Research residency
Summer 2026
Ji-Yoon Han PhD is a curator and art historian who has been active in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal for about a decade. Her often interdisciplinary projects explore the guiding force of the visual arts within shifting social, cultural, and psychological contexts. She served as guest curator of the MOMENTA Biennale de l’image in 2023 and has collaborated with numerous institutions in Quebec and elsewhere. Deeply engaged in her community, she cultivates long-term conversations with the artists she supports across several continents. Her independent projects have received significant support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, and the Canada Council for the Arts. In the summer of 2026, she joins the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal as a curator.
“Over the past ten years, my professional and personal conversations have led me to hear, instigate, and sometimes collect fragments of testimony about the too little-known history of the visual arts in Montreal during the 1980s and 1990s. While history is necessarily a collective and polyphonic endeavour, my residency proposal consists, modestly, in a writing project taking this period of Montreal’s artistic life as its primary material, while exploring how historical narratives operate as a literary form.
My research in the Artexte collection pivots around three focal points: the highly symbolic year 1992 which framed landmark events for the arts in Montreal; installation as a medium embodying the aesthetic decompartmentalization and abundance of artistic research at the time; and the figure of the curator, who got progressively fleshed out during the 1990s. By combining documentation and creation, including fiction, this project is motivated by a caring concern for memory and reference, and by a desire to draw upon imagination to engage with my adopted hometown.”
- – Ji-Yoon Han