L’Espace Riopelle : quand Québec offre à l’art un horizon à sa mesure

Jean Paul Riopelle

Espace Riopelle

ENGLISH translation app above

Le 21 octobre 2026, sous un soleil d’automne qui accompagne le voyage de Montréal à Québec, un nouveau lieu de mémoire, de création et de contemplation ouvre ses portes sur les plaines d’Abraham. Consacré à Jean Paul Riopelle, l’un des artistes majeurs de la modernité québécoise, l’Espace Riopelle ne se contente pas d’accueillir une œuvre immense : il lui offre un territoire, une lumière et une postérité.

Le 21 octobre 2026 restera associé à une journée où la beauté semblait avoir décidé de nous accompagner. De Montréal à Québec, le soleil a déployé sa lumière avec une générosité presque cérémonielle, atteignant son zénith sur la capitale avant de nous raccompagner, au retour, vers le couchant. Entre ces deux villes reliées par la route, le temps paraissait suspendu à une promesse : celle d’assister non pas simplement à l’inauguration d’un musée, mais à l’ouverture d’un espace capable de transformer notre rapport à l’art, au territoire et à l’histoire culturelle du Québec.*** Ce jour-là, l’Espace Riopelle, nouveau pavillon du Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ), a inscrit sa présence au cœur des plaines d’Abraham, ouvrant un nouvel horizon à la vie culturelle québécoise. Et la lumière, en quelque sorte, semblait avoir préparé sa venue.

Le moment où Madame Yoshiko Karasawa coupe le ruban.

L’ouverture de l’Espace Riopelle modifie durablement la géographie symbolique d’une nation. Consacré à Jean Paul Riopelle (1923-2002), peintre, graveur et sculpteur dont l’œuvre a profondément marqué l’art moderne, ce pavillon constitue bien davantage qu’un hommage tardif à un créateur disparu. Il affirme qu’un artiste québécois peut mériter, à lui seul, un lieu de cette ampleur, une architecture conçue autour de son imaginaire et une collection appelée à se renouveler au fil des générations. Dans un pays où les institutions culturelles doivent constamment défendre leur importance face aux urgences du présent, ce geste possède une portée singulière : il inscrit la création dans la durée et donne à la mémoire une forme habitable.

Le maire de Québec, Bruno Marchand, a formulé cette idée avec une franchise qui dépassait le protocole. « Pendant que certains politiciens internationaux cherchent le conflit et la guerre, nous, on ouvre un musée », a-t-il déclaré lors de l’inauguration. La phrase avait la simplicité d’un manifeste. À l’heure où tant de discours publics s’organisent autour de la confrontation, ouvrir un musée revient à choisir une autre temporalité : celle de l’attention, de la transmission et de la rencontre. Il ne s’agit pas de prétendre que l’art peut résoudre les fractures du monde, encore moins de le soustraire aux réalités politiques et économiques. Il s’agit de reconnaître qu’une société se définit aussi par les lieux qu’elle décide de construire pour ce qui la dépasse. Un musée est un espace où le présent consent à dialoguer avec des sensibilités qu’il ne maîtrise pas entièrement. C’est déjà une manière de résister à l’appauvrissement de l’imaginaire collectif.

D’un coût de 84 millions de dollars, le bâtiment de 5 600 mètres carrés a été financé par plusieurs partenaires : le gouvernement du Québec, à hauteur de 44 millions, la Fondation Riopelle, qui a contribué 25 millions, la Fondation du Musée, avec 10 millions, et la Ville de Québec, avec 5 millions. Le mécène vancouvérois Michael Audain, dont les dons cumulés au monde muséal atteignent 91 millions de dollars, était présent pour l’ouverture du pavillon qui porte son nom. Sa contribution à ce projet comprend notamment un ensemble d’œuvres ayant enrichi la collection consacrée au peintre. Pierre Lassonde, autre philanthrope étroitement lié au MNBAQ, a également participé à cet enrichissement. Ces chiffres racontent une histoire de financement, mais aussi une histoire de confiance : celle de donateurs et d’institutions qui ont choisi de faire de l’œuvre de Riopelle un patrimoine vivant, accessible et durable.

L’Espace Riopelle a adopté une nouvelle méthode d’éclairage des œuvres d’art qui permet de les admirer sans reflets. C’est magnifique!

L’architecture conçue par la firme FABG ne cherche pas à enfermer l’artiste dans un mausolée de prestige. Elle privilégie le dialogue entre la matière, le paysage et la lumière. Dès l’entrée, le regard est attiré vers une cascade de pans inclinés en épinette noire qui composent le plafond de l’atrium. Le bois, chaleureux sans être démonstratif, accompagne l’ascension du visiteur et établit une relation sensible avec la nature environnante. Les surfaces vitrées, ponctuées de motifs sérigraphiés destinés notamment à réduire les collisions d’oiseaux, laissent pénétrer le soleil des plaines d’Abraham. Le bâtiment semble ainsi moins posé sur le territoire que traversé par lui. À travers le verre et les fibres du bois, la forêt, le ciel et les variations lumineuses deviennent des éléments de l’expérience muséale.

