CAPTAIN TSUNAMI by Aaron Sherry

TRAILER

 

In an era saturated with franchise spectacle and algorithm-friendly storytelling, Captain Tsunami arrives as something far more intimate and quietly disarming: a film that uses the language of comic books not to escape reality, but to interrogate it. Director Aaron Sherry’s debut feature, written by and starring P.J. Marino, is a modestly scaled yet emotionally ambitious work that explores grief, memory, and the fragile scaffolding of belief that holds people together after loss.

At its center is a deceptively simple premise. A young girl, Emma (Madeleine McGraw), appears unannounced at the doorstep of Glenn (Marino), a reclusive comic book store owner with a past he has carefully sealed off. Emma is searching for her missing mother—once Glenn’s great love—and carries with her a cryptic comic book that may contain clues to her disappearance. From this setup, Captain Tsunami unfolds less as a conventional mystery and more as an excavation of emotional terrain, where answers are elusive and meaning is something assembled rather than discovered.

What distinguishes Sherry’s approach is his refusal to treat the comic book motif as mere aesthetic garnish. Instead, the illustrated panels—rendered with striking detail and visual imagination—become an extension of the characters’ inner lives. As Glenn and Emma pore over the pages, the film slips fluidly between reality and stylized fantasy, allowing the comic’s imagery to bleed into the physical world. These transitions are handled with a restraint that keeps them from feeling gimmicky; rather than overwhelming the narrative, they deepen it, suggesting that imagination is not an escape from grief but one of its necessary languages.

Madeleine McGraw delivers a performance of remarkable control and emotional intelligence. Her Emma is not the precocious archetype so often found in films about loss, but something more grounded and unpredictable. She oscillates between determination and vulnerability, her resolve to find her mother undercut by the dawning realization that the truth may not offer the closure she seeks. McGraw’s performance anchors the film, giving it a steady emotional core even as the narrative drifts into more abstract territory.

Opposite her, P.J. Marino’s Glenn is a study in quiet devastation. Marino resists the temptation to overplay the character’s grief, instead allowing it to manifest in small, telling gestures—a hesitation before opening a door, a glance that lingers too long on an old photograph. His chemistry with McGraw is the film’s beating heart, evolving from wary distance to a tentative, surrogate familial bond. Their relationship never feels forced; it grows organically, shaped as much by what remains unsaid as by the dialogue they share.

The supporting cast, drawn largely from familiar television faces, lends the film a sense of lived-in authenticity. Jeremy Sisto’s turn as the titular Captain Tsunami—a figure who exists both within the comic and as a kind of symbolic presence in the narrative—is particularly noteworthy. Sisto imbues the role with a weary gravitas, transforming what could have been a mere narrative device into something closer to a mythic embodiment of resilience and loss. Elsewhere, Archie Kao and Tessa Munro provide understated support, while Craig Frank adds an undercurrent of unease that subtly reinforces the film’s thriller elements.

Visually, Captain Tsunami is more ambitious than its modest runtime might suggest. Cinematographers Jennifer Hook and Bobby Lam craft a palette that shifts between muted realism and bursts of saturated color, mirroring the film’s oscillation between the mundane and the fantastical. The comic book sequences, in particular, are rendered with a tactile richness that invites the viewer to linger on each frame, as though the film itself were encouraging us to read it as much as watch it.

Yet for all its stylistic flourishes, the film’s greatest strength lies in its thematic restraint. Sherry and Marino are clearly interested in big questions—about the nature of belief, the stories we tell ourselves to survive, and the possibility of healing in the absence of answers—but they resist the urge to resolve these questions neatly. The mystery of Emma’s mother is not so much solved as reframed, its ambiguity becoming a reflection of the characters’ internal states. In this sense, the film aligns itself more closely with works that treat narrative as a process of discovery rather than resolution.

There are moments, to be sure, where the film’s ambitions threaten to outpace its execution. The blending of genres—drama, fantasy, mystery—can occasionally feel uneven, with certain transitions landing more awkwardly than others. A few supporting characters are sketched more lightly than the material might warrant, their narrative potential hinted at but not fully realized. And at times, the script leans a bit too heavily on metaphor, risking a kind of thematic over-determination that undercuts the story’s more organic moments.

But these are, in many ways, the growing pains of a filmmaker reaching beyond the confines of conventional storytelling. What makes Captain Tsunami compelling is not its perfection, but its willingness to inhabit uncertainty—to sit with grief rather than rushing to alleviate it, to embrace imagination without losing sight of reality’s weight.

