VOLUME 5 MTL
Montreal’s artists’ publishing festival and conference is returning this fall for its 5th iteration, with a full programme of activities that showcase the work of artists and publishers in the art book and art publishing field. Follow the action on Instagram @volumemtl, #volume5mtl and our Facebook page, and don’t forget to visit the huge free art book fair on October 1 and 2 to discover new titles and creations from more than 50 exhibitors.
Volume 5 MTL programming coordinator: Danielle St-Amour.
PROGRAMME
Volume 5 MTL fair
1 – 2 Oct 2022 11h – 18h free
SAT (Société des arts technologiques) 1201 Saint-Laurent ; accessible space. métro Saint-Laurent.
Montreal’s only annual art book fair, Volume 5 MTL showcases artists’ books talents and legends from around the world. More than 50 publishers will be selling their latest artists’ books and publications, and there will be a huge second-hand sale of art books as well! Music provided on-site by n10.as. Join the Facebook event here.
Nour Bishouty in Conversation with Swapnaa Tamhane
Art Metropole + Librarie Maktaba
27-Sep 2022 18h-20h
Librarie Maktaba, 165 Rue Saint-Paul O., Montréal, QC H2Y 1Z5 Facebook event
1—130: Selected works Ghassan Bishouty b. 1941 Safad, Palestine — d. 2004 Amman, Jordan.
Art Metropole and Librarie Maktaba, in partnership with Volume 5, present artist Nour Bishouty in conversation with artist and curator Swapnaa Tamhane,. In her recent artist book, 1—130, Bishouty draws upon the work of her late father, artist Ghassan Bishouty (b. 1941 Palestine – d. 2004, Jordan). Borrowing from museological methods of indexing and object classification to lend her father’s history and work a form of pseudo-visibility and order, Bishouty simultaneously unsettles structural conventions and permeates her father’s artworks and ephemera with her own acts of collage, ekphrasis, and storytelling.
Bishouty will be joined by Montreal-based artist and curator Swapnaa Tamhane to discuss the book, its making and where it is situated in her wider practice.
Swapnaa Tamhane is an artist and curator. She has an MFA in Fibres & Material Practices, Concordia University, Montreal (2021), and an MA in Contemporary Art, University of Manchester (2001).Her visual practice is dedicated to drawing, making handmade paper, and working with the material histories of cotton and jute.
Nour Bishouty is a Tkaronto-based artist working with video, sculpture, digital images, installation, works on paper, and writing. Her practice engages familial and material histories to explore colonial legacies and pose questions around dissonance, opacity, legibility, and the generative possibilities of misunderstanding.
Librairie Maktaba is an independent bookstore and versatile cultural space located in a heritage building in Montreal’s vibrant Old Port area. MAKTABA is a specialized, culture-oriented bookshop, carrying English-language books by diverse authors on a variety of subjects. Its purpose is to cultivate and share knowledge, inspiration and imagination to the greater Montreal community, with a global virtual reach.
Keeping a Living Library
Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
28-Sep 2022 12h-13h via webstream
Join Gallery 44 for a library tour and discussion. We will open with a casual show-and-tell of books selected by Gallery 44 staff and artist members which will lead into an open discussion about the value of small libraries and how to activate them. Register for this free event here.
Gallery 44’s library contains over 1000 works with a focus on rare artist monographs, esoteric technical manuals, and artist-run publications. The lending library is open to members 24/7 and to the public by appointment.
Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography is a charitable, non-profit, artist-run centre committed to supporting multi-faceted approaches to photography and lens-based media. Founded in 1979 to establish a supportive environment for the development of artistic practice, Gallery 44’s mandate is to provide a context for meaningful reflection and dialogue on contemporary photography. Gallery 44 is committed to programs that reflect the continuously changing definition of photography by presenting a wide range of practices that engage timely and critical explorations of the medium. Through exhibitions, public engagement, education programs and production facilities our objective is to explore the artistic, cultural, historic, social and political implications of the image in our ever-expanding visual world.
