 |
| Manuel Mathieu, Unity in Darkness @ PHI |
This winter, while Montreal’s riverine winds carve their way through Old Montreal’s stone arteries, PHI offers something like a temporal hearth—an aperture of warmth that is less about radiators and more about psychic combustion. For two decades, PHI has positioned itself as one of the city’s most lucid cultural sentinels, a place where art doesn’t merely reflect the present but interrogates the cosmological scaffolding around it. This season, three exhibitions—each an ecosystem unto itself—transform PHI’s constellation of spaces into a triadic voyage across interstellar myth, historical wound, and the digital unconscious.
Manuel Mathieu: Unity in Darkness
A few streets away, PHI’s building at 451 Saint-Jean Street becomes the vessel for Manuel Mathieu’s most expansive exhibition to date: Unity in Darkness. Where Ntjam aims her gaze toward speculative creation, Mathieu excavates the complicated strata of memory, trauma, erasure, and resilience—territories that resist neat deciphering.
Mathieu’s practice is synesthetic, almost shamanistic. His paintings, drawings, ceramics, mosaics, and video works emanate from a state of surrender, a kind of interior spelunking that accesses what is hidden in the body’s shadowed corridors. His abstracted gestures seem to flare from some underworld of recollection, where trauma refuses stasis and instead becomes a volatile pigment.
The exhibition’s gravitational center is his single-shot video work from which the show takes its title: a flickering match that is about to extinguish, rekindled by another hand, and then another. The flame travels, relay-style, unbroken—a choreography of endurance and mutual ignition. In an era saturated with cynicism, the simplicity of this gesture reads as radical: solidarity not as slogan but as breath-to-breath transmission.
Mathieu’s installation practice broadens here into new sensorial registers. A large-scale olfactory environment envelopes visitors in a scent that feels simultaneously earthly and ancestral—something like soil, salt, and memory distilled into aroma. It transforms the gallery into a porous body, inhaling and exhaling with its visitors.
Across the building, recent paintings teem with ghosted figures, spectral landscapes, and chromatic ruptures. Their surfaces carry the psychic scar tissue of Haiti, Mathieu’s homeland, whose mystical luminosity has long been obscured by political predation and external misrepresentation. Mathieu reveals that numinous spirit not through spectacle but through the tremulous language of texture and color. His canvases feel warm-blooded, as though their pigments were pumped directly from the heart.
One of the exhibition’s tender surprises is Mathieu’s invitation for every PHI staff member to create a small colored ball, integrated along the exhibition path. It is a gesture of communal authorship, a refusal of the solitary genius myth. In a time defined by fracture, Mathieu offers a ritual of togetherness—a reminder that unity often emerges not from clarity, but from darkness shared.
 |
| Keiken, Sensory Oversoul @ PHI |
Keiken: Sensory Oversoul
In another portal in this seasonal triptych is Keiken’s Sensory Oversoul, the North American debut of the London-Berlin–based collective. Keiken’s multidisciplinary practice—spanning gaming, performance, AI, neural interfaces, and speculative fiction—often reads like a rehearsal for the future internet, one where bodies and data streams mingle in unexpected intimacy.
Here, the collective presents two major installations, including Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊·˚ (2024), a participatory experience that merges empathy, biology, and technology. Visitors recline on seed-pod beds while wearing a “haptic wearable womb”—a sound-touch interface placed on the abdomen that vibrates with signals derived from underwater mammals, sandstorms, and interstellar noise. The effect is disarmingly tender: a surrogate organ offering non-verbal communion.
In a culture split between technological secularism and unexamined religiosity, Keiken proposes a third option: a techno-spiritual poetics that neither rejects science nor deifies it. Their work suggests that the human longing for the ineffable hasn’t diminished; it has merely migrated. We seek spirit in data streams, in simulations, in vibrational frequencies, in the metaphysics of code. The installation plays like both a game and a meditation—an embodied speculation on the oversoul that might bind all beings, whether animal, mineral, digital, or imagined.
Keiken’s worldbuilding is precise yet permissive, inviting participants to examine their own thresholds of belief and sensation. In their hands, technology becomes less a tool than an organism—one that amplifies, rather than anesthetizes, our capacity for interconnection.
 |
| Josèfa Ntjam: swell of spæc(i)es @ PHI / Josèfa Ntjam, swell of spæc(i)es, 2024. Installation view, collateral event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, 2024. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy of the LAS Art Foundation © Josèfa Ntjam / ADAGP, Paris / CARCC, Ottawa, 2025. |
Entering Josèfa Ntjam’s swell of spæc(i)es feels like tumbling through the event horizon of another ontology. Part cosmic lagoon, part subaqueous nebula, the installation is an immersive, cyclical dream logic distilled into film, sound, and sculptural apparitions. Ntjam has long been fluent in the language of assemblage—her vocabulary culled from marine biology, space speculation, African cosmogony, and online ephemera—and here she composes a new creation myth that refuses linearity.
The room ripples with blues, purples, and vaporous greens, colors that suggest the shared sensual register between oceanic trenches and deep space. Two jellyfish-like sculptures emanate voices—creatures of neither sea nor sky but of Ntjam’s hybrid futurism. Her figures, composed from multiple species, enact a biological pluralism that collapses the dichotomy between the ancestral and the extraterrestrial. At the center is her film, a hypnotic loop, as though the creation of the universe were not a one-time combustion but a recurring cycle, forever re-negotiated.
Drawing on Dogon and Huaorani creation stories, Ntjam charts a utopian cartography in which plankton—the planet’s ubiquitous, cellular wanderers—becomes the connective tissue between epochs and biomes. The effect is both entrancing and corrective: in a world obsessed with categorization, Ntjam insists that origins themselves are mutable dialogues. Her mythmaking is not escapist but deeply political, dismantling dominant narratives of identity and race by reminding us that all species, human or otherwise, are cosmic sediment.
Even amid the sensory seduction, there is a philosophical rigor at work. Ntjam imagines the universe as a breathing archive—one built not from monuments or texts but from the micro-organisms that have always mediated life on Earth. swell of spæc(i)es posits an exquisite truth: the future is not ahead of us, but beneath and around us, waiting to be composted into new cosmologies.
PHI as a Winter Constellation
Taken together, these exhibitions transform PHI into a triptych of parallel dimensions: Ntjam’s mythic oceans, Mathieu’s incandescent shadows, and Keiken’s digital spirit-spheres. Each offers a different route toward understanding how we inhabit this era of profound instability—whether through remixed cosmologies, communal resilience, or speculative empathy.
In winter, cities contract. People retreat indoors, the world shrinks to the radius of a scarf. But PHI, true to its 20-year mission, expands the season into something cosmic, reminding visitors that warmth is not merely thermal but ontological. These exhibitions don’t just invite viewers to travel; they ask us to recalibrate what we think travel—and connection—can mean.
In Old Montreal, where history hangs like breath in cold air, PHI ignites three flames: one born in oceans and stars, one in the wounds and wonders of Haiti, and one in the circuitry of tomorrow. Together, they form a kind of winter constellation—a map for navigating darkness, and perhaps, a shared spark to carry forward.
No comments:
Post a Comment