Funny Women

Funny Women is a selection of funny and performative works directed by women between 1977 and 2018. Playing with gender stereotypes, narrative conventions or the limitations of video and performance art, they lead us into whimsical and biting experiences.

marshalore

Multidisciplinary artist marshalore is the co-founder of Vehicule Press and Vidéo Véhicule (PRIM). She was also the director of Véhicule Art Montréal, one of Canada’s first artist-run centres. Her work draws its inspiration from environment studies, social behaviour and symbolism. Her current research focuses on the intersections of language and culture, an area embracing language, symbols and images. She has also worked with Aboriginal women on the symbolic representation of post-diaspora self-identification. Her works have been presented in North America, Europe and Japan.

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Lynn Hershman Leeson has worked extensively in photography, video, film, performance, installation, and interactive and net-based media. She received the prestigious Golden Nica Prix Ars Electronica, in 1999 for a networked telerobotic site specific installation commissioned for the ZKM Mediammuseum in Germany. Hershman Leeson received a tribute and retrospective at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and she was awarded the ZKM/Seimens Media Arts Award. She was a Sundance Screenwriter Fellow and was honored with the Flintridge Foundation Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts. In 2003, she received The Alfred P. Sloan Film Prize, awarded for writing and directing Teknolust, a film that "explores science and technology themes with originality and insight, challenging existing stereotypes". In 2006 she received the International Association of Digital Arts award for "Innovative storytelling" and Zero One Prize for "Media that Matters" and in 2008, a Creative Capital Grant for her documentary Women Art Revolution.

Chantal duPont

Chantal duPont (1942-2019) has taken part in many international video festivals and individual and group exhibitions in Quebec and abroad. She is the winner of the 2005 Bell Canada Award in video art. Her work is internationally recognized and has received awards in several festivals, including events in Belgium, Colombia, France, Portugal and in Montreal, where she won the Prix à la Création artistique from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for her video Headstrong. Her work has been the subject of retrospectives in Montreal and abroad, including at the Festival International de Films de Créteil, Optica Gallery and the Ed Video media arts centre in Guelph. Her latest audio and video installation created in collaboration with Madelon Hooykaas and Elsa Stansfied, artists from the Netherlands, was presented in September 2006 in Montreal at Parc La Fontaine. A retrospective of her video work selected by the curator Nicole Gingras is part of the 2007, Festival International des Films sur l’Art de Montréal (FIFA) held in March.

Rachel Echenberg

Rachel Echenberg (Montreal, Quebec) is a visual artist who primarily works in performance, video and sculpture. Echenberg’s continual interest in possibilities for active empathy has lead to artworks that highlight vulnerable, intimate and uncontrollable relationships. Since 1992, Rachel Echenberg’s work has been exhibited, performed and screened across Canada as well as internationally in Belgium, Chile, Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Morocco, Northern Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland and the United States. Many of her videos are available through Vidéographe Distribution in Montreal. Echenberg holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada (1993) and an MA in Visual Performance from Dartington College of Arts in the UK (2004). Rachel Echenberg currently teaches in the Fine Arts Department of Dawson College in Montreal, Quebec.

Monique Moumblow

Monique Moumblow was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1971. She received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1992 and has lived in Montreal since 1993. Her videotapes have screened at festivals in Canada, Europe and the United States and are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Oberhausen Short Film Festival Archive.

Sylvie Laliberté

Born in Montréal, Sylvie Laliberté has been a performance artist since 1985, and an important figure on the Canadian performance art scene. Her work, which integrates singing, dance and story-telling, has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her video works question the frame, gesture, body-camera relationship, self-representation, sense of space, fiction and parody.  Narrative, humour, and the role of the storyteller are essential components of her post-feminist and subjective videography. Links between the domestic environment and existential preoccupations are explored, while the electronic medium integrates the performative capacities of the subject. Laliberté's works are a testament to the fact that the critical dimension of feminism may be integrated without denying the specific nature of the creative process and allowing the presence of a conscious, active and imaginative individual.

Manon Labrecque

Manon Labrecque has degrees in contemporary dance and visual arts. Since 1991, she has made videos [single-channel and installation], performances, drawings, photographs, kinetic and sound installations.

Sylvanie Tendron

Since 2004, Sylvanie Tendron has explored behaviors associated with language and communication. Drawing on her own daily experiences, she exposes, with humor and derision, the misunderstandings, obstacles and absurd situations that can arise through encounters of difference. In her performance videos she tries to overcome almost farcical difficulties that lead to isolation or confinement, in so doing illustrating numerous examples of situations in which we try to connect with others by adapting to their language. Tendron has carried out residencies and presented her work in Bolivia, Morocco, Vietnam, France and Quebec. She lives in Toulouse, France.

First shown at Alexandraplatz Bar on July 22, 2019.

Image: Sylvie Laliberté, L’outil n’est pas toujours un marteau, 1999