Cette relation au paysage n’est pas un simple agrément architectural. Elle rejoint l’une des tensions essentielles de l’œuvre de Riopelle : la circulation entre l’abstraction et le monde vivant. Son art n’a jamais été réductible à une géométrie autonome ou à un jeu de couleurs détaché du réel. Même lorsque la forme semble se dissoudre dans une profusion de touches, quelque chose du monde persiste : une lumière, une sensation de froid, le souvenir d’un voyage, l’énergie d’un mouvement animal. Les jardins aménagés en contrebas, qui évoquent la flore laurentienne, prolongent cette conversation. Cinq sculptures de l’artiste y prennent place, dont La Tour, bronze de 2,5 mètres réalisé au tournant des années 1970. À ces œuvres s’ajoute À la rencontre des sources, une création de Fiona Annis intégrée au programme du un pour cent, dont les groupes sculpturaux en différents matériaux coulés dans le bronze évoquent notamment les écorces de bouleau. L’extérieur du pavillon n’est donc pas une transition entre la ville et les salles : il constitue déjà un lieu d’interprétation.

Le parcours intérieur, lui, propose une traversée de près d’un demi-siècle de création. Le MNBAQ possède désormais 504 œuvres de Riopelle, tandis qu’environ 130 sont présentées dans l’exposition permanente inaugurale, intitulée Riopelle : l’expression du geste. Conçue par le commissaire André Gilbert, cette présentation rassemble peintures, estampes, sculptures, œuvres sur papier et réalisations mixtes, dans un parcours organisé autour de sept grands thèmes. Des premiers travaux, dont Hibou premier (1939-1941), aux compositions tardives inspirées par les oies, l’exposition met en évidence la diversité d’un artiste qui a continuellement déplacé ses propres frontières. Le titre choisi est particulièrement révélateur. « Expression » refuse de figer Riopelle dans la catégorie parfois restrictive de l’abstraction ; « geste » rappelle que son art est d’abord une action, une manière d’engager le corps, la matière et la mémoire dans une même intensité.

L'architecture est parfaitement intégrée au paysage naturel pour notre plus grand bonheur.

Cette liberté prend une dimension historique lorsqu’on la replace dans l’aventure automatiste. Riopelle fut l’un des signataires de Refus global, manifeste publié en 1948 qui contestait les conventions artistiques et les structures idéologiques d’une société alors soumise à de puissantes forces conservatrices. L’automatisme ne représentait pas uniquement une révolution formelle. Il affirmait la possibilité de libérer la création des règles imposées, de laisser émerger des associations inattendues et de faire confiance à une intelligence qui ne passe pas nécessairement par le contrôle rationnel. À travers ses tableaux, Riopelle a porté cette exigence bien au-delà de son contexte initial. Sa peinture est devenue un territoire d’expérimentation où la spontanéité n’exclut ni la rigueur ni la construction, mais leur impose de demeurer ouvertes à l’imprévisible.

Les premières salles donnent toute sa force à cette recherche. Dans les œuvres des années 1940 et 1950, la peinture paraît parfois se défaire de son rôle traditionnel de représentation pour devenir une surface de forces. La matière s’accumule, se fracture, s’illumine. Les touches, souvent appliquées au couteau, composent des paysages sans horizon stable, où le regard avance comme dans une mosaïque en perpétuelle métamorphose. La proximité de certaines grandes toiles crée une impression d’abondance qui témoigne de la richesse de la collection, même si plusieurs œuvres de grand format auraient gagné à disposer de davantage d’espace. À l’inverse, la section consacrée à l’effet mosaïque trouve dans un corridor une disposition particulièrement éloquente : les tableaux s’y répondent sans jamais se répéter. L’œil comprend alors que la répétition, chez Riopelle, n’est pas une formule, mais une variation incessante de l’expérience sensible.

La pluralité des médiums constitue l’un des autres enseignements majeurs de cette exposition. Riopelle ne fut pas seulement un peintre virtuose. Il explora la gravure, la sculpture, le plâtre, la terre cuite et l’émail sur pierre, faisant dialoguer des techniques qui transformèrent en retour son approche de la peinture. Une œuvre sculptée modifie la perception du volume ; une gravure invite à reconsidérer la ligne et la reproduction ; une matière nouvelle impose d’autres résistances et d’autres possibilités. Ce cheminement donne parfois l’impression de rencontrer plusieurs artistes au sein d’une seule trajectoire. Pourtant, une cohérence profonde relie ces expériences : la volonté de ne jamais laisser un procédé devenir une prison. La rétrospective révèle ainsi moins une succession de périodes étanches que le mouvement continu d’une intelligence artistique qui se réinvente.

Au milieu du parcours, La rencontre des formes d’art matérialise cette porosité grâce à des prêts de musées, de collectionneurs et de partenaires, parmi lesquels figurent des lithographies, un triptyque de la série Jeux de ficelle et plusieurs sculptures. André Gilbert le rappelle : le musée ne peut raconter seul l’histoire de Riopelle. Cette reconnaissance de la collaboration est essentielle. Le patrimoine ne se constitue pas uniquement par l’accumulation d’œuvres dans une collection publique ; il se construit aussi grâce aux échanges, aux prêts et à la confiance entre les institutions, les familles, les galeries et les particuliers. La rotation annuelle prévue des œuvres pendant les cinq premières années permettra, en outre, de renouveler le regard porté sur cet ensemble. Une collection vivante n’est pas une collection que l’on a fini de regarder : c’est une collection dont chaque visite réorganise les possibilités.

André Gilbert, commissaire de l’exposition Riopelle : l’expression du geste , explore les 7 thèmes importants qui sous-tendent l’œuvre de Riopelle. Ici sont réunies les œuvres consacrées au thème du Grand Nord.