The film’s closing moments are emblematic of this approach. Without resorting to sentimentality, Sherry offers a resolution that feels both earned and incomplete, acknowledging that healing is not a destination but an ongoing process. The comic book, once a puzzle to be solved, becomes something else entirely: a shared language through which Glenn and Emma can begin to articulate what they have lost and, perhaps, what they might still find.

In a cinematic landscape often dominated by noise and excess, Captain Tsunami is a quieter proposition, but no less resonant for it. It asks its audience to engage not just with its narrative, but with the emotional undercurrents that shape it—to read between the panels, as it were, and to find meaning in the spaces where words and images fall short.

For a debut feature, it is an impressively assured work, one that signals a filmmaker attuned to the complexities of human experience and unafraid to explore them through unconventional means. If Captain Tsunami occasionally falters under the weight of its own aspirations, it does so in pursuit of something genuine and affecting—a rarity that feels, in its own way, quietly heroic.

Captain Tsunami available On Demand April 23 2026 

LENA GHIO   

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Les Anges et le Canadien • The Angels and the Canadians • 1993

THE STORY BEGINS HERE

FRANÇAIS app de traduction plus haut

Montreal, in the winter of 1993, did not yet know it was standing on the edge of something that would refuse to fit inside the limits of sport. The city moved as it always had—through cold air, familiar streets, and the shared rhythm of expectation that rises each year around Le Canadien. The Montreal Canadiens were, as ever, more than a team. They were a language. A pulse. A gathering point for memory and identity. But that season, the feeling was different. The confidence that usually wrapped itself around the club like armor had thinned. Doubt circulated freely—in the press, in the stands, and in the private conversations that followed each uneven performance.

Inside the Montreal Forum, that doubt had weight. It pressed into the corridors, into the dressing rooms, into the spaces where people worked not as spectators but as participants in the life of the building. Among them, inside La Mise au Jeu, the stakes were not symbolic. A short season meant a quiet room, empty tables, a stalled livelihood. A long run meant energy, income, continuity. Every game mattered in a direct, tangible way. And so the atmosphere that settled over the Forum in the early months of 1993 was not just tense—it was fragile, as if something essential had yet to be decided.

What no one outside that inner circle could have understood at the time was that the turning point would not come from a tactical adjustment or a sudden surge in form.

It would begin elsewhere.

In a place where intention quietly replaces resignation.

It would begin with a choice.

A choice to act as though unseen forces were not only present—but responsive.

The Little Angels—les Petits Anges—were not introduced as a metaphor or a flourish of imagination. They were invoked. Deliberately. Repeatedly. In gestures that might appear small from the outside but carried precision and consistency: a moment chosen to light a candle in alignment with a desired outcome, a drop of fragrant oil placed under someone’s nose to interrupt the spiral of negativity, a silent request made while looking out over the empty ice before the crowd arrived. These were not superstitions performed out of habit; they were actions grounded in the conviction that energy could be directed, that belief could be concentrated, that something beyond the visible might answer if called upon with clarity.

Jean Béliveau & Maurice Richard

At first, nothing announced itself. The team continued to struggle. The mood did not instantly lift. But beneath the surface, something had shifted. The environment was no longer passive. It had become engaged. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the results began to change—not in a smooth, predictable arc, but in moments that resisted explanation.

Overtime became the theatre of this transformation. Again and again, the Montreal Canadiens found themselves at the edge of defeat, suspended in the narrow space where a single play determines everything. And in that space, something remarkable occurred. Goals arrived with a timing so precise it felt less like chance and more like response. Not once, but repeatedly. Not in isolation, but in a pattern that grew too consistent to ignore.

From the outside, the search for meaning began immediately. The phrase “Ghosts of the Forum” resurfaced, carried into public consciousness by voices such as Réjean Tremblay, who understood the allure of linking the present to the legends of the past. It was a compelling narrative—romantic, familiar, and comfortably rooted in the mythology of hockey. It allowed the improbable to be explained without disturbing the established order of things.

Réjean Tremblay dominated the narrative about the "Ghosts". The men just couldn't accept that the people were with the team all the way, the LIVING die hard fans and us at  La Mise au Jeu.

But for those working inside La Mise au Jeu, that explanation did not correspond to what they were living. What they witnessed was not the echo of something long gone. It was something immediate, interactive, and unmistakably present. The difference is not subtle. Ghosts belong to memory; they do not adapt, do not respond, do not arrive precisely when called. What unfolded during that spring suggested the opposite: a force that engaged in real time, that met intention with outcome, that seemed to move in step with belief as it intensified and spread.

