Video program

Out of Perfect Context — Úr fullkomnu samhengi

July 2025
📍 The Factory (Hjalteyri, Iceland)

As a complement to the exhibition Out of Perfect Context — Úr fullkomnu samhengi, Dazibao presents a program of video works by Québec artists.

Program

Frédéric Lavoie, Alert. A letter from Rachel Carson (2020) — 4 min.

Alert. A letter from Rachel Carson is a tribute to the marine biologist and pioneer conservationist, famous for her book Silent Spring (1962). Slowly pulling the viewer into a miniature architecture of a boreal forest, the artist offers mise-en-scène of an ecosystem — a world of growth, co-habitation and future — both natural and digital.  

Frédéric Lavoie is an artist and a naturalist based in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal. He holds a bachelor's degree in anthropology and a master's in visual and media arts. Through a heterogeneous practice that draws on documentary material, he produces narratives, group portraits and thematic analyses. His research revolves around questions of listening and observation, biodiversity and the relationship between nature and culture. Significant projects include the feature film La Nature Contre-Attaque (2019), his exhibition Le début de la fin at the McCord Museum (2014) and a mid-career retrospective at the Musée régional de Rimouski entitled Réécritures (2014).

Samy Benammar, Kauaʻi ʻōʻō (2023) — 3 min. 48 sec. 

In 2000, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) officially declared the Kaua’i ​‘o’o, a bird endemic of Hawaii, extinct. The only thing that remains following its disappearance is a 1987 recording of its singing by ornithologist David Boynton. Edited mostly in-camera, the film is a visual poem, taking us through the artist's search for traces of these vanished birds. 

Samy Benammar is filmmaker, photographer and critic living in Montréal. His algerian and working-class origins are at the heart of his experimental work, which questions sociopolitical issues related to archived and present-day images. His films include Adieu Ugarit (2024), Avant Seriana (2024), kaua'i'o'o (2023), and peugeot pulmonaire (2021) and have been presented widely in festivals, including Prismatic Ground (New York), British Film Institute (London), Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal. His writings can be read in magazines such as Hors Champs, 24 images, and Panorama cinéma. 

Jinyoung Kim, Survival 101: In Case of Complete Disappearance (2019) — 14 min.

Survival 101: In the Case of Complete Disappearance documents a conversation between a family of three, in which they plan their survival in case of an apocalypse. Their conversation revolves around a hypothetical situation in which they would be the only human survivors following destruction to only later encounter an unknown being. This work visually weaves the conversation through the liminal site of an urban development in South Korea; its narrative unfolding with the revelation of one’s simulated response to notions of migration, integration, and community. 

Jinyoung Kim is a Korean-born, Montréal-based artist whose practice explores a sense of place and the material culture where personal and collective memories coalesce. She utilizes photography, video, and object-based installations to create an inventory of lived experiences from the perspective of a diaspora. She received the Prix Lynne-Cohen in 2019 and was shortlisted for the Prix Pierre-Ayot in 2018. Her works can be found in numerous public collections in public and private institutions, including the permanent collection of Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Ville de Montréal, Hydro-Québec, and Desjardins. 

Charlotte Clermont, death by fantasies by mirrors (2022) — 13 min. 2 sec.

death by fantasies by mirrors experiments with the treatment of film to compose a layered and saturated cache of images. Between hyperexposed frames, strands and blotches move in time with a flickering hypnotism of light and hue. A fragmented narrative of symbiotic sensualities is cryptically suggested, imprinted more like a dream than a plot: ferns, birds, stone, water, offering, lust, communion, time, death, and curious antidotes.

With a background in experimental cinema, Charlotte Clermont questions our perceptions of reality through a dialogue between film and sound explorations. With a Master's degree from Uniarts Helsinki's Academy of Fine Arts, she works between Montreal and Helsinki. Her master's project du soleil, que ça existe was nominated for the Nordic and Baltic Young Artist Award. Her work has been presented in Canada and internationally at festivals and exhibitions including the International Festival of Films on Art (Montréal), FRACTO (Berlin), Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Künstlerhaus Bethanian (Berlin), CROSSROADS (San Francisco), Arctic Moving Image and Film Festival (Harstad) and Edinburgh International Film Festival. 

Frédéric Moffet, The Magic Hedge (2016) — 9 min.

The Magic Hedge explores a bird sanctuary located on a former Cold War Nike missile site on the north side of Chicago. Left to wander and observe, the viewer becomes aware of the park’s open secret: men looking for fleeting sexual contacts within the trees and shrubberies. The video highlights the many contradictions of a site historically devoted to military surveillance and now designed to preserve and control the ‘wildlife’.

Frédéric Moffet is a media artist, educator, video editor and cultural worker. Born in Montreal, he now lives in Chicago, where he is an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His films explore the slippery territory between history, lived experience and fantasy. His projects have received awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, Gus Van Sant Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, among many others. He has also exhibited at numerous film festivals, notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (Geneva), PPOW Gallery (New York), among others. Currently he is a professor in Film and New Media at the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Razan AlSalah, Canada Park (2020) — 8 min.

Using Google Street View the artist “trespasses” into so-called Canada Park, a land designated by Israel for leisure, where formerly there were four Palestinian villages. This experimental poetic essay on the disappearance of the land, the erasure and displacement of Palestinian people complicates the digital-colonial gaze with the insertion of 20th century colonial photography.

Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her films work with the material aesthetics of disappearance of indigenous bodies, narratives and histories in colonial image worlds. Her films have screened at Palestine Cinema Days (Sunbird Award for Best Short 2017), Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal (Best National Short or Medium-Length Film 2024), Singapore International Film Festival, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia, Doclisboa International Film Festival, among others. She teaches film at Concordia University.

Jean-Pierre Aubé, Mars Analogue (2022) — 7 min.

Mars Analogue captures the Maria Helena desert in Chile, known as the world’s driest landscape and that most closely resembling the planet Mars. Since the 1970s, its mostly lifeless ecosystem and rocky terrain have been host to many scientific explorations, notably by NASA who uses the land to test martian robots. Inspired by discussions with astrophysicists over the course of his research, Jean-Pierre Aubé translated weather data into an algorithmic formula to generate a plausible color palette of Mars’ landscape and modified the images documenting the desert into a simulation.

Jean-Pierre Aubé is a Montréal-based artist and programmer using recuperative technologies and data collection to research nature. His work is presented through installation, performance, synthesized images, and sound recordings. His work has been presented in the context of numerous exhibitions and festivals both in Canada and abroad such as at EXPRESSION (St-Hyacinthe), Canadian Centre for Architecture, Centre CLARK, and Musée d’art contemporain (Montréal), Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Québec), Palais du Tau (Reims) and Ludwig Museum (Budapest), among others.