Le parcours consacré au Nord constitue un autre moment de réflexion. Les paysages de glace, les étendues boréales et les formes évoquant les icebergs donnent à la nature une présence qui dépasse la description géographique. Chez Riopelle, le Nord n’est pas seulement un lieu : il est une expérience de l’espace, de l’isolement, de la lumière et de la résistance. La présentation de Pangnirtung (1977), issue de la série des Icebergs, accompagnée d’une projection vidéo créée par les 7 Doigts, propose une rencontre audacieuse entre peinture et mouvement. Le dispositif pourra diviser les sensibilités, la projection semblant parfois recouvrir le tableau plutôt que prolonger son expérience. Mais ce dialogue, même discutable, rappelle une question féconde : comment exposer aujourd’hui une œuvre du passé sans la réduire à un objet immobile, ni imposer à son mystère une interprétation supplémentaire ?

Cette question trouve une réponse particulièrement saisissante au dernier étage, dans l’espace réservé à L’Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg (1992). Réalisée à la mémoire de la peintre américaine Joan Mitchell, cette immense composition constitue l’un des sommets de la dernière période de Riopelle. La faune, la flore, les oiseaux et les couleurs y deviennent les éléments d’une méditation sur l’amour, la liberté, la disparition et la persistance de la vie. L’œuvre, longue d’environ 40 mètres, était auparavant présentée dans un espace en sous-sol. Sa relocalisation transforme radicalement sa réception. Désormais installée dans une salle semi-circulaire, elle bénéficie de la lumière, de la proximité du spectateur et d’une vue sur le Saint-Laurent. La disposition évoque, par son principe enveloppant, les Nymphéas de Claude Monet au Musée de l’Orangerie, sans chercher à reproduire leur expérience. Ici, le regard ne se contente plus de contempler un triptyque : il entre dans un monde pictural qui semble se déployer autour de lui.

La monumentalité de L’Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg ne repose pourtant pas sur sa seule dimension. Le pochoir et l’aérosol, outils associés à des pratiques artistiques longtemps tenues à distance des formes institutionnelles, y participent à une expression d’une liberté remarquable. Les silhouettes animales et les couleurs vives font affleurer une énergie presque primitive, mais profondément consciente de la perte. L’œuvre ne propose pas une consolation facile. Elle fait plutôt de la peinture un espace où le deuil peut se transformer sans s’effacer, où la mémoire se prolonge dans le mouvement de la couleur. En la plaçant au terme de l’ascension architecturale, le musée donne à l’ensemble une véritable fonction de couronnement. Le visiteur arrive devant une œuvre qui ne clôt pas une carrière autant qu’elle en rassemble les tensions, les obsessions et les audaces. C’est mon coup de coeur!

L’Espace Riopelle ne se limite toutefois pas à célébrer un héritage déjà constitué. Une salle au rez-de-chaussée, destinée aux présentations temporaires, ouvre la voie à d’autres formes de recherche. Le premier projet associe une dizaine d’œuvres de l’artiste à une démarche menée avec l’Université Laval afin de recueillir les impressions du public et de cartographier les émotions suscitées par les tableaux. Cette initiative soulève une question importante pour la muséologie contemporaine : que devient une œuvre lorsqu’on l’observe non seulement à travers son histoire et ses techniques, mais aussi par les réactions qu’elle provoque aujourd’hui ? L’enjeu ne consiste pas à transformer l’émotion en mesure définitive de la valeur artistique. Il s’agit plutôt de comprendre comment une œuvre traverse les époques, rencontre des sensibilités nouvelles et continue de produire du sens. La postérité n’est pas une immobilité glorieuse ; elle est une conversation dont personne ne possède seul le dernier mot.

Bernard Lamarche présente l’œuvre L'Hommage à Rosa Luxembourg  dans sa nouvelle forme, qui enveloppe le visiteur et s’ouvre sur une vue du fleuve (voir plus haut). C’est mon coup de cœur! En découvrant cette œuvre, j’ai ressenti l’âme de l’artiste et l’amour qui a animé sa vie et son travail. C’est très émouvant.

Le pavillon prend également tout son sens au sein de la cité muséale du MNBAQ. À proximité de la colonne Wolfe, qui marque l’endroit où le général britannique aurait succombé à ses blessures après la bataille des plaines d’Abraham, le nouvel édifice s’insère dans un paysage chargé d’histoire. Il rejoint le pavillon Pierre Lassonde, ouvert en 2016, ainsi que des bâtiments plus anciens, dont une ancienne prison et un édifice de style Beaux-Arts. Cette diversité architecturale, que l’ancien directeur du musée John Porter considère comme une richesse plutôt qu’une faiblesse, compose un ensemble où les époques se côtoient sans se confondre. Le musée devient ainsi une collection de bâtiments autant qu’une collection d’œuvres. Dans une ville où les strates historiques demeurent visibles dans la pierre, les rues et les paysages, cette pluralité exprime une conception ouverte de la culture québécoise : une culture qui se construit par sédimentation, par confrontation et par réinterprétation.

Riopelle entretenait lui-même des liens étroits avec Québec, où une importante rétrospective lui avait été consacrée au MNBAQ en 1967. Près de six décennies plus tard, l’ouverture de ce pavillon donne une autre dimension à cette relation. Elle intervient aussi dans un moment de transition pour le paysage culturel de la capitale, alors que les regards se tournent vers le futur Musée national de l’histoire du Québec, dont l’ouverture a été reportée à l’automne 2026. Mais l’Espace Riopelle possède une signification qui dépasse le calendrier des grands projets publics. Il rappelle qu’une société ne devient pas culturellement ambitieuse simplement parce qu’elle construit de nouveaux bâtiments. Elle le devient lorsqu’elle choisit ce qu’elle veut transmettre, lorsqu’elle donne aux artistes les moyens d’être étudiés dans toute leur complexité et lorsqu’elle rend leurs œuvres accessibles sans en épuiser le mystère.

