responding to curator Nicole Gingras’ invitation to create an installation based on links between her practice and one or several objects in the museum’s collection. A first collaboration between the Musée de l’Amérique française and the Manif d’art, this commission provides an important Québec City artist with a stimulating opportunity for creation.

The complete program of Manif d’art 6 will be revealed at a press conference in April 2012.  


The theme is Machines : The Shapes of Movement
The main lines of the Manif d’art 6, as defined by guest curator Nicole Gingras will be developed around the word machine and the movements they make. Our world is inhabited by inventions designed to simplify, complexify, mask and transform our relationship to the world. A machine generates, exposes and documents movement. It makes the processes of creation and learning visible and perceptible. It introduces us to moving, this mobile aspect of the phenomena that stimulate humans and keep us alive.

The interests of participating artists comprise words, drawing, kinetic art, sound art, performance, cinema and video. The curator hopes to address the theme from various angles: the mechanical or technical (animation, reanimation, kinetics, recording, dissemination), the conceptual (reflection and the articulation of thought, the creative process) or metaphorical (viewing or listening machines, dreaming machines, utopian machines). She foresees uniting big and small machines: serious, absurd, useful, lucid, derogatory, eccentric, essential, discrete or sometimes even invisible.

The Manif d’art
Held in the heart of Québec City’s artistic quarter, the Manif d’art takes place every two years in May and June. Dedicated to the promotion and presentation of contemporary art, each edition of the event is developed around a different theme. Held in various venues in the city’s downtown core and nearby, the event unites an important number of local and international collaborators from the cultural and artistic scene. The arts scene and the general public are warmly invited.