© Laura Ohio, Like a Tongue Knows the Mouth (2024).
Laura Ohio
Like a Tongue Knows the Mouth
From April 23 to June 13, 2026
Opening on April 23 at 6 pm
Laura Ohio’s work employs different oral forms to investigate the psychological spaces of grief, adaptation, and heightened peripheral perception. Through film, sculpture, and durational performance, the artist creates symbolic structures that open up temporal spaces and contemplate the precarity and provisionality of life.
In the midst of grappling with her father’s death, the artist abandons her car when a fire on the freeway causes a city-wide traffic jam. She encounters an elderly woman whom she proceeds to follow and film through downtown Los Angeles in the rain.
Like a Tongue Knows the Mouth is an autofictional chronicle wherein the filmmaker moves through concentric narratives about the people, places, and things which serve as surrogates of her own becoming. The “I” of the artist is not fixed but rather a kind of interlocutor, shifting through relations and reorienting how meaning forms.Composed mainly of cellphone footage shot at indirect angles, remediated or refracted by mirrors and lenses, the film attempts to capture the absences accumulated in time. Here, grief is approached as a mode of perception that gives contours to that which is invisible.
Laura Ohio (1991) holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited and screened across Canada and internationally at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Hawick), BIDEODROMO International Experimental Film and Video Festival (Bilbao), Pornfilmfestival Berlin, Automata (Los Angeles), Baxter St at Camera Club of New York, Film Diary NYC, Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, Antimatter Media Art (Victoria), Mile Zero Dance, Latitude 53 (Edmonton) and Winnipeg Underground Film Festival. She is currently living and working between Los Angeles (USA) and Edmonton (Canada).
Other exhibition
Philippe-Aubert Gauthier
and Tanya St-Pierre
Intact au milieu des flammes — Dans une série d'architectures vivantes
From April 23 to June 13, 2026
Dazibao thanks the artist for her generous collaboration as well as its advisory committee for their support.
Dazibao receives financial support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the ministère de la Culture et des Communications and the Ville de Montréal.
Dazibao acknowledges that it is located on the unceded territory of the Kanien'kehá: ka Nation and that Tiohtiá:ke / Montreal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations, and today, is home to a diverse population of Indigenous as well as other peoples. Guided by ethics of respect, listening, and awareness, Dazibao commits to a continued reflection regarding the deep-rooted and systemic challenges tied to accessibility and inclusivity in the arts and beyond, and endeavors to apply such reflections to all aspects of its activities and governance.