The MACM is always an accessible museum, but these days it’s even more interactive than usual thanks to two works by British-born, Berlin-based artist Tinho Segal. Creating a cross between theatre and visual art that somehow sidesteps art performance, Seghal builds entire sets in museums and hires “actors” to animate them in carefully choreographed situations.

Right now there are two of his pieces at the MACM: his iconic Kiss, from 2002, which involves a couple reinterpreting famous kisses drawn from the history of art in a tightly choreographed 8-minute loop; and This Situation, from 2007, a conversation piece that has the “agents” discuss philosophical issues between themselves and with the visitor, if you so choose. Passersby can influence the whole direction the performance takes awhile they are in the room. Now that’s power!

Right next door in the video room don’t miss 4 000 Disparos by Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade, for which he filmed male faces in Super 8 film as he travelled throughout Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, in a journey of territorial recognition of a Latin America he belongs to without feeling part of. French artist Laurent Grasso and Montreal artist Lynne Cohen round out the current exhibitions: With his trickster’s take on temporality and the making of history, Grasso’s show, titled, Uraniborg, presents neon signs, objects, videos and more that lead to the creation of what the artist calls a “false historical memory.”

Cohen, on the other hand, presents 40 of her interior landscapes – since the 1970s the artist has been capturing, unpopulated, often odd spaces constructed by humans, used by humans, but devoid of humans. The images are filled with the tension created by that emptiness and the occasional inexplicable aspects of the photographs. Photo: courtesy of Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto.

On April 5, make sure you catch the Friday Nocturne, the museum’s popular series from 5 to 9 pm every first Friday of the month, which this time features saxophonist Colin Stetson. Famous as a member of Bell Orchestre and a collaborator of Arcade Fire, Lou Reed and Feist, Stetson explores the limit of his instrument in his solo work, creating beautiful soundscapes that will transport you to wholly ethereal planes.

In May this bunch of exhibitions will make way for two new guys: the first solo exhibition in Canada of Brooklyn-based artist Eve Sussman and her collaborative team Rufus Corporation, for one. Generated by algorithm but influenced by the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard and Wim Wenders, Sussman’s filmic pieces offer a futuristic look at space and time, utopia and dystopia, fractured narration and torn landscapes from Russia and Central Asia. In the next room there’ll be Montreal artist Michel de Broin, whose playful multidisciplinary practice extends from photography to video to sculpture, and explores the notions of resistance, misappropriation and recycling with a cynical sense of humour.

THE DETAILS

Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 185 Sainte-Catherine West, (514) 847-6226

Photo Credits- Tinho Segal Photo: ©Tate, Jonathas de Andrade Photo: courtesy of Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto

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Montreal-Brooklyn is happening in November in Montreal and then in January in Brooklyn, the event uniting eight art institutions in each city and a total of 40 artists, seeks to highlight both similarities and contrasts between the two places’ art scenes by, on the one hand, bringing New York artists to galleries throughout our city and, on the other, engaging Montreal artists on the subject of Brooklyn. Here are three must-sees to get you started.

1) At Centre Clark: Here at the project’s HQ, the curators chose to contrast two pairs of artists: Julie Favreau (from Montreal) and Patrick Martinez (from Brooklyn) in the gallery’s big room, and Mathieu Beauséjour (Montreal) and Steven Brower (Brooklyn) in the smaller one. They’re really trippy pairings – Favreau and Martinez both work with the symbolism and narrative potential of everyday objects, Favreau in video form and Brower by building ever-growing plastic straw structures – his own version of Meccano. Brower and Beauséjour make social commentary in their respective installations; Brower’s contribution consists of a sealed hatch that blocks the entrance to the room unless the viewer follows very specific instructions.

Once inside, Beauséjour’s video Don’t Worry Darling, There Will Be More Riots in the Spring depicts a white-haired man in a suit attempting to make a political speech but instead gagging on an egg. Referring to the Maple Spring, the work features eggs in a major way, inspiring thoughts of walking on eggshells, or, conversely, of rebirth – the rebirth of a nation? One can only hope.

2) At the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal: The MACM organized two exhibitions within the Montreal-Brooklyn project: one is a solo exhibition of video works by New York artist Janet Biggs, which feature people with extreme jobs in extreme parts of the world – an ice spelunker, an arctic explorer, a coal miner and a sulphur miner – and make exotic what, to the subjects, is the mundane.

The other exhibition features a couple of videos by Montreal artists Aude Moreau featuring New York. A kind of love letter to the Big Apple skyline, Moreau’s slow and poetic work titled Reconstruction makes the familiar skyscrapers seem alien through the use of weird time-lapse and space morphing effects. It lends a whole new look on the city, from Battery Park to Ground Zero, that oddly has the effect of making it look as if it were made out of cardboard while simultaneously making it even more majestic than it is in person.

3) At Articule: For their contribution, titled Territorial Re-marks, Mile End gallery Articule selected artists from both cities whose work deals with the idea of territory: of the mind, of the body, of societies, of wilderness. The four artists united are Jérôme Havre and Michelle Lacombe from Montreal, and Emily Roz and Patricia Smith from Brooklyn. There’s a great interplay between the amazing wall-art left over from a performance by Lacombe, the utopian urban planning of Smith and the heavily symbolic sculpture by Havre. Roz gets special mention for her paintings because I’ve got a total thing for wilderness, and the way she paints ironic territories where beastly beasts roar and maim in chintzy floral environments more befitting of your grandma’s sofa than of the jungle drives me, well, wild!

THE DETAILS

Montreal-Brooklyn, Various locations in Montreal until November 17, 2012

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