Berirouche Feddal was the last, but really, the ultimate artist to exhibit a work at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal (MACM), now closed for a vast expansion project. In fact, the young Montrealer created this work on site, on a wall at the entrance to the establishment, during a fundraising event on January 30. He then cut the mural approximately 15 feet long with a reciprocating saw. The bulky colored section now sits in his parents’ garage.
“I was asked to do a performance on site during the evening and I chose to work on the first wall encountered by visitors after the entrance doors,” says the young artist who is launching his first exhibition this week. solo, titled My bougainvillea is in a deep sleep, at McBride Contemporain in Montreal. The wall was interesting because it had a hole which allowed us to evoke optical games through the way we look at ourselves or at people, to evoke the idea of observing without being seen. The museum is under renovation and I wanted to give it a good look. »
Mr. Feddal worked inspired by a work by Matisse from the MACM collection entitled Portrait with pink and blue face (1936-1937). His own mural in superimposed layers uses personal and family archives and even references to Pompeii, a buried city, but also to a first creative performance carried out during his studies where he already superimposed layers of archives. The work of the MACM is entitled Palimpsest, resistance of torn stories. Its signatory hopes to display it in the new MACM, which is scheduled to open in about three years.
Another Quebec artist, Abbas Akhavan, will certainly be there with another work, also created with debris from the old museum, in this case the copper covering of the columns in the hall. Mr. Akhavan was the only beneficiary of an order made in 2020 by Marie-Ève Beaupré, at the time curator of the collection. The work, whose working title is Variations on a Garden (2020-2024), already appears in the establishment’s catalog of acquisitions. It will be exhibited in the garden of the new building.
“It is part of the MAC’s desire to commission a major work for the reopening,” explains Alexandra Frappier, public relations manager for the establishment, by email. In addition, it allows us to recycle and transform emblematic materials from the existing MAC into a sculptural work imbued with memories. »
Recycling materials is commonplace in art, a trend accentuated by eco-responsible movements. The recovery of portions of cultural buildings for artistic purposes seems more rare.
In China and Japan, exact replicas of ancient temples are periodically demolished and rebuilt in an approach symbolizing the regeneration and transmission of ancestral knowledge.
Montreal artist Melvin Charney (1935-2012) presented destroyed historic buildings in the exhibition Corridartas part of Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympic Games. Corridart was very quickly destroyed by order of the town hall.
The renovation plans for the MACM, barely thirty years after its installation at Place des Arts, are signed by the Montreal firm Saucier + Perrotte. Its promoters, including the management, partly justify this reconstruction by the need to “at least double the exhibition spaces”. Calculations carried out by The Press in September reveal that, according to the construction program, in fact, the surface area of the rooms will only increase by 28%.