Il faut enfin revenir à cette journée d’octobre, à la lumière qui traversait les vitres, au bois qui réchauffait l’espace et au fleuve qui s’étendait derrière les œuvres. En quittant le pavillon, on emporte davantage que le souvenir d’une inauguration réussie ou la satisfaction d’avoir découvert une collection exceptionnelle. On emporte l’impression qu’un territoire vient de trouver une nouvelle manière de se raconter. Riopelle, qui a consacré sa vie à faire surgir des formes inattendues de la matière, se voit offrir ici un lieu où ses œuvres peuvent respirer, évoluer et rencontrer des regards qu’il ne connaîtra jamais. C’est peut-être la plus belle ambition d’un musée : non pas conserver le passé sous verre, mais lui donner assez d’espace pour continuer à nous surprendre.

Le 21 octobre 2026, Québec n’a pas seulement inauguré un pavillon. La ville a affirmé que la création artistique mérite une place centrale dans la vie collective, que la beauté peut être une responsabilité publique et que la mémoire d’un artiste ne doit pas se limiter aux célébrations anniversaires. À travers le bois, le verre, les sculptures et les grandes surfaces peintes, l’Espace Riopelle propose une alliance entre architecture et imaginaire, entre patrimoine et avenir. Le soleil qui nous avait accompagnés de Montréal à Québec a fini par disparaître derrière nous sur la route du retour. Mais quelque chose de sa lumière demeurait : dans les couleurs de Riopelle, dans les reflets du fleuve et dans cette conviction, désormais inscrite dans le paysage, qu’une œuvre véritable ne cesse jamais de commencer.

LENA GHIO   

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Photos © Lena Ghio, 2026

F(R)ICTION Art et Jeux 15.10 - 15.11 2026 @ Arsenal

An event produced by ELEKTRA 

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When the Game Becomes Art: ELEKTRA’s Radical Reimagining of Play

At Montréal’s eighth ELEKTRA International Digital Art Biennial, F(R)ICTION: Art and Games dismantles the boundaries between artistic expression and interactive experience, revealing the video game as a medium capable of confronting the deepest anxieties, exclusions, and contradictions of contemporary life.

The ARTISTS

There is something quietly revolutionary about an artwork that refuses to be admired from a distance. It demands a hand, a decision, a willingness to enter its unstable universe without the reassurance that one will understand it, much less emerge victorious. At the eighth edition of the ELEKTRA International Digital Art Biennial, F(R)ICTION: Art and Games makes this proposition the foundation of an expansive and intellectually adventurous exhibition. Bringing together approximately forty artists across four Montréal venues, the biennial confronts an art world that has too often regarded video games as commercial entertainment rather than a legitimate vehicle for serious artistic inquiry. Curated by Lynn Hughes and Ida Toft, the exhibition does more than rehabilitate a neglected medium. It challenges the very assumptions by which art is distinguished from entertainment, participation from contemplation, and cultural significance from economic value.

The stakes are considerable. As Hughes observes, the video game industry has acquired an economic and sociological importance that surpasses that of the film and music industries combined. The statement invites reflection not merely on the scale of gaming but on the changing geography of cultural production. The conventional art world, with its galleries, museums, collectors, and established systems of patronage, no longer possesses an uncontested claim to the visual imagination of the age. Games have become formidable arenas for the employment of artists, the circulation of images, and the construction of shared worlds. Yet the magnitude of the commercial industry should not be confused with the prosperity of the independent artist. The fact that gaming commands immense resources does not mean that those resources flow equitably toward experimental creators. Rather, the exhibition exposes a revealing contradiction: a medium of extraordinary cultural and financial power can still marginalize the very practices that test its imaginative limits.

In the center: curator  Lynn Hughes

In the center: curator Ida Toft

At Arsenal Contemporary Art, the principal exhibition space, this contradiction becomes an invitation to reconsider what a game can be. The familiar vocabulary of the commercial product—objectives, rewards, progression, polished graphics, predictable gratification—is repeatedly unsettled. Some works offer no victory condition; others seem deliberately fragile, technically awkward, visually unremarkable, or even broken. To an audience accustomed to the seamless engineering of mainstream games, these experiences may initially appear to be failures of design. But that apparent failure is frequently the point. Toft, whose research and artistic practice have long explored experimental games, draws attention to forms that resist conventional expectations: non-games without conventional goals, fragile games that expose emotional or technical vulnerability, and trash games that use poor programming or glitches as expressive devices. Here, imperfection becomes a language. The malfunction is no longer an obstacle to meaning; it may be the means by which meaning enters.

The exhibition's most consequential achievement lies in its refusal to impose a single definition of artistic legitimacy on this unruly territory. Hughes brings decades of experience across painting, installation, photography, and interactive art, while Toft contributes a sustained engagement with experimental game-making and its international communities. Their collaboration connects two traditions that have often developed in isolation: contemporary artists who adopt games as a medium and designers who approach game-making as an artistic practice in its own right. The resulting encounter feels less like an annexation of gaming by the art establishment than an overdue recognition of a shared field. The works suggest that games need not imitate cinema, resemble painting, or justify themselves through technological sophistication. Their distinctive artistic possibility lies in the relationship they establish between a designed environment and the person who enters it.

