Fall 2023/Winter 2024
For my research project with the Artexte collection, I will focus on artworks and all other materials that address and testify to experiences associated with HIV/AIDS. I will explore how the artists, authors, and activists whose work is in the collection confront cultural representations of the virus to create their own representations and how this approach fits within the process of appropriating agency.
In a general context of indifference to the current issues related to HIV/AIDS, I hope to reactivate memory and examine this silence and what contributes to it – mourning, fear, sense of guilt, and the fact that the disease is no longer fatal, at least in wealthy countries. As I explore, I will accumulate notes, photographs, and text excerpts; later, I will print fragments of these materials onto fabric to be used to make garments. I will compose a form of portable archive, like a wearable skin, body, or memory. Overall, this process is a way for me to join a vaster kinship by wearing the marks left by others.
Guillaume Brisson-Darveau is an artist and researcher living in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. His most recent projects have been strongly influenced by reflection on the body, the hybrid body, and representations of the body transformed by contemporary society. The works that emerge from this research are situated at the intersection of sculpture, performance, and fashion. Through his images and forms, Brisson-Darveau attempts to describe a human condition and its complexity, and to bring to light a world filled with possibilities, desires, and fears.
Brisson-Darveau’s work has been presented in Canada and internationally, including at the Biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine in Trois-Rivières (2022, Canada), Engramme (2021, Canada), and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo – Parque Forestal (2018, Chile). He has attended numerous artist residencies, including at the NARS Foundation (United States, 2021), cheLA Centro Hipermediático Experimental Latinoamericano (Argentina, 2019), and Atelier Mondial (Switzerland, 2018). He is currently a doctoral student in art studies and practices at UQAM; his research is articulated around accounts of the experience of “trouble” through a material practice.