The Power Plant

In conjunction with the exhibition I SEE WORDS, I HEAR VOICES, artist Dora García will discuss her Mad Marginal project with Guest Curator Chantal Pontbraind, including her interest in voice-hearing, James Joyce and life in exile.

García's work is largely performative and deals with issues related to community and individuality in contemporary society. Exploring the political potential of marginal positions, she pays homage to eccentric characters and antiheroes. Since 2009, she has been carrying out a project entitled Mad Marginal, in which she investigates the very complex relations between art, politics, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. This research has been documented in her series of books Mad Marginal Cahiers.

Chantal Pontbriand is a contemporary art curator and critic whose work is based on the exploration of questions of globalization and artistic heterogeneity. She founded PARACHUTE magazine in 1975 and acted as Publisher/Editor until 2007. From 1982 to 2003, she was President and Director of FIND (Festival International de Nouvelle Danse), Montreal. She was appointed Head of Exhibition Research and Development at Tate Modern in London in 2010 and more recently founded PONTBRIAND W.O.R.K.S [We_Others and Myself_Research_ Knowledge_Systems]. In 2013, she received the Governor General of Canada Award for Outstanding Contribution in the Visual and Media Arts and in 2014, an Honoris Causa Doctorate from Concordia University and the title of Officer of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres in France. Recent exhibitions include PER/FORM: How To Do Things with[out] Words, CA2M, Madrid (2014); and Dora Garcia: Of Crimes and Dreams, Darling Foundry, Montreal (2014). Pontbriand curated the current exhibition I SEE WORDS, I HEAR VOICES. Recent publications include The Contemporary, the Common: Art in a Globalizing World, Sternberg Press, Berlin (2013).