Ville: Montreal

diane hau yu wong

Diane Hau Yu Wong is the recipient of 2020-22 articule + MAI joint support for curators.

Diane Hau Yu Wong is an emerging curator and art historian based in unceded Coast Salish Territories & Tiohtiá:ke territory. She graduated with a BFA in Art History from Concordia University in 2018. Her curatorial practice and research are largely based on her experience as a second-generation immigrant and the intersection between community and diasporic identity.  For the articule + MAI support for curators, Diane is examining digital futurism as a method to re-imagine a better world and sustainable solidarity among BIPOC communities through technoculture and speculative fiction. She most recently curated Centre A’s 2019 recent graduate exhibition titled (dis)location (dis)connect (dis)appearance, examining the loss of language, tradition, and culture in the diasporic community.

This partnership is supported by the Government of Quebec and the City of Montreal as part of l’Entente sur le Développement Culturel, and by the Canada Council for the Arts.

 

saba heravi

Saba Heravi is an Iranian-Canadian visual artist based in Tiohtiá:ke/ Montreal. Her art practice is concentrated on drawing, ceramics, and printmaking. She graduated with a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University in 2019. Her work explores the idea of home, memory, and identity and is ultimately an investigation of self. During the Alliance program, Heravi will investigate new techniques and approaches to help develop a project built around family archives.

 

victoria may

Victoria May is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher with a career spanning nearly 30 years, and has danced for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Göteborg’s Danse Kompagni, Danish Dance Theatre, and, as an independent performer, for Danse-Cité, Louise Bédard, Dominique Porte, Barbara Diabo among other artists. She is a citizen of the Manitoba Metis Federation with family and community ties in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Her most recent choreographic work Kiwaapamitinaawaaw (2020) was presented at the Biennale d’Art Contemporain Autochtone (BACA) at Centre de Création O Vertigo (CCOV). Her project within Alliance focuses on holding and facilitating Métis kitchen table talks (an Indigenous research methodology) and other Indigenous centered gatherings. Victoria believes in the necessity of staying connected to the heartbeat of the collective community through conversation, art-making, circles and ceremony that is based on an exchange of knowledge and experiences through an artistic, embodied Indigenous centered lens.

soroush aram

Soroush Aram is the recipient of 2020-21 Mandoline hybride + MAI joint support for artists. He is an Iranian multidisciplinary visual artist working in Montreal. After completing a course in Fine Arts at the University of Tehran in 2002, Soroush developed a particular aesthetic that interweaves drawing and performative art and juggles between images of the past and dreams of the future. His work has been presented and recognized in Iran since 2010. Today, Soroush’s artistic career takes place mainly in Canada, where he gradually integrates the different spheres of contemporary Quebec art scene, by participating in exhibitions, residencies, workshops and artist support programs (DAM; Montréal en Arts; SKOL; Montréal Arts Interculturels). As part of Alliance, Soroush’s project Réminescence explores traces of the past and memory through a series of drawings of recovered objects from the music industry, a performance and videos from interviews conducted by the artist.
This partnership is supported by the Government of Quebec and the City of Montreal as part of l’Entente sur le Développement Culturel, and by the Canada Council for the Arts.

nasim lootij

Choreographer, performer, teacher and Laban notator, Nasim Lootij left Iran in 2006 to study dance in Paris. Since 2014 she lives and works in Montreal where she co-founded the collective Vâtchik Danse with Kiasa Nazeran, dramaturge and PHD in theatre. 

Their sources of inspiration: the art and socio-political history of Iran, the modern currents of the early twentieth century, including German expressionism.

Their creations: Moi-Me-Man (2017), La Chute (2019), L’Inconsistance (In progress). The latter is supported by MAI’s Alliance program, Dance-Cité, Maison de la culture Plateau-Mont-Royal and José Navas/Compagnie Flak.

burcu emeç

What does it mean to collaborate with someone or something? Burcu Emeç’s project within Alliance We were awkward at first but then it was ok subverts the tensions inherent in collaboration, while reckoning with the function of objects in performance.

 

Burcu is practicing care, political action and rigorous curiosity. As an interdisciplinary performance maker she blends social commentary, active listening, improvisation and visual art. Her work lives in the shifts between the highly poetic and unbearably banal, subverting codes of live performance and creating tensions between language and image. 

Burcu’s collaborative and independent projects have been presented in a wide range of settings in Montreal, Toronto and Germany, including the festivals OFFTA, SummerWorks and ZH, and venues such as Eastern Bloc, Never Apart and Montréal arts interculturels (MAI). Her recent awards include the Mécènes investis pour les arts, OFFTA Coup de coeur, OFFTA Hybridity Award, and five Montreal English Theatre Awards. She is curator in residence with Christopher Willes at Studio 303 and artist in delegate production with LA SERRE-arts vivants. Burcu is also a cultural worker and a coordinator at the artist-run centre articule. She holds a BFA in Theatre Performance from Concordia University (2017).

amir sám nakhjavani

Amir Sám Nakhjavani (he, him) is a META-Award nominated multilingual and multidisciplinary Montrealer of Azerbaijani-Iranian origin. As a theatre artist he has worked with the Segal Centre, Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal, Black Theatre Workshop, Tableau d’Hôte Theatre, Teesri Dunya Theatre and Infinithéâtre. He was a member of Black Theatre Workshop’s 2016-2017 Artist Mentorship Program ensemble; and participated in the DémART-MTL program through the Conseil des arts de Montréal, in collaboration with Centaur Theatre. He is currently working on a French-language translation of the Farsi-language classic, Aurash, by Bahram Beyza’ie, in collaboration with Modern Times Stage Company, in Toronto. His participation in the 2020-2021 MAI Alliance program is oriented towards an exploration of human-specific performance.

ahmad hamdan

Ahmad Hamdan is a Montreal-based actor who graduated from UQAM’s École supérieure de théâtre in 2017. He has performed his texts on several stages including La Licorne in the show Foirée Montréalaise. Parallel to his acting career, a storytelling and creation desire leads him to write short theatrical content. Within Alliance, he will tackle the long form to create a show that will explore, among other things, social mobility, the relationship to culture (in all senses of the word) and the conception of identity.

 

chloé barshee

Graduated of the École supérieure de théâtre de l’UQAM in 2014, Chloé Barshee co-founded the Grande Surface collective with her classmates when she left school. She has been seen performing at the Théâtre La Chapelle, at the Théâtre du Rideau-Vert in the production Molière, Shakespeare et moi and at the Zone Homa festival.

She is the theater director of Théâtre Everest. She is the one who constructs and imagines the craziest images, the one who always pushes the limits of the possible, who always asks herself : How are we going to do this?

“With Théâtre Everest, the creative process is a return to our roots, to childhood, a great playground where anything is possible, where anything can happen, where an accident can turn into an extraordinary idea and where there are no right or wrong moves… because it’s all about creation.”