Correspondences and Confidences
The program Correspondances et confidences was specially curated for the occasion by Nicole Gingras, winner of the 2026 Robert-Forget Award. The program was first screened during the award ceremony, which took place on February 19 at the Cinéma Moderne.
Created in 2021 as part of the celebrations marking Vidéographe’s 50th anniversary and named after the organization’s founder, the Robert-Forget Award is presented every two years to a Quebec artist, curator, or researcher who has made an exceptional contribution to the development of the moving image in Quebec.
Nicole Gingras is an independent curator, author, and editor. Her research is guided by the creative process and by notions of trace, time, and listening. Her interest in exploratory practices in cinema and video, as well as in visual arts, sound art, and kinetic art, has given rise to numerous projects—exhibitions, programmes, and publications—presented on national and international stages. She has authored many analytical texts on the moving image, photography, and sound art. For many years, her writing has favoured dialogue with artists as a mode of exchange. She maintains ongoing correspondence-conversations with various artists, sometimes resulting in publications, the most recent of which, 9 entretiens / interviews, was published in 2024. Over the years, she has collaborated with numerous museums, galleries, artist-run centres, and festivals, including the International Festival of Films on Art (Le FIFA), where she developed the FIFA Experimental section from 2003 to 2025, as well as with production and dissemination organizations such as Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV) and Vidéographe in Montréal, and VTape in Toronto.
List of works in program
A journey traced in dotted lines, drawn from the memory of someone inhabited by images, sounds, and words. For this programme, I have chosen six works created between 1986 and 2023 by Marik Boudreau, Francisco Ruiz de Infante, Manon Labrecque, Geneviève & Matthieu, Rachel Echenberg, and Catherine Boivin.
I maintain a particular relationship with each of these works. Some have accompanied me since they were first made; others revealed themselves more gradually. Time has a marvellous and uncanny way of introducing us to things when we are ready for them.
The photographic dimension—which I understand as an attentiveness to the image, its properties, and its evocative power—served as the point of entry for this selection, bringing together distinct and deliberate practices. Each video, shaped by still or moving images—imbued with narrative, memory, creative intensity, a sense of place, or an attachment to a gesture-recollection—bears witness to the artist’s approach, whether they be a photographer, video artist, author, sculptor, performer, or filmmaker.
I turned my attention to works that cultivate a singular—even loving—relationship with the image. An image that also has a voice: sometimes faint, sometimes phenomenal, but always deeply embodied. This voice—a presence—courses through the flow of images, enveloping us in a story or haunting testimony, carrying breath, whispered words, and, at times, yielding to silence. Across the sequence of works, multiple subjectivities unfold, offering each of us a portal for projection and resonance. These works are manifold manifestations of thought, of shared visions. Intense, warm, precise, fragile, they attend to reality, the dreamlike, the ghostly, the magic, the intimate, identity, and the sacred.
Time never ceases to pass. Nothing remains stable for long. What binds us together? Do simple things exist? How to approach the complexities of being, existing, and creating? Curating and programming, fortunately, afford me the privilege of returning to works, of rereading them—to bask in their materiality, their concern, and their singularity.
May these visions, spaces, perceptions, and manifest presences nurture many exchanges, confidences, and correspondences.
—Nicole Gingras, curator
Translated from the French by Sunny Doyle.
