Montreal, Canada, 2011-10-24 -
For its 4th edition, the Art Souterrain Festival will offer a 7 kilometre art tour in the heart of Montreal’s underground passageways. The tour will include more than 130 projects by local, national, and international artists as well as an increasingly diverse programming and activities. The Festival will be launched on February 26, 2012, from 6:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m., as part of the Nuit Blanche à Montréal and the MONTREAL HIGH LIGHTS Festival, and will continue to run until March 13, 2012 during regular hours.
Art Souterrain introduces contemporary art into the public passages of Montreal’s Underground City on an annual basis. For the duration of the Festival, Art Souterrain provides a team of over 200 cultural mediators in order to facilitate a dialogue between the artworks and the general public. In addition, the Festival offers a variety of activities including workshops, lectures, and performances that promote contemporary art.
More than 130 artists engaging with a new overarching Festival theme
As part of a new initiative this year, the 130 projects presented will address and explore an overarching Festival theme, “Passageways.” The theme invites the public at large to revisit and investigate the encounters that take place in the spaces through which they travel – such as the public corridors in the underground passages of Montreal – and explore the relationships that form and the dialogues that take place between themselves, passersby, the artwork, and Montreal’s Underground City. The theme of “Passageways” also touches on the notion of corridors in the figurative sense – in this case, the various paths that we take throughout our lives, and our passage from one stage of life to another.
Two exhibitions devoted to exciting art from outside Quebec
This year, Art Souterrain is proud to announce the participation of two guest cities in the Festival.
Renown for its cultural life and thriving art scene, the major international city of Paris will be featured in the new addition to the underground exhibition zones at 1000 de la Gauchetière. Agnès Violeau, Curator of Nuits Parisiennes, will be organising an exhibition of ten works by French artists produced for this year’s Edition of Art Souterrain.
In addition, Art Souterrain will host the exhibition curated by Évè De Garie-Lamanque which will present the work of artists from Western Canada, specifically Calgary. Calgery’s participation in the Festival is part of an ongoing effort by Art Souterrain to bring together contemporary artists throughout Canada and offer them visibility on a national scale. Art Souterrain also aims to create networks and connections in the field of Canadian visual-arts, and contribute to the promotion of Canadian contemporary art.
About Art Souterrain
Art Souterrain is a non-profit organization whose mandate is to promote and exhibit contemporary art by taking the works of local and international artists out of art institutions and placing them in spaces frequented by the public at large. By doing so, Art Souterrain hopes to engage the diverse public that frequents the underground passages of Montreal and, with the help of cultural mediation initiatives, address the contemporary artworks presented during the Festival.