The pattern became undeniable within that intimate circle. Hands joined during overtime, focusing on the same invocation—ANGEL POWERS ACTIVATE!-- and a goal would follow. A collective insistence on maintaining faith, even when doubt pressed hardest—and the game would turn. These moments accumulated, each reinforcing the last, until what had begun as a private experiment in intention evolved into a shared certainty. The ice itself seemed to respond, not as a haunted surface animated by relics of the past, but as a living field influenced by a present, directed force.

Even among the players, traces of this dynamic surfaced in ways that slipped beyond routine explanation. Patrick Roy spoke of unexpected encounters, gestures of luck offered at precisely the right moment, as though the current surrounding the team extended outward into the city itself. Symbols appeared—small, almost incidental—yet charged with meaning: a miniature Stanley Cup placed on a bar as an act of confidence, a question asked before each game about whether the Angels had been “put in place.” These were not relics of history asserting themselves; they were signs of participation, of a network of belief forming in real time.

As the playoffs advanced, the distinction between the public narrative and the lived experience sharpened. The media spoke of ghosts, of legacy, of an invisible lineage of players guiding the puck. Inside the Forum, another understanding had taken hold. This was not inheritance. It was alignment. A force—call it Spirit, call it energy, call it Angels—was being engaged deliberately, and it was answering with a consistency that no longer allowed for dismissal.

Even Jacques Demers, who had resisted any suggestion of supernatural influence, began to shift as the improbable victories accumulated. Near the end, faced with a sequence of outcomes that defied conventional reasoning, he reached for his own language of invocation, calling upon Saint Joseph. To the outside world, it read as tradition—a familiar gesture of Catholic faith, a coach grasping for comfort in ritual. But inside the deeper current that had already taken hold, it marked something else entirely: a convergence. Different words, different symbols—but the same underlying act. Demers was no longer standing apart from what was happening around him. He had, in his own way, begun to align with it—to participate in the same frequency of intention that had already been set in motion.

By the time the Canadiens faced the Los Angeles Kings, led by Wayne Gretzky, the story had already been written beneath the surface. What remained was its visible conclusion. To analysts, the matchup was formidable, uncertain. To those who had witnessed the unfolding pattern from within, there was a different sense—one not of arrogance, but of inevitability. The alignment had been established too firmly, the current sustained too consistently to dissipate at the final threshold.

When the victory came, it carried the force of release rather than surprise. The city erupted, as it always does, in sound and celebration. History recorded another championship, the last Stanley Cup to date for the franchise. And the phrase “Ghosts of the Forum” settled comfortably into the official telling, repeating itself over time until it became inseparable from the event.

But that version, for all its poetry, leaves something essential untold.

It removes the presence of those who acted.

It replaces participation with inheritance.

It transforms a living interaction into a closed legend.

The story you are about to enter restores that missing dimension. It does not deny the emotion, the skill, or the drama of that extraordinary run and the extreme efforts of the players. Instead, it reveals the layer beneath it—the deliberate invocation, the shared focus, the unshakable faith that did not simply accompany the victories but helped shape them. It is the account of a convergence between a community and a force that responded when called, not as an echo of the past, but as an active presence in the present.

In Montreal, the name Le Canadien will always carry its history. But in 1993, something else moved through it—something that cannot be contained in nostalgia alone. Not ghosts, lingering at the edges of memory, but Angels, engaged in the immediacy of belief, meeting a city that, for a moment, remembered how to call—and how to receive.

L'HISTOIRE COMMENCE ICI

LENA GHIO   

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SOUND OF FALLING now on MUBI

TRAILER

Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling arrives less as a film than as a slow, enveloping disturbance—an accumulation of textures, silences, and psychic echoes that seem to seep out of the screen and settle somewhere uncomfortably permanent. It is a work that resists easy taxonomy: part haunted-house story, part historical palimpsest, part sensory poem about the inheritance of pain. In her second feature, Schilinski not only confirms the promise of her debut but expands it into something far more formidable—an audacious, century-spanning vision of female experience that feels at once intimate and mythic, grounded and spectral.

The first signal of the film’s singularity is sonic. An ominous, droning rush recurs throughout, swelling like pressure in the ears before a plunge, or the sickening acceleration of a body succumbing to gravity. This sound—neither fully musical nor entirely environmental—becomes the film’s emotional undercurrent, binding together disparate timelines and subjectivities. It is less a motif than a force, suggesting inevitability, repetition, and the crushing weight of history itself. If the English title feels oblique, even evasive, it is perhaps because Schilinski is working in a register where language falters. The film trades not in clarity but in sensation, in half-formed recognitions and emotional residues that refuse to settle into neat articulation.