That relationship can be playful, disorienting, intimate, or politically unsettling. Afrane Makof's VGAS-T26, which draws on the instantly recognizable logic of Tetris, turns the mechanics of mass consumption into a subject for scrutiny. The familiarity of the reference provides an accessible entrance, but recognition is only the beginning: the structure of play becomes a means of questioning the habits that organize everyday life. In orange pekoe, Vanny employs an eight-bit aesthetic to foreground Anishinaabe community, demonstrating how a visual language frequently associated with technological nostalgia can also sustain cultural affirmation. These works do not simply insert social messages into entertaining formats. They use the conventions of gaming themselves—the repetition, rules, spatial organization, and demands placed on the player—to reconsider how culture is consumed, remembered, and represented.

Elsewhere, the exhibition approaches psychological vulnerability and the contested terrain of popular culture. Works by Davey Wreden and Leo Castañeda engage depression and social anxiety, subjects whose inwardness can be difficult to convey through conventional visual representation. Laureline Chiapello reconsiders female pleasure, while A. M. Darke recruits Kanye West into a reworking of the guessing game Guess Who?, and Raphaëll Maïwen transforms the public mythology surrounding Katy Perry into the material of horror. Such gestures are potentially irreverent, but their significance extends beyond provocation. Celebrity, identity, and psychological distress become systems to be manipulated and examined rather than images passively consumed. The player is no longer merely a spectator of representation; participation makes the act of interpretation part of the artwork's unfolding.

The exhibition's more immersive works extend this inquiry into the unstable boundaries between the human and the digital. The Montréal collective aenl's /lick approaches endangered digital species through a laboratory-like aesthetic, directing attention toward forms of disappearance that exist beyond the familiar categories of ecological loss. Its subject is a digital environment that is neither immaterial nor immune to extinction. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's monumental The Rebirthing Room, meanwhile, proposes personal and social transformation through immersion, making the exhibition's concern with identity both experiential and collective. Such works are particularly effective at demonstrating that interactivity need not be synonymous with freedom. Every game establishes conditions; every system determines, at least partially, what can be seen, attempted, or achieved. By exposing those conditions, experimental games can reveal the politics embedded in seemingly neutral structures.

The inclusion of Bernie DeKoven and Jaron Lanier's Alien Garden (1982), presented on period Atari hardware, supplies an essential historical counterpoint. So does Suzanne Treister's Fictional Videogame Stills (1991–92). These works remind visitors that experimental gaming did not suddenly become artistically interesting when contemporary institutions discovered it. Its alternative histories stretch back decades, even as its visibility within contemporary art has fluctuated. The biennial therefore performs a corrective act of cultural memory, restoring a lineage that risks being obscured by an industry perpetually fascinated with novelty. What appears fashionable today has often survived through the persistence of artists working outside dominant commercial expectations.

Equally important is the exhibition's international and generational breadth, encompassing artists from South Korea, Ghana, Nigeria, Hong Kong, South America, the United States, and elsewhere, alongside Québec and Canadian practitioners, including Indigenous artists. LGBTQ+ perspectives and a range of lived experiences complicate any notion that gaming possesses a singular cultural identity. The exhibition's inclusive ambitions are not simply a matter of representation on the wall. They are connected to its insistence that the rules of participation, the possibilities of identification, and the authority to construct digital worlds remain open to challenge. Nor must every visitor become a player. Those reluctant to take control of a game can watch another person navigate it, discovering that spectatorship, too, can be a form of attention.

Across its four Montréal locations—Arsenal Contemporary Art, ELEKTRA Gallery, Concordia University's 4TH SPACE, and SONOLUX HOTEL—the biennial offers thirty-five game-artworks and more than one hundred hours of possible gameplay. No single visit can exhaust its contents, an unusual proposition in an exhibition culture often organized around the efficient consumption of objects. The invitation to return without additional admission transforms repetition into a curatorial principle: familiarity may reveal what first appeared obscure, while another player's decisions can disclose possibilities one never encountered alone. The accompanying temporary library of Québec media arts, assembled by Nathalie Bachand and Alessandro Ludovico, extends this spirit of discovery through an archive of nearly three hundred cultural magazines and exhibition programs. It situates digital experimentation within a wider ecology of documentation, criticism, and artistic memory.

F(R)ICTION is not without a productive difficulty: works that deliberately resist conventional play may frustrate visitors expecting immediate pleasure or easily decipherable meaning. But that resistance is also its argument. An artwork need not reward attention with instant comprehension, any more than a game must culminate in triumph to justify the time invested in it. The exhibition asks its audience to exchange mastery for curiosity and consumption for encounter. In doing so, ELEKTRA makes a persuasive case that the future of artistic gaming depends not on competing with the commercial industry's technical spectacle but on preserving spaces where other possibilities can be imagined. In an era when nearly every experience is pressured to become frictionless, measurable, and profitable, there is genuine radicalism in a game that hesitates, breaks, refuses to entertain, or leaves its player without an answer. Sometimes the most revealing move is the one that leads nowhere. Sometimes the game begins precisely where winning ends.

Laureline Chiapello and above her game CLTRS a game where the player travels from one luscious environment to the other while the avatar is a clitoris happily floating in pink elegance.

LENA GHIO   

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Photos © Lena Ghio, 2026

From the Abyss to the Battlefield: PHI’s New Virtual Realities Put the Infinite and the Historical Within Reach

Randall Smith, Associate Director – Strategic Initiatives, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, was in Montreal to introduce this extraordinary project and answer some questions. I asked him mainly about gravity and space travel, as well as the possibility of humans living on Mars. He explained that, at least for now, living on Mars would be a terrible experience for humans because of the lack of atmosphere, water, and any source of food. On top of that, Mars is exposed to deadly radiation that can be destructive to life.

