Free of charge
About the moderator
Abigail E. Celis is Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at the Université de Montréal (Tiohtià:ke). Her research focuses on the afterlives of colonialism and decolonial imaginaries as witnessed through contemporary visual culture, artistic practice, and museum norms in the French-speaking world, with a focus on France, Francophone Africa, and the African diaspora. Professor Celis teaches the annual summer seminar “Decolonial Museology” at the Université de Montréal. Her research practice incorporates curatorial work, creative collaborations, and scholarly publications, and she has received several awards and grants for her research and writing.
About the curators
Curator of Indigenous Arts at the MMFA since 2023, Léuli Eshrāghi, born in 1986 in Yuwi Country, belongs to the Seumanutafa and Tautua clans of the Sāmoan archipelago. Eshrāghi was curator of TarraWarra Biennial 2023 (Highly Commended at the 2023 Victorian Museums and Galleries Awards), Curatorial Researcher at Large at the University of Queensland Art Museum, where they co-curated Oceanic Thinking: Season Two (2022), Mare Amoris | Sea of Love (2023-2024) and How We Remember Tomorrow (2024). Eshrāghi has also been a contributing writer and editor to numerous publications. Their essay Bambae ol stamba fasin blong lukaotem mo kasem ol wanwan saed blong solwora i no save lusum (Highly Commended at the AAANZ 2023 Arts Writing and Publishing Awards) was conceived for the monograph Daniel Boyd: Treasure Island. They have curated and contributed to various exhibitions, juries, residencies and gatherings in contemporary art centres and art museums in Canada, France, Australia, Hawaiʻi and Aotearoa New Zealand.
As curator of pre-Columbian art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Erell Hubert, has been guiding the direction of this collection since 2016. She also works to enrich and enhance the collections from the Mediterranean basin, Africa and Oceania. At the Museum, she was co-curator of Connections: Our Artistic Diversity Dialogues with Our Collections (2019) and Peru: Kingdoms of the Sun and the Moon (2013). She holds a doctorate in Andean archaeology from the University of Cambridge (2015), and is still actively pursuing field research on the north coast of Peru. Her research, published in several scientific journals, draws on this dual experience and explores the relationship between people and the material world through notions of materiality, of object biography, including ethics of provenance and the history of collections, and of the active participation of artworks in identity negotiation.
Chief Curator of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts since 2020, Mary-Dailey Desmarais oversees a multidisciplinary team dedicated to enriching, promulgating and preserving a collection of close to 47,000 art works and objects dating from antiquity to the present. Since joining the Museum in 2014, she has notably curated the exhibitions Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music (2022), How Long Does It Take for One Voice to Reach Another (2021), Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together (2021) and Once Upon a Time... The Western: A New Frontier in Art and Film (2017), whose accompanying catalogue won two awards. She has published widely in scholarly journals, exhibition catalogues and art magazines on subjects ranging from Impressionism to global modern and contemporary art. Originally from New York, she holds a PhD in Art History from Yale, an MA from Williams College and a BA from Stanford.
About the series
This is Thinking Out Loud!, a series of lively discussions on artistic, social and political issues affecting the Montreal community.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Location: Maxwell Cummings Auditorium, 1379-A, Sherbrooke Street West
Reservation terms: Please note that seat reservations are held until the beginning of the event. Once the activity has started, any unoccupied seats will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis.