Set almost entirely on a remote farmstead in northern Germany, Sound of Falling traces the lives of four generations of girls across the 20th century and into the present day. Yet to describe it as a multi-strand narrative risks misrepresenting its method. Schilinski and her co-writer Louise Peter do not intercut these stories in any conventional sense; rather, they allow them to bleed into one another, to echo and refract across time. Scenes begin mid-thought and end mid-gesture. Perspectives shift without warning. Characters appear to sense one another across decades, as if the house itself were remembering.

At the film’s fractured center is Erika, ( Lea Drinda ) a red-haired teenager in the 1940s whose introduction is as disquieting as anything in recent cinema. Hobbling down a dim corridor on crutches, she initially appears injured, vulnerable. The revelation that she is feigning disability—her leg bound beneath her dress, the crutches borrowed from her amputee uncle—lands with unnerving force. When her father strikes her for this transgression, her response is not tears but a faint, ambiguous smile directed toward the camera. It is a moment that encapsulates the film’s uneasy relationship with spectatorship: these girls are seen, but not protected; observed, but not understood.

Erika’s story is only one thread in a densely woven tapestry. We are carried backward to the early 1900s, where young Alma ( Hanna Heckt ) navigates a household steeped in unspoken violence and ritualized suffering. Through her curious, watchful gaze, we glimpse the origins of family traumas that will reverberate for decades. A farmhand’s mutilation, a servant’s forced sterilization—these are not dramatized as singular events but absorbed into the fabric of daily life, their horror dulled by repetition.

Moving forward, the film settles briefly in the 1980s, where Angelika, ( Lena Urzendowsky ) on the cusp of adulthood, becomes entangled in a web of desire and exploitation that blurs the boundaries between affection and abuse. In the present day, the farmhouse is occupied by a middle-class Berlin family whose daughters, Lenka ( Laeni Geiseler ) and Nelly, ( Zoë Baier ) seem at first removed from this legacy. Yet Schilinski gradually reveals the persistence of unease, the subtle ways in which the past intrudes upon the present—not as explicit memory, but as atmosphere, as inherited anxiety.

What emerges is not a linear history but a kind of emotional archaeology. Schilinski excavates patterns of behavior, gestures, and violations that recur across generations, suggesting that the true continuity lies not in bloodlines but in structures of power. Patriarchy, in Sound of Falling, is not a backdrop but an omnipresent condition—mutable in form, perhaps, but relentless in its effects.

Formally, the film is as rigorous as it is elusive. Shot in a constricted Academy ratio, the images possess a suffocating intimacy, as though the characters were trapped not only within their environment but within the frame itself. Cinematographer Fabian Gamper employs a range of textures—grainy, desaturated compositions that evoke decaying photographs; blurred, pinhole distortions that suggest memory in the process of disintegration. The palette is dominated by muted browns and ashen blacks, occasionally punctured by a startling blue that feels less like color than intrusion.

Schilinski’s visual strategy finds its counterpart in the film’s editing, which is both precise and disorienting. Scenes are truncated, rearranged, revisited from altered perspectives. Time folds in on itself. The effect is less that of a puzzle to be solved than of a consciousness attempting to process trauma—circling, fragmenting, resisting closure. Evelyn Rack’s editing does not guide the viewer so much as implicate them, forcing an active engagement with the film’s gaps and silences.

Performance, too, operates in a deliberately restrained register. Dialogue is sparse, often secondary to gesture and gaze. The young actresses—particularly Hanna Heckt as Alma and Lena Urzendowsky as Angelika—convey entire emotional landscapes through minute shifts in expression. Their characters exist in states of watchful apprehension, their inner lives suggested rather than declared. Voiceover, when it appears, is shared among them, blurring individual identity into something more collective—a chorus of female experience that transcends time.

There are moments of startling, almost surreal imagery: a girl stepping out of a photograph and vanishing; underwater sequences in which eels writhe through murky currents; the persistent presence of flies, their droning amplified to oppressive levels. These elements do not function as symbols in any straightforward sense. Instead, they contribute to a pervasive sense of unease, of a world slightly out of joint.

If the film invites comparison, it is to artists who have similarly grappled with the limits of representation in the face of historical trauma. Yet Schilinski’s voice feels distinctly her own—less interested in homage than in forging a language adequate to her subject. The result is a film that is, in the best sense, difficult: resistant to summary, to easy interpretation, to passive consumption.

