Consider the Archive: In Conversation with Michaëlle Sergile

For the exhibition To All The Unnamed Women, the Museum invites you to a conversation between artist Michaëlle Sergile and artist-researcher Kessie Theliar-Charles.

Exploring the archives of Montreal’s Black communities requires alternative methods to retrace the histories that have remained in the blind spots of traditional knowledge institutions. The discussion will focus on the use of archives and archiving, the foundation of Michaëlle Sergile’s practice, to inscribe Black women’s bodies in time and space. How do we articulate this presence when faced with the challenge of reconstructing, recognizing and appreciating the traces and fragments of a past that has been denied?

About Michaëlle Sergile

Michaëlle Sergile is an artist and independent curator working mainly on archives including texts and works from the postcolonial period from 1950 to today. Her artistic work aims to understand and rewrite the history of Black communities, and more specifically of women, or communities living in diverse intersections, through weaving. Often perceived as a medium of craftsmanship and categorized as feminine, the artist uses the lexicon of weaving to question the relationships of gender and race.

She has recently exhibited at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art de Joliette and the Off Biennale de Dakar. Her name was also on the long list of the prestigious Sobey Award for the Arts in 2022. In 2023, she won Visual Artist of the Year at the Gala Dynastie and began a residency at the Darling Foundry.

About Kessie Theliar-Charles

Kessie Theliar-Charles is a research-based artist affiliated with the International Centre for Haitian, Caribbean, and Afro-Canadian Documentation and Information (CIDIHCA) and is the cofounder of the research collective Black Art Histories Montreal. Her approach takes shape through research-creation, merging oral history and archival research to facilitate the preservation and transmission of narratives of the Haitian diaspora. Her current research focuses on the documentation of Haitian visual artists who left Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship from 1957 to 1986 and settled in Montreal, New York and Paris. More broadly, she focuses on the recovery, preservation, and dissemination of the heritage of Afro-descendant visual artists who have been and continue to be active in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal.

Information

• Activity in French on September 25, 2024
• Discussion and public Q&A in French and English.