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In Montréal’s Old Port, two immersive productions promise radically different journeys: one into the architecture of the cosmos, the other into the tumultuous world of Napoleon Bonaparte. Together, they raise a compelling question about virtual reality’s capacity to transform knowledge into experience.

There are two ways to lose oneself in time: to travel so far into the past that history acquires the immediacy of memory, or to venture so far into the universe that the human scale of existence begins to dissolve. This autumn, Montréal’s Old Port offers both possibilities. Beginning October 8, PHI presents two virtual reality experiences that move in opposite directions but converge on a common ambition: to make the incomprehensible tangible. Smithsonian Starstruck: An Immersive Experience invites audiences beyond Earth, into the spectacular machinery of stars, galaxies and black holes. Napoleon: The Immersive Saga transports them to the era of the French emperor, where military triumph, political ambition and the human cost of power unfold within a meticulously reconstructed historical world. One looks outward toward the immensity of the cosmos; the other looks backward into the restless theatre of human ambition. Both ask what happens when spectatorship gives way to presence.

The distinction matters. Virtual reality has spent years negotiating the uneasy territory between technological novelty and genuine artistic expression. Its capacity to surround an audience with images is no longer, by itself, a sufficient argument for its existence. Immersion becomes meaningful when it changes our relationship to what we see—when space ceases to be a backdrop and becomes a means of understanding. These two productions approach that challenge through different forms of authority. Smithsonian Starstruck draws upon astronomical research and scientific data, while Napoleon: The Immersive Saga grounds its historical narrative in specialist scholarship. Neither proposes that technological simulation can replace the patient work of learning. Rather, each explores how the sensation of being somewhere else might open a door that conventional exposition leaves closed.

In Smithsonian Starstruck, produced by Fever in collaboration with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the universe becomes an environment through which visitors can move rather than an abstraction confined to diagrams, photographs or the distant surface of a screen. Over 40 minutes, audiences journey alongside some of humanity’s most powerful astronomical observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The resulting voyage passes through the Milky Way, approaches the Sun, encounters extreme exoplanets and follows the life cycle of stars toward the extraordinary presence of a supermassive black hole. Thousands of galaxies emerge within a three-dimensional expanse whose immensity challenges the instincts by which human beings ordinarily measure distance, scale and significance.

Visuels@Crédits: Fever

The project’s most consequential feature, however, lies not in its promise of cosmic spectacle but in its grounding in real astronomical data. Developed with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, a research institution founded in 1890, Starstruck attempts to translate scientific knowledge into a sensory language without severing its connection to discovery. The distinction separates informed visualization from decorative science fiction. When the universe becomes walkable, navigable and responsive to the visitor’s movements, abstract knowledge acquires a bodily dimension. The experience suggests that scientific understanding need not be limited to the accumulation of facts; it can begin with wonder, with the vertiginous recognition that the world familiar to our senses is only a fragment of a much larger reality. The challenge is to ensure that visual enchantment remains an invitation to comprehension rather than an end in itself.

There is something quietly radical about bringing astronomical distances into a space that the human body can traverse. We cannot walk through a galaxy, touch a star or approach the event horizon of a black hole without confronting physical impossibility. Virtual reality does not abolish those limits, but it temporarily reorganizes our perception of them. The impossible becomes imaginable, and the unimaginable acquires contours. Selected in competition for Venice Immersive at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, Smithsonian Starstruck enters a field in which the boundaries between cinema, scientific visualization and interactive art are increasingly porous. Its significance will ultimately depend on whether it can sustain the delicate equilibrium between spectacle and insight. The cosmos is already magnificent; the artistic task is to reveal something within that magnificence that a beautiful image alone cannot tell us.

If Starstruck confronts the limits of human perception, Napoleon: The Immersive Saga turns toward the limits of human power. Created by French studio Sandora, the 28-minute experience places audiences inside the turbulent history of Napoleon Bonaparte and the First French Empire. Through virtual reality headsets and historically detailed reconstructions of iconic locations, visitors encounter a world shaped by conquest, political transformation, military calculation and the increasingly fragile promises of imperial glory. The narrative moves between victories and disasters, achievements and restrictions on freedom, presenting Napoleon not simply as a monumental figure in European history but as the centre of a story in which ambition continually collides with consequence.

Visuels de l"expérience_Crédits: Sandora

The experience’s historical framework is strengthened by a scientific committee that includes specialists associated with the Fondation Napoléon—Thierry Lentz, Pierre Branda and François Houdecek—as well as historian David Chanteranne, director of heritage sites at Rueil-Malmaison, and the Musée de la Légion d’honneur et des ordres de chevalerie. Written and directed by Marin de Saint Chamas, from an original concept developed with Baudouin de Troostembergh, the production reflects an effort to bring historical scholarship into dialogue with immersive storytelling. Such collaboration is essential when technology promises to place audiences inside the past. Historical environments can create a persuasive sensation of authenticity, but visual precision is not the same as historical truth. The former concerns what a world looks like; the latter demands an understanding of how power operated, whose lives it transformed and which experiences official memory has chosen to preserve.

Napoleon remains an especially revealing subject for this medium because his legacy resists easy containment. He was a military commander, a political architect, an agent of institutional reform and an emperor whose pursuit of domination brought devastation across Europe. His image has been repeatedly reconstructed by historians, artists and political cultures, oscillating between the brilliance of the strategist and the catastrophe of the conqueror. An immersive treatment of his era therefore carries an intriguing responsibility: to make the past immediate without making its central figure mythic by default. The most compelling historical experiences do more than place us amid the grandeur of power. They encourage us to consider the distance between the spectacle of victory and the suffering that sustains it, between the monument and the people whose lives become its foundations.

