Brutalisme magique
Amélie Laurence Fortin
It was during The Arctic Circle* residency that sound has become an integral part of Amélie Laurence Fortin’s practice. In 2023, Avatar is initiating a three-year, customized residency to support Fortin in exploring and enriching her world of sound.
In 2017, while in the Arctic, Amélie Laurence Fortin experienced a singular monumentality, one that exists through the space between things, through the sounds that fill the immense invisible space. Five experimental sculptures that mechanically produce sounds were born. These will enable her to regularly blur the boundaries between disciplines, thereby questioning the performative role of the object and the place reserved for the body in the field of visual arts.
In 2023, Avatar is initiating a long-term, customized three-year residency to support Fortin in exploring and enriching her world of sound. In the first phase of the residency, her five kinetic sculptures : Envoy, Decade, 2RPM, Two Revolutions Per Minute and Cloud Nine were recorded at Avatar’s studio and at Université Laval’s gallery.
In 2024, for the second phase of the residency, Fortin immersed herself to composing, mixing and spatializing her recordings, with the aim of producing a first sound composition and drafting a new spatialized installation. To mark the end of the second residency, a first variation of her work was publicly presented, in collaboration with the Art Centre Oboro (Montréal, Canada).
In 2025, for the third phase of her residency, the project will conclude with the publication of a two-volume sound work and an original installation. This dual physical and digital collection will retrace the artist’s creative process, offering a plunge into Amélie Laurence Fortin’s wonderfully enigmatic universe and a reflection on the performativity of body, object and space in the experience of sound.
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*The Arctic Circle: a residency on high-Arctic Svalbard Archipelago and Arctic Ocean aboard a specially outfitted expedition vessel.
End-of-residency event
Thursday, April 11, from 5pm
Open house:
Friday 12 and Saturday 13, noon to 5pm
Location
OBORO
4001, rue Berri
Montréal (Québec) H2L 4H2
Invited by Oboro, Avatar settles at the studios, 4001 Berri Street in Montreal from April 11 to 13, 2024.
The second phase of Brutalisme magique takes place from March 18 to 31, 2024, during a second sound creation residency at Avatar.
Credit: Carole Siciak – Avatar, 2024
Credit: Stéphane Bourgeois, 2023
Amélie Laurence Fortin lives and works between Quebec (Canada) and Warsaw (Poland). Through her installations, sculptures and sound works, she creates futuristic narratives in which objects bear witness to past or future actions. Her latest projects are an opportunity to question current technological upheavals through a radical, monumental and performative formal approach. Where opaque feminist fictional narratives and the ambiguity between the technical and the magical create the emergence of the random.
A selection of her recent exhibitions includes; OBORO (Canada); Tallinn Art Hall (Estonia); Darling Foundry Gallery (Canada); BWA Wroclaw (Poland); Festival Mois Multi (Canada); Stroboskop (Poland); KIKK Festival (Belgium), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Germany); Alfa Gallery (USA); Biennale Manif d’Art 9 (Canada); as well as several local and international fairs. Fortin has been selected for a one-year residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien (2020), the Arctic Circle residency (2017) and the Canado-Belgium co-production residency between Werktank and Productions Recto-Verso (2020-2021), and has been invited for a long-term residency with Avatar (2023-2025). She was shortlisted for the Prix Videre (2020); and winner of the Prix Louis Garneau and ADFU (2010). Her work has been reviewed in Szum Magazine, BLOK Magazine, BerlinArtLink, BE Magazine, EFSYN Magazine, Esse Art+Opinion and Espace Magazine, among others. Fortin completed a Master’s degree in Visual Arts focusing on the translation of extreme experience into art installation (Université Laval – 2009 – 2011). Her exhibition “Triomphe” was created and produced alongside curator Sylvie Fortin for Manif d’Art 5 (2020).
