Photographic film is a sensitive substance, similar in its way to the soil in a garden: it reacts to light but also to what it is exposed to and how we treat it. While this comparison might seem a bit far-fetched, it’s by bringing together disparate subjects that Leyla Majeri establishes new methodologies, ways of making that are inspired by unexpected encounters. Her work unfolds through the actions she performs in different environments, whether in a subsistence garden she has planted without irrigation, on farmland that has been dried out by the sun and the wind, or with a community of artists who collectively experiment with imaginative approaches to image-making through a combination of independent learning and know-how.
Short, side-by-side film sequences depicting discrete moments are joined in a reflection that traverses the artist’s entire range of actions. Her 16 mm images reveal shared moments, hand-dyed fabrics, and shadow-puppet plays, in addition to having been developed using concoctions made of medicinal plants. By applying a documentary approach to her own creative process, Majeri lays claim to reappropriated practices, those defined less by the materialized work itself than by the force of each gesture and its transformative power.
The exhibition is part of our The View from Here programming, which invites us to imagine how we might reinvent ourselves today by cutting up parts of our past and reconstituting them as possible futures.
Silhouettes / shadows: Marion Henry, Corine Dufresne-Deslières, Catherine Lemire, Myriam Rochon and Abby Maxwell.
The artist thanks the Canada Council for the Arts.
Biographie
Leyla Majeri
Leyla Majeri is an artist living in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyaang (Montreal), whose practice navigates between sculptural installation and moving image. Her work consists of textual and sound collages, reimagined forms of archives, and plants that she cultivates without irrigation on an agricultural land, where she has set up a subsistence garden. With Harness the Sun (Arprim, Montreal, 2016), she initiates a dialogue between her artistic practice and her gardening practice, as a way of reclaiming and sustaining a space of imagination through which she brings together different materialities, ecologies, forms of knowledge, and modes of resistance – an exploration that she continues, among others, with Don’t Blame Us If We Get Playful (Galerie de l’UQAM, 2018), There’s a wasp who penetrates the ladybug (CIRCA, 2019), and Anticipating Hypersea (OPTICA, 2023). During her Chantier residency at the artist-run center L’imprimerie (2022), she conceived a research garden to develop images with plants, which served as a starting point for a collective reflection on alternative and decolonial approaches to the image. Her current projects are part of a long process of gathering and exploring know-how, embodying, documenting and relating different forms of knowledge, (self)learning, materiality and territories of practice. She is the recipient of the Intersections Residency (2023) from the École des arts visuels et médiatiques at UQAM, Optica, and the Conseil des arts de Montréal, and her projects have been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