The contrast between these productions gives PHI’s autumn programme its particular intellectual appeal. In one experience, the individual becomes almost negligible against the immense duration and scale of the universe; in the other, individual ambition threatens to reorder a continent. One offers a confrontation with forces that exist beyond human intention, while the other examines the extraordinary consequences of intention itself. Their shared medium also reveals a central paradox of virtual reality: the more convincingly it simulates presence, the more urgently it must cultivate perspective. To feel transported is not necessarily to understand. The deepest promise of immersion emerges when physical immediacy produces intellectual distance—when being surrounded by an experience allows us to think more clearly about what lies beyond it.

Presented at 2 rue de la Commune Ouest in Montréal’s Old Port, both experiences are open since October 8 and are suitable for visitors aged eight and older. Their appeal extends beyond dedicated enthusiasts of astronomy, military history or emerging media. They address a broader curiosity about the worlds that exceed ordinary experience, whether those worlds are separated from us by unimaginable distances or by the centuries that divide the present from the past. In an era when digital spectacle is abundant, the distinction between being entertained and being genuinely transported has become increasingly important.

Ultimately, Smithsonian Starstruck and Napoleon: The Immersive Saga propose two different forms of displacement, each capable of returning audiences to themselves with a changed sense of scale. The first asks us to contemplate our place in a universe that neither begins nor ends with human concerns. The second confronts us with a history in which human decisions have repeatedly altered the lives of millions. Between the black hole and the battlefield stretches the full tension of our condition: our insignificance before the cosmos, our extraordinary capacity to reshape the world, and our persistent desire to make both legible. If these experiences fulfill their ambitions, their achievement will not be measured simply by how convincingly they transport us elsewhere, but by what they enable us to see differently when we return.

INFORMATION & TICKETS

LENA GHIO   

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KLARA AND THE SUN in theatres this weekend

Jenna Ortega plays Klara  TRAILER

 

The Beautiful Strangeness of Klara and the Sun

Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel is an imperfect, occasionally bewildering fable about artificial intelligence, human vulnerability, and the curious persistence of hope. Its very oddness is part of its appeal.

There is something endearingly peculiar about Klara and the Sun, Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, a film that seems to have wandered into the wrong future and decided to make itself comfortable. Its world is too picturesque for its tragedies, its artificial intelligence too guileless for its philosophical ambitions, and its emotions too conspicuously arranged to pass for the difficult, private business of being human. Yet I found myself enjoying it, sometimes in spite of its shortcomings and sometimes because of them. With its pastel melancholy, retrofuturist furnishings, eccentric rhythms, and almost anime-like understanding of emotional expression, the film possesses an unusual visual personality that is difficult to dismiss. It may not penetrate the mysteries of consciousness with the precision its source material invites, but it approaches those mysteries with an openhearted strangeness of its own. I left less persuaded by its philosophy than charmed by its peculiar little universe.

Jenna Ortega plays Klara, an Artificial Friend designed to accompany children, whose attentive, slightly disconcerting gaze becomes our principal means of encountering this altered society. When Josie, a seriously ill teenager played by Mia Tharia, selects Klara as her companion, the android enters a household where affection is inseparable from apprehension. Josie's mother, Chrissy, portrayed by Amy Adams, is struggling with the possibility of losing her daughter, while the family inhabits a future in which technological advancement has become both a promise of salvation and a mechanism of social exclusion. Klara observes everything with the solemn concentration of someone who has arrived on Earth without receiving the explanatory literature. Human gestures, passing expressions, and the mysterious behavior of sunlight acquire enormous significance in her developing understanding of existence. Ortega gives this peculiar consciousness a winning physical vocabulary: a held posture, an uncertain movement, a face whose openness seems almost to expose the machinery beneath it. There is a sweetness here, although the film occasionally mistakes sweetness for depth.

The distinction matters because Ishiguro's novel, published in 2021, is a considerably more restrained and unsettling proposition. Like Never Let Me Go, it allows its speculative premise to unfold through a consciousness that cannot entirely comprehend the world it inhabits. Klara's limitations are essential to the novel's achievement. She observes human beings with extraordinary attentiveness, yet her interpretations remain partial, leaving readers to recognize the emotional realities she cannot fully articulate. Her faith in the sun as a benevolent, sustaining presence gives the narrative a delicate spiritual dimension without resolving its uncertainties. What does it mean to possess consciousness? Does love depend upon the nature of the person who gives it, or upon the needs of the person who receives it? And if a machine can become indispensable to someone who suffers, does its artificial origin ultimately matter? Waititi's film raises these questions, but it is less interested in allowing them to linger. It prefers to make them visible, colorful, and occasionally funny. The difference is not insignificant. Still, a film need not reproduce the intellectual temperature of a novel to justify its existence.

Waititi's particular sensibility is immediately recognizable. The director of Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople has often found comedy in the awkward behavior of people who have no adequate language for their pain. His humor can make vulnerability bearable, exposing the absurdity that coexists with sorrow. In Klara and the Sun, however, the balance is less assured. The opening scenes, featuring android companions displayed for prospective buyers, flirt with retail satire and the peculiar comedy of manufactured innocence. Natasha Lyonne, presiding over the proceedings with her characteristically tart eccentricity, seems to have arrived from a more mischievous movie. Klara's unusual movements and literal-minded observations likewise invite amusement. But as Josie's illness assumes greater importance, the film shifts toward domestic melodrama, and the tonal transition can feel abrupt, as though somebody had changed the channel without changing the scenery. The comedy does not always deepen the sorrow that follows it. Sometimes it merely sits beside it, waiting for its turn to speak.

