From Tuesday 20 to Friday 30 October 2020 will be held the Laboratoire performance during which performances by artists Tatiana Koroleva and Diyar Mayil will be presented.The Performance Laboratory has been curated by the Performance Committee and will take place both in the gallery's window showcase and online.

Performance artists Diyar Mayil and Tatiana Koroleva are interested in the notion of body within feminist discourses. Each explores, in their own way, the themes of body, memory and identity within a political, social and cultural context. These performances are slowly constructed through gestures that are both gentle and raw, and highlight various injustices and violence against people who identify as women.

From October 20 to 23, 2020, the artist Diyar Mayil will present her project Femmestatistics, a performance of endurance that will take form as a sculptural installation at the end. Every day from 12pm to 4pm, the artist will perform in the gallery's window showcase and can be seen from the outside. In addition, a fragment of the performance will be broadcasted online, each day for one hour on Facebook, at 2pm.
Femmestatistics is a dialogue between mass statistics and the uniqueness of bodies that comes to life in the form of a massive abacus that can be counted with locks and tufts of hair instead of traditional marbles. With the interaction of the inability to count a considerable amount of hair and the malfunctioning of the abacus, this piece questions how society interprets and understands the various bodily crimes that occur every day. With the performance of counting hair, the goal is to highlight the dysfunction of the abacus, forcing the audience to find new ways to make sense of the data. The performance demonstrates the inadequacy of the abacus by engaging in several failed counting methods. The artist-counter will become exhausted, confused, and disoriented, opening up new areas of engagement in the void left by these failures.

From October 27 to 30, 2020, artist Tatiana Koroleva will present a series of four performances addressing the history of women's oppression in the USSR based on the artist's family history. Each day, the artist will perform in the gallery's window showcase and can be seen from the outside. In addition, a fragment of the performance will be broadcasted online, every day for thirty minutes on Facebook, at 2pm.
During these four days, she will present four performances - My Predecessors had a Hard Look (2016), The Bread of my Foremothers (2017), Red 80s - Wild 90s (2019) and Wandering Women (2019), each exploring ancestral memories in relation to Soviet history. Through the symbolic reconstruction of events in the life of her maternal great-grandmother, grandmother and mother, the artist addresses the subjects of intergenerational trauma, historical oppression and the multiple