And yet, for all its formal complexity, Sound of Falling is not an abstract exercise. Its emotional impact is cumulative and profound. By the time the film reaches its quiet, devastating conclusion, one feels not only the weight of the individual stories but the enormity of what connects them—the persistence of systems that diminish, silence, and brutalize, even as they evolve.

Schilinski offers no facile resolutions, no comforting narratives of progress. The past does not recede; it lingers, embedded in spaces and bodies alike. If there is a form of hope here, it lies not in escape but in recognition—in the act of seeing, of refusing to let these histories dissolve into silence.

With Sound of Falling, Mascha Schilinski announces herself as a filmmaker of rare ambition and control, capable of transforming the most intimate experiences into something vast and resonant. It is a film that unsettles, challenges, and ultimately endures—a work that, like its haunting central motif, continues to reverberate long after the screen goes dark.

NOW ON MUBI

LENA GHIO   

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Retour sur PLURAL 2026

INFORMATIONS

 ENGLISH translation app above

Il est des rendez-vous artistiques qui dépassent la simple exposition pour devenir de véritables traversées sensibles. La foire Plural, orchestrée par l’Association des galeries d’art contemporain, (AGAC) appartient indéniablement à cette catégorie rare. Samedi dernier, au Grand Quai du Port de Montréal, j’ai eu le privilège de m’immerger dans cet espace vibrant où convergent visions, matières et imaginaires. Dès les premiers pas, une impression s’impose : celle d’un foisonnement maîtrisé, d’un dialogue continu entre les œuvres et celles et ceux qui les regardent.

Ce que l’on aime d’emblée à Plural, c’est cette sensation d’entrer dans une constellation de mondes singuliers. Chaque kiosque agit comme un seuil, une invitation à traverser des univers colorés, texturés, parfois déroutants, souvent saisissants. Les artistes, soutenu·e·s par leurs galeries, y déploient des propositions qui oscillent entre rigueur conceptuelle et puissance émotionnelle. L’expérience est éblouissante, au sens le plus juste : elle capte le regard, mais surtout, elle engage le corps et l’esprit dans une déambulation active, presque méditative.

Présentée par la Banque Nationale du Canada, cette édition de la foire, tenue du 10 au 12 avril, a rassemblé 45 exposants et plus de 500 artistes, confirmant l’ampleur et la vitalité de la scène contemporaine actuelle. Sous un soleil encore hésitant, les quais vibraient d’une énergie joyeuse, animés par une foule éclectique, mue à la fois par le désir de découvrir et celui de collectionner. Avec plus de 11 000 visiteur·euse·s, un record depuis l’installation de l’événement à cet emplacement en 2019, Plural consolide son statut de rendez-vous incontournable du calendrier culturel montréalais.

Au-delà de l’effervescence, cette édition marque également un tournant significatif sur le plan du marché de l’art. Pour la première fois de son histoire, les ventes ont franchi le seuil des 2 millions de dollars, atteignant 2,2 millions à la clôture. Ce jalon témoigne non seulement de la confiance renouvelée des collectionneur·euse·s, mais aussi du rôle structurant que jouent les galeries dans la diffusion et la pérennité de l’art contemporain. Les collections privées dominent encore largement, mais la progression des acquisitions corporatives souligne un intérêt croissant des entreprises pour le soutien à la création.

Dans ce contexte dynamique, certaines initiatives se distinguent particulièrement. L’installation immersive d’Elisabeth Perrault, présentée dans l’Espace Banque Nationale, a su captiver les visiteur·euse·s par son univers textile à la fois chimérique et enveloppant. Suspendues dans l’espace ou déployées au sol, ses formes invitaient à une exploration sensorielle où le fantastique se mêle à une réflexion sur la matérialité et la transformation. Ce type de proposition incarne parfaitement l’esprit de Plural : un lieu où l’expérimentation artistique rencontre un public prêt à s’y abandonner.

Au fil de cette traversée, entre découvertes marquantes et coups de cœur assumés, une certitude émerge : Plural n’est pas seulement une foire, mais un véritable laboratoire du regard. C’est dans cet esprit que je vous propose maintenant de découvrir une sélection personnelle d’œuvres et de galeries qui ont particulièrement retenu mon attention — autant d’escales à explorer, à votre tour. Poursuivez votre lecture ci-dessous

Emilie Duval chez Patrick Mikhail

La toile d’Emilie Duval, The Valley of Illusion, détail plus haut, capte d’emblée par sa résonance avec les recherches chromatiques de David Hockney dans les années 60. Chez Duval, toutefois, la citation devient prétexte à une exploration plus conceptuelle : une cartographie sensible des structures invisibles qui régissent nos sociétés. Nourrie par une double formation juridique et historique, elle interroge l’empreinte des algorithmes sur nos équilibres collectifs. Ses œuvres, hybrides et stratifiées, déploient une pensée visuelle où peinture, vidéo et installation dialoguent, révélant la tension entre abstraction systémique et expérience humaine, invitant le spectateur à reconsidérer son environnement contemporain.