Visually, though, the film has an undeniable appeal. Its future looks strangely nostalgic, as if technological progress had taken place inside a memory of the mid-twentieth century. Warm golds, carefully composed interiors, and objects that seem to belong to several different historical periods give the setting the quality of an illustrated fable. The cinematography favors a softened, luminous atmosphere, while the production design imagines a civilization that has advanced technologically without relinquishing its affection for the tangible and familiar. This is not the cold, metallic dystopia that speculative cinema so often supplies. It is a future with the slightly artificial charm of a dollhouse, beautiful enough to inhabit and strange enough to distrust. At times, I was reminded more of anime than of conventional live-action science fiction: not necessarily in any literal stylistic correspondence, but in the willingness to let a heightened visual world carry emotions that ordinary realism might leave unexpressed. The result can be twee, even absurd. It can also be lovely. The film's artificiality becomes part of its imaginative signature.

Beneath these attractive surfaces lies a darker social arrangement that the screenplay never quite develops. Genetic enhancement appears to offer privileged children a competitive advantage, while those excluded from such interventions risk becoming increasingly irrelevant. Artificial companions occupy an equally ambiguous position, serving as commercial products while assuming roles that families once expected human relationships to fulfill. Josie's illness brings these larger anxieties into intimate focus. Her mother's desperation is understandable precisely because it is so difficult to separate from love: how far might a parent go to preserve a child, and at what point does the desire to defeat mortality become a refusal to recognize another person's vulnerability? Adams conveys flashes of this terrible emotional arithmetic, suggesting a woman whose composure is an increasingly fragile defense against catastrophe. Yet the screenplay gives her too little psychological space. The social consequences of enhancement remain sketchy, and the ethical questions surrounding Josie's future are introduced more clearly than they are examined. The film gestures toward a world transformed by technological inequality without making that transformation sufficiently tangible.

Adams nevertheless lends the domestic drama a seriousness that the surrounding material sometimes struggles to sustain. Her restrained expressions suggest fears that the dialogue cannot adequately contain, and her performance gives Chrissy an emotional weight beyond the character's occasionally schematic construction. Tharia, meanwhile, brings Josie a believable mixture of reserve and vulnerability, although the film too often positions her as the embodiment of an ethical dilemma rather than as a teenager with a fully independent inner life. Ortega remains the film's most intriguing presence. Her Klara is earnest without being entirely innocent, observant without being conventionally perceptive. The difficulty is that the screenplay repeatedly converts her unfamiliarity with human behavior into a source of charm, leaving insufficient room for the strangeness to become genuinely unsettling. Klara is supposed to illuminate the people around her, but she is also an intelligence whose consciousness should resist our complete understanding. The film makes her likable before it makes her mysterious.

This limitation becomes especially apparent when Klara's memory begins to deteriorate. Here, the story approaches one of its most affecting possibilities: the idea that a being assembled from observation might lose the very experiences through which it has constructed an identity. For a human being, memory is already an unreliable architecture, subject to revision, omission, and the consolations of self-invention. For an artificial consciousness, its failure raises an additional question: if the accumulated record of experience disappears, what remains of the person who experienced it? The film's visual glitches communicate malfunction, but not always the intimate terror of an existence coming apart from within. Nevertheless, the premise has a quiet emotional force. Klara's vulnerability invites us to contemplate our own dependence on the fragile continuity of memory, and the possibility that personhood may be less a stable possession than something continually reconstructed. The film comes closest to philosophical seriousness when it stops trying to explain its android and allows her fragility to speak for itself.

There is, finally, something touching about the film's insistence that hope need not be intellectually sophisticated to be emotionally consequential. Klara believes in the sun. She believes that careful observation and purposeful action might make a difference to someone she loves. Her understanding of the universe is incomplete, perhaps even naïve, but then so is much of the human behavior surrounding her. The people who consider themselves more sophisticated are hardly free of magical thinking: they invest their hopes in medical interventions, technological solutions, and the fantasy that sufficient determination can make loss negotiable. Klara's faith may be sentimentalized, but it also exposes the desperation beneath ostensibly rational forms of belief. The film never fully resolves this parallel, and its score sometimes insists upon feelings that would have been more powerful left unannounced. Yet its emotional generosity has a sincerity that I found difficult to resent. There is a difference between a work that simplifies suffering because it cannot imagine its complexity and one that simplifies it because it longs, perhaps too earnestly, to offer consolation. Waititi's film wavers between the two.

Klara and the Sun is not the profound meditation on artificial consciousness that its premise promises, nor does it achieve the quiet devastation that Ishiguro's approach to human fragility might lead one to expect. Its ideas are underdeveloped, its tonal shifts occasionally awkward, and its emotional cues too often underlined in musical ink. But its imperfections do not cancel its pleasures. I admired its peculiar beauty, its retrofuturist dreaminess, its willingness to be a little ridiculous, and Ortega's delicate attempt to embody a being caught between mechanical construction and emotional possibility. The film sometimes resembles an elaborate toy whose hidden mechanisms remain visible, but there is pleasure in watching it move, and even a certain tenderness in its clumsiness. Perhaps its most revealing contradiction is that a story about the limits of artificial feeling should itself feel so visibly manufactured. I would have welcomed greater ambiguity, greater psychological depth, and more confidence in silence. I would also, quite happily, return to its strange, sunlit world. A film can fall short of greatness and still possess a soul of sorts. This one, imperfectly and unexpectedly, does.

LENA GHIO   

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