with Julia Eilers Smith, Florencia Sosa Rey and Didier Morelli
March 23, 2024 — 2:00 - 5:00 PM @ Artexte's reading room
As part of the public programming surrounding the Artletics exhibition curated by Didier Morelli, join us at Artexte for the launch of Issue 13 of Le Sigh, featuring a trilingual (French, English, and Spanish) conversation between author Julia Eilers Smith and artist Florencia Sosa Rey, whose performance FatherDaughter (2022) currently exhibited at Artexte.
Moderated by Didier Morelli, the conversation will focus on questions of sports and filiation/family; movement and performance; and the transference of embodied knowledge through generations of football players. This special collaboration between Le Sigh and Artexte comes in the context of this exhibition, in which Morelli considers the intersections between contemporary art and sport in Quebec and Canada.
Also a co-founder (with Charlene K. Lau) of Le Sigh, a multilingual online exhibition space and art magazine, Morelli invited Eilers Smith to write about Sosa Rey’s practice. A reception with a sports-inspired foodscape/snack table will follow the event.
Schedule of the event:
2:00 PM: talk with Julia Eilers Smith, Florencia Sosa Rey, and Didier Morelli
3:00 PM: launch of Le Sigh Issue 13
3:30–5:30 PM: visit the exhibition + bar
The talk will be in French, English, and Spanish.
Collaborator:
Co-founded by Charlene K. Lau and Didier Morelli, Le Sigh is a multilingual online exhibition space and art magazine that presents creative conversations on time-based contemporary art practices. Their hope is to foster a welcoming and generative online cultural space for underrepresented voices. Encouraging slow looking and slow reading, each issue pairs an artwork with a written response.
Guests:
Julia Eilers Smith is a curator and writer based in Tio’tia:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. She holds a master’s degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and a bachelor’s degree in art history from UQAM. Since 2019, she has served as the Max Stern Curator of Research at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, at Concordia University. Prior to her current position, Eilers Smith worked at the ICA London, the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, and SBC Gallery in Montreal. Her writings have been published on platforms such as e-flux and in the art magazine Espace art actuel.
Didier Morelli is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. At its peak, his twenty-year career as an amateur youth soccer player saw him play for three teams simultaneously, changing from one kit to the other between tournaments in the back of his mother’s Volvo 240. He holds a PhD in performance studies from Northwestern University and his work has been published in Art Journal, the Canadian Theatre Review, C Magazine, Esse Arts + Opinions, Frieze, Spirale, and TDR: The Drama Review, among others. In addition to serving as curatorial research assistant for the career retrospective of the photographer Evergon at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in 2022, he also curated Traversée/Crossing, a group exhibition that same year on the intersections of contemporary art and watersports at Stewart Hall Art Gallery.
Florencia Sosa Rey is a visual artist based in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyand/Montréal. Through a physical and somatic approach expressed primarily through abstract drawing and performance, she explores themes of residual memory and affect left by people and experiences. She holds a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University and continue to develop a physical practice through various professional workshops. Her solo and collaborative work has been presented in Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, Sudbury, the United Sates, Iceland, and Argentina. In the fall of 2023, she took part in the Fonderie Darling’s artists residency at the Gare de Matapédia in the Gaspé region. Florencia Sosa Rey has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, ARTCH, and the LOJIQ.