Lyne Lapointe chez Galeries Bellemare Lambert

Les œuvres de Lyne Lapointe évoquent pour moi les fresques antiques que redécouvrent les archéologues, entre ruine et révélation contemporaine. Née à Montréal, elle vit et travaille aujourd’hui à Mansonville, au Québec, où son œuvre poursuit une exploration sensible de la mémoire des lieux. De 1983 à 1994, sa collaboration avec Martha Fleming transforme des espaces abandonnés en dispositifs in situ, véritables strates de mémoire collective et personnelle. En 1994, elle réalise une installation d’envergure à la Biennale de São Paulo, affirmant une présence internationale marquante. Depuis, son travail plus intime explore la matière, le geste et la mémoire visuelle. En haut, à gauche Eucedaris, 2025; à droite Le goût des fraises, 2025.

Barbara Steinman chez Galeries Bellemare Lambert

L’œuvre Keeping Time (random) No. 261 de Barbara Steinman se déploie comme une expérience chromatique saisissante, où les couleurs riches et saturées instaurent une tension presque musicale. Chez Steinman, la question du temps ne cesse de se fragmenter et de se recomposer, traversant installations, photographies et dispositifs multimédias. Depuis plus de trente ans, elle explore les migrations de l’identité, les récits historiques et les strates de mémoire individuelle et collective. Son langage visuel, précis et conceptuel, conjugue matérialité et flux, invitant le regardeur à circuler entre perception et pensée critique dans une lecture sensible des temporalités contemporaines fragmentées et mouvantes.

Marigold Santos chez Patel Brown

Chez Marigold Santos, l’œuvre Shroud of epiphyte (Billbid Chair 2025) s’impose comme une apparition envoûtante. Une figure féminine stylisée nous fixe depuis un ailleurs spectral où elle règne avec une autorité quasi divine. Marigold Santos, artiste née à Manille et basée au Canada, déploie une pratique interdisciplinaire entre peinture, sculpture et son. Son œuvre explore l’héritage, la diaspora et la décolonisation à travers une esthétique fragmentée et puissamment symbolique. Lauréate et exposée internationalement, elle inscrit son travail dans une cosmologie intime et politique en expansion continue. Sa recherche picturale ouvre un espace liminal où identité et mémoire se recomposent constamment. L'oeuvre est en voie d'acquisition par le MAC! Un bel accomplissement.

Genie Kim chez SSEW Project

Lors de la foire Plural, Genie Kim (née en 1968 en Corée du Sud) s’impose comme une figure singulière de la scène contemporaine. Formée à la Hong-ik University School of Fine Arts à Séoul, elle développe une pratique raffinée entre peinture et céramique. Sa sculpture de médiums mixtes, Fleurs guérissantes (Baleine) 2, (2026) que j’ai particulièrement appréciée, condense une sensibilité organique et poétique. Son parcours, jalonné d’expositions collectives et de foires internationales comme Carnegie Craft 2023 ou le Artist Project de Toronto, témoigne d’une reconnaissance croissante. Les distinctions reçues soulignent une œuvre cohérente, à la fois délicate et puissamment évocatrice. 

LENA GHIO   

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❤️‍🔥 Plural 2026, une édition record et rassembleuse

 

Présentée par la Banque Nationale, la foire Plural s’est déployée du 10 au 12 avril au Grand Quai du Port de Montréal. L’événement rassemblait 45 exposants et les œuvres de plus de 500 artistes.

Montréal, le 15 avril 2026 — L’Association des galeries d’art contemporain (AGAC), qui organise la foire depuis maintenant 19 ans, est fière d’avoir accueilli plus de 11 000 visiteur·euse·s, un nouveau record de fréquentation depuis que l'événement s’est établi au Grand Quai en 2019. Malgré le soleil timide, l’ambiance était festive et propice aux découvertes. L'AGAC se réjouit de cet engouement du public, composé d’amateur·trice·s de tous horizons, venu·e·s pour acquérir, découvrir ou admirer l'incroyable sélection d'œuvres présentées à Plural.