Volume 5 Zine Jam
28-Sept 2022
Nouvel Établissement, 5817 Saint-Laurent
20h – 22h Free
Free collective zine-making workshop. Come and contributed pages to a collective zine that will be made available at the art book fair during Volume 5 MTL! All materials provided. A co-production between Zine Recipe, Expozine and Volume 5 MTL. @zinerecipe @expozinemtl
Artists’ Book Club @ BAnQ
29 Sep 2022 14h – 16h
BAnQ Rosemont, 2275 Holt
Come and discover two artists’ books kept at the BAnQ that address the themes of collection and reuse at two different times: Images Apprivoisés by Roland Giguère, published in 1953, and Con todo mi afecto by Josée Pedneault, published in 2011. Just like in a book club, you can take the time to listen or read the text and examine these two creations. A group discussion will follow. An intimate and participatory event for anyone interested in artist’s books!
Archives in Artbooks
26 sept – 7 oct 2022 Monday, Wednesday – Friday — 9H-17H
ARTEXTE, 2, rue Sainte-Catherine Est (espace 301)
Montréal, QC, H2X 1K4
From September 26 to October 7, visit Archives in Artbooks, curated by Anabelle Chassé and Jessica Hébert at Artexte Montreal.
Since the 1960s and the emergence of movements such as Fluxus and Conceptual Art, the artists’ book has gradually established itself as an artistic medium in the visual arts. Rather than maintaining its status as a container to showcase art, artists have transformed their approach. The book has become a work of art in itself, while also being the vehicle of its dissemination.
Running parallel to the development of this contemporary practice located at the crossroads of creation and conceptualization, recent decades have shown a growing interest by artists to question and infiltrate the archive, with documents becoming both materials for creation and artistic approach. Artists question the authority of knowledge around the institution, its documents and the historical narratives that are part of the institutional, family and personal archive, and even fictional archives.
The library exhibition Archives in Artbooks explores these various approaches which use archival documents as a medium for artistic creation, through the artists’ books held in Artexte’s collection.
Epistolary Webs
OK Stamp Press
29 Sep 2022 19h – 20h30
Join M and maya of OK Stamp Press for a zoom round-table and collective reading called “Epistolary Webs,” where we explore the role of letter writing in mutual aid networks. M and maya will bring in the work of activists and artists who make letter-writing and support structures for incarcerated populations part of their work. Contributors will include:
Mark Menjivar, Prisoner Correspondence Project and others, pending confirmation, from Austin, TX and Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, QC (OK Stamp’s current bases of operation). The second half of the project will involve a collective reading of letters: round-table guests and event attendees are encouraged to bring letters they have received, emails, errant text messages, group chat missives, authored and found letters, and share them together, with consent. Attendees and visitors to Volume 5 are welcome to donate their letters to a project led by OK Stamp Press to raise funds for carceral justice networks.
CASON SHARPE X VOLUME MTL 5
INSTAGRAM LIVE – C MAGAZINE
Throughout the fair, Join C Magazine’s online art book columnist Cason Sharpe for a series of rapid-fire interviews with a handful of the many exhibitors and presenters featured in this year’s edition of VOLUME. Brief, irreverent, and informative, each interview will be conducted on-location and broadcast over the internet. Inspired by the candid red carpet interviews of Joan Rivers and the backstage antics of Nardwaur the Human Serviette, this series is designed to introduce viewers to a range of publishing projects and practitioners from across Canada and beyond.
Amy Ching-Yan Lam reads Looty Goes to Heaven
1 Oct 2022 15H30-17H
SAT (Société des arts technologiques) 1201 Saint-Laurent ; accessible space. métro Saint-Laurent.
Amy Ching-Yan Lam reads from and talks about her book Looty Goes to Heaven, based on the story of a small Pekingese dog that was taken from the Summer Palace outside of Beijing, at the end of the Second Opium War, and gifted to Queen Victoria. The dog was renamed “Looty” after the act of looting, in reference to how she was found. Looty Goes to Heaven is a re-imagination of what Looty’s life was like, equal parts fact and fantasy. Lam will be joined by Aman Sandhu for a conversation and Q&A post-reading.
Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. She has shown projects internationally, both solo and as part of the collective Life of a Craphead. Looty Goes to Heaven was commissioned by Eastside Projects, Birmingham UK, for the 2022 C*mmonwealth Games. Other exhibitions and performances have been presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Seoul MediaCity Biennale, and Lam has participated in residencies at Macdowell and Delfina Foundation. Her debut collection of poetry is forthcoming with Brick Books in spring 2023.
Aman Sandhu works between Montréal and Glasgow. His installations encompass drawing, moving image, and text. He considers them as ensembles of objects that refuse to come into view through institutions’ unrelenting calculations. Through improvisation, he aims to rethink the place of refusal in critique to produce other ways of coming to knowledge.
LE SIGH on Translation in Digital Arts Publishing, with Mue
(Catherine Debard and Léon Lo), Katherine Melançon, H. Felix Chau Bradley
1-Oct 2022 19H30-00H
Anteism, 435 Beaubien W.
Facebook event. PWYC
Newly formed online time-based arts exhibition space and magazine LE SIGH presents a conversation with digested sounds collective Mue (Catherine Debard and Léon Lo), and visual artist Katherine Melançon, with a reading by author H. Felix Chau Bradley. Thinking through translating contemporary time based art through literary, biographical, or other non-traditional art discourse, LE SIGH and its collaborators propose different modes of eating and probing at the agency of table scraps and other art world detritus. What happens when you’ve consumed an art book or journal, ingested all of its glossy pulp and saturated inks and moved on to the Matrix? Why print on paper when the Internet functions as a digested contemporary textual/textured archive ?
H Felix Chau Bradley is the author of Personal Attention Roleplay, which was a finalist for the WUC Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Kobo Rakuten Emerging Writer Prize, as well as the poetry chapbook Automatic Object Lessons. They are the fiction editor for This Magazine and the host of Strange Futures, a speculative fiction book club. They live in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal)
Mue is a duo based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal and is composed of Catherine Debard and Léon Lo. The electronic musical project merges two distinct practices and explores the way they interact with each other, weaving asymmetric patterns, creating spaces, and digesting various sounds.
WENDY’S SUBWAY X VOLUME 5 MTL
2-Oct 2022 14h30 – 15h30
SAT (Société des arts technologiques) 1201 Saint-Laurent ; accessible space. métro Saint-Laurent.
WENDY’S SUBWAY
At Volume 5, Wendy’s Subway Artistic Director, Rachel Valinsky, will present recent publications, focusing specifically on the Document Series, an interdisciplinary publishing initiative that highlights work by time-based artists in printed form. The series offers artists a unique platform to explore the relationship of performance text to live event, of documentary and archival impulses to daily life and creative practice, and of performance to its afterlives.
The series has, to date, counted the work of choreographers, dancers, video artists, performers, comedic performers, and writers: Morgan Bassichis, JJJJJerome Ellis, jaamil olawale kosoko, Sara Magenheimer, Shala Miller, Mariana Valencia, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and more.
Wendy’s Subway is a non-profit reading room, writing space, and independent publisher in Bushwick, Brooklyn. We support emerging artists and writers in making experimental, urgent work and create alternate modes for learning and thinking in community. Wendy’s Subway is dedicated to encouraging creative, critical, and discursive engagement with arts and literature.
Rachel Valinsky is a writer, editor, and curator based in New York. She is co-founder and Artistic Director of Wendy’s Subway, and Editor at Primary Information. Her writing has appeared in Art in America, Art-Agenda, Artforum, Frieze, BOMB and elsewhere. She was an art writer in residence at the Banff Centre and an art critic in residence at CUE Art Foundation/Art 21. Rachel is a doctoral candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and currently teaches writing and performance studies at The New School and Queens College.
PS GUELPH presents – O LONE TRAVELLER
2-Oct 2022 16h-17:30h
SAT (Société des arts technologiques) 1201 Saint-Laurent ; accessible space. métro Saint-Laurent.
PS GUELPH
Join Mélika Hashemi, Shirin Fahimi and Publication Studio Guelph for the Montréal book launch of O Lone Traveller for a discussion and workshop. PS Guelph is a small Ontario publisher of hand-made books with a network of a handful of other sister studios worldwide.
O Lone Traveller (یا مسافر وحدک) addresses themes of border-passing, surveillance, and self-censorship in a time of urgency that demands appropriate response and awareness. In becoming aware of our rights, creating access and performing them, we can move towards subverting our damaged narratives, reclaiming our experiences, and making visible the invisible practices at the border. PS Guelph is a small Ontario publisher of hand-made books with a network of a handful of other sister studios worldwide.
Mélika Hashemi is an Artist-Researcher based in Kitchener, Ontario. Using art as a device, she finds ways to renew intersectionality and empowerment through the curriculum beyond screens and institutional walls.
As an Iranian-Canadian artist, Shirin Fahimi explores the impact of the occult sciences and mysticism in empowering the female presence in the political, spiritual, and digital domains.
Beginning in street art, Mitra Fakhrashrafi is a mixed media artist and curator indebted to border abolition organizing. In her spare time she listens to music that emerges from Toronto; a since-always queer, trans, Indigenous, Black, and diasporic city.
Joyce Joumaa is a Montréal-based video artist interested in the intersection of art and politics as a means to translate images from the political climate surrounding the places she associates with. Her works examine themes of exile, language, post-war memory, and post-colonial education.
Nima Esmailpour is an Iranian-born artist, art historian, and a curator based in Tkoronto/Toronto. He holds an MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths College (University of London), and is currently a PhD student in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. Nima is the co-founder of Diaspora in Diaspora, an online and print publication platform.
FLINT MAGAZINE/ HALIM EL DABH AT LE SYSTEME
2-Oct 2022 19H-LATE
LE SYSTÈME, 7119 Rue St-Hubert, Montréal, QC H2S 2N1
POP Montreal – Art POP co-production. Facebook event.
DETROIT ART BOOK FAIR x JOURNAL SAFAR
VOLUME MTL, Studio Safar and Detroit Art Book Fair present a special evening of music and sound inspired by the work of the late Egyptian composer, musician, and ethnomusicologist Halim El-Dabh (1921-2017) and his forthcoming record The Wondrous Reverberations of Halim El-Dabh, released as a part of the multimedia project Flint Magazine, for their newest issue, Wonder. The launch will also feature a selection of music by Flint editor Maya Asshaq. Maia Asshaq is an Assyrian writer and editor based in Los Angeles. Her writing often incorporates her personal and familial history, often resulting in explorations in sound; both experimental and traditional to her Assyrian heritage.
8PM MATT CONZETT
Matt Conzett is an artist living in Detroit who primarily works with sound. He creates music under the monikers The Glass Path (solo) and The New Me (duo). He also runs his own imprints, Irrational Tentent and Nonstilevo (co-run).
9PM HABIB
Habib is a musician and sound-artist from Tunis, Tunisia. With no concern for genre or consistency, his music constantly shifts between free improvisation, musique concrète and a wide range of traditional influences. Habib is also the co-founder of Interzone Editions, one of Montreal’s most noteworthy experimental labels and arts collectives at the moment.
Flint Magazine is an unbound multimedia journal modeled after Aspen Magazine, the highly influential art journal “in a box.” Like Aspen, each issue of Flint assembles a diverse collection of text, film, print, and sound, interweaving the tactile and the intangible in content and form.
Studio Safar is a design agency and publisher (est 2012), with offices in Beirut and, now, Tiohtia:ke (Montreal). The studio adopts an experimental approach to design. Evoked by its name, the studio is concerned with notions of communication across cultural and linguistic barriers. Projects span different media and design frameworks such as communication strategies, publications, visual identities, exhibitions and sets, and websites. The studio publishes the biannual and bilingual (Arabic/English) design and visual culture journal, Safar. The magazine answers to the lack of critical writings on design in the global south, and it works towards acknowledging designers as active agents of cultural production. The studio is also expanding into publishing books on design in the region.
WORKSHOP: Confronting writing and dreaming CANCELLED
1-Oct 2022 13H30-15H
SAT (Société des arts technologiques) 1201 Saint-Laurent ; accessible space. métro Saint-Laurent.
CANCELLED due to unforseen circumstances!
The workshop will introduce participants to a brief introduction of dream interpretation and some contemporary ideas surrounding dream symbolism and accessing the subconscious self through dreams. From this perspective we will collectively dive into writing on art and question how connecting with and interpreting our unconscious mind can help deepen our ability and understanding of art. The workshop will include reading selections by Helene Cixous, bell hooks, Ursula K Le Guin, Sigmond Freud and Carl Jung, and Matthew Spellberg.
Lauren Lavery is an artist, writer, editor of Peripheral Review and the Managing Editor of The Capilano Review. She has published art writing for The Capilano Review, ReIssue, BlackFlash, Cornelia Magazine, Public Parking, Peripheral Review, LUMA Quarterly, and in exhibition texts for Wil Aballe Projects, Martha Street Studios, Xpace Cultural Centre, and Y+ Contemporary. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts, and is currently based in Vancouver, BC.
Volume 5 MTL is an ARCMTL production made possible in part thanks to the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, SODEC and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. 2022 Graphics by Anahita Jamali Reid.