« Nous constatons que cette édition a vraiment consolidé le rayonnement de Plural. Encore cette année, la foire a su s’imposer comme un rendez-vous incontournable du calendrier culturel, devenant aujourd’hui un événement aussi attendu que convoité par les galeries, les artistes et le public. Merci à tous les visiteur·euse·s de votre enthousiasme pour l’art contemporain ! » — Anie Deslauriers, directrice générale, AGAC

Première photo : Soad Carrier, présidente du C.A. de l'AGAC ; Jo-Ann Kane, Conservatrice de la Collection Banque Nationale ; Anie Deslauriers, directrice de l'AGAC ; Karine Vanasse, porte-parole de la foire Plural. / photo : Vivien Gaumand Kiosques : 2. Stephen Bulger Gallery  3. McBride Contemporain  4. Patel Brown  5. Pangée / photos : Jean-Michael Seminaro

Pour la première fois de son histoire, les ventes d’œuvres à Plural ont dépassé la barre des 2 millions, atteignant un sommet de 2,2 millions de dollars à la clôture de la foire dimanche dernier. L’AGAC attribue cette augmentation aux efforts déployés au cours des dernières années pour mobiliser les institutions et les entreprises collectionneuses, ainsi que les collectionneur·euse·s de partout au pays, afin de favoriser leur présence à la foire. L’Association observe par ailleurs que malgré quelques variations dans la provenance des acquisitions, les tendances générales se maintiennent. Les collections privées demeurent majoritaires, représentant 77% des ventes, comparativement à 68% à l’édition précédente. Les acquisitions réalisées par les entreprises poursuivent leur progression et atteignent 16%des ventes, contre 14% en 2025. Quant aux collections institutionnelles, elles représentent 7% des transactions, en baisse par rapport à 18% en 2025, une diminution que l’AGAC attribue à la part plus importante des acquisitions effectuées par des collectionneur·euse·s privé·e·s cette année.

« Collectionner l’art, c’est soutenir directement les artistes, mais c’est aussi contribuer à un écosystème où les galeries jouent un rôle central dans la diffusion de l’art contemporain. L’AGAC est profondément reconnaissante envers les collectionneurs, les institutions et les entreprises qui contribuent activement au rayonnement des galeries et de leurs artistes par l’acquisition d’œuvres d’art. » — Soad Carrier, présidente du C.A., AGAC

Les entreprises et les musées ayant effectué des acquisitions à Plural incluent entre autres la Banque Nationale, BLG, Claridge, Desjardins, Giverny Capital, Hydro-Québec, le Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, le Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, le Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal et Nukleo. Parmi les acquisitions de la Banque Nationale, on compte cette année les œuvres des artistes Anna Torma, John Massey (Clint Roenisch Gallery), Han Sungpil (TrépanierBaer Gallery) et Nour Bishouty (COOPER COLE).

Nour Bishouty (COOPER COLE)

L’AGAC tient à exprimer sa reconnaissance à son partenaire présentateur, Banque Nationale, dont l’engagement fidèle joue un rôle clé dans le développement de Plural. Ce partenariat solide contribue, depuis plus d'une décennie, à faire de la foire un rendez-vous incontournable de l’art contemporain. Cette année, la Banque présentait l'installation Ratking de l'artiste Elisabeth Perrault. Tout au long du weekend, les visiteur·euse·s ont pu déambuler au coeur d’impressionnantes sculptures textiles chimériques, suspendues au plafond et éparpillées au sol, se laissant porter par l’univers enchanteur et surréaliste de l'artiste. L'Espace Banque Nationale a également été le théâtre d'ateliers interactifs animé par Elisabeth Perrault, offrant aux visiteur·euse·s de tous horizons l’occasion d’expérimenter ses techniques et d’en apprendre davantage sur son processus artistique. Suite à sa présentation à Plural, l'installation Ratking est actuellement en processus d'acquisition par le Musée des beaux-arts du Canada. Félicitations à Elisabeth Perrault pour cet accomplissement majeur !

« À titre de commanditaire officiel de Plural, la Banque Nationale y présente une sélection d’oeuvres de sa Collection ainsi qu’un projet spécial, confié cette année à Elisabeth Perreault, affirmant ainsi son engagement envers la création contemporaine et le rayonnement de l’art canadien et québécois. C’est dans ce contexte que s’inscrit l’installation d’Elisabeth Perreault, aujourd’hui en processus d'acquisition par le Musée national des beaux-arts du Canada, témoignant de la portée de son travail. Nous sommes fiers d’avoir contribué à sa diffusion. » — Jo-Ann Kane, Conservatrice de la Collection Banque Nationale

L'Espace Banque Nationale / photos 1 et 3 : Jean-Michael Seminaro / photos 2,4 et 5 : Sam Lee

L'Espace Banque Nationale a également mis en lumière une magnifique sélection d'œuvres de sa collection. Avec plus de 6 000 œuvres, la Collection Banque Nationale est l’une des plus importantes collections d’entreprise au Canada et a pour principale caractéristique d’être représentative de l’histoire de l’art canadien de 1895 à nos jours.

Dès leur arrivée à Plural, les visiteur·euse·s ont été accueilli·e·s par l'exposition ANTICIPATION, commissariée par Sophie Latouche. Rassemblant le travail de 11 artistes canadien·ne·s de générations diverses, l'exposition explorait le pouvoir prémonitoire des œuvres qui, par leurs matérialités et leurs gestes, habitent le présent tout en tendant vers ce qui vient. L’exposition a d’ailleurs fait l’objet de deux articles dans les médias pendant la foire : dans Le Devoir, rédigé par Amélie Revert, et dans La Presse, par Jean Siag. Vitrine lumineuse avec un panorama époustouflant sur le centre-ville de Montréal, le Pavillon accueillait également les activités du Forum Plural, les Espaces projet, ainsi que plusieurs kiosques partenaires, dont Loto-Québec et artch qui présentaient une exposition mettant en lumière l'émergence en art contemporain.

Vues des expositions ANTICIPATION et Vertige de l'excès (Loto-Québec et artch) présentées au Pavillon / photos : Vivien Gaumand et Jean-Michael Seminaro

Pendant les trois jours de la foire, le Forum Plural a offert une programmation d’exception, mettant en lumière une diversité de perspectives sur des enjeux actuels du marché de l’art contemporain. Tout au long de l’événement, les 7 tables rondes, 4 visites guidées et 3 ateliers — offerts gratuitement au public — ont suscité un fort engouement auprès des visiteur·euse·s, attirant au total près de 1 000 participant·e·s. L’AGAC remercie également chaleureusement la Fondation de la Famille Claudine et Stephen Bronfman, bienfaiteur présentateur du Forum Plural, pour son appui essentiel à la réalisation de cette programmation, ainsi que Projet Casa, bienfaiteur des initiatives d'accessibilité. Le public est invité à se rendre sur la chaîne YouTube de l'Association dans les prochaines semaines pour (ré)écouter les tables rondes présentées durant la foire.

1. La table ronde Les collections au travail : apports insoupçonnés de l'art actuel  2. Carrie Scott pendant la table ronde How to Communicate Art  3. Michèle St-Amand anime la visite Ahchietehk: Braiding Traditions and Contemporary Practices 4. La table ronde Résidences d’artistes : repenser la rencontre entre création et publics 5. Marie-Ève Charron anime l'atelier L'exercice de la critique

L'AGAC rappelle au public que le catalogue d'œuvres demeure accessible en ligne, sur www.plural.art, jusqu'au 1er mai 2026. Le catalogue comprend près de 1 000 œuvres d'art qui peuvent être filtrées par médium, par prix ou par grandeur. Pour une expérience du site web personnalisée, nous vous encourageons à vous créer un compte. Votre compte vous permet d’enregistrer vos œuvres favorites. Si vous aviez un compte l'an dernier, vous pouvez utiliser les mêmes accès.

La réalisation de la foire Plural est possible grâce au soutien de nos précieux partenaires, collaborateurs et bénévoles. L'AGAC les remercie chaleureusement !

À propos de Plural Plural célèbre le meilleur de l'art contemporain au Canada. Créée par et pour les galeries, la foire rassemble et présente la pluralité des voix et des œuvres en art contemporain au pays. Elle élève les pratiques du marché de l'art : d’une part, avec une sélection rigoureuse de galeries présentant des artistes et des œuvres soigneusement choisis; d’autre part, par le biais d’une programmation accessible abordant les thématiques actuelles du champ des arts. Plural favorise la découverte des nouvelles voix et des formes d'expression en art contemporain de pointe, tout en cultivant un esprit de collectivité au sein de la communauté artistique canadienne.

À propos de l'AGAC L'Association des galeries d'art contemporain est un OBNL dont la mission principale est d'assurer la reconnaissance et la prospérité du marché de l'art contemporain au Canada. L'AGAC contribue à la promotion de la création artistique nationale par le biais de ses différentes plateformes web, de ses projets et de ses événements. L'Association se dédie également à sensibiliser le public envers les arts visuels et à stimuler l'émergence de nouveaux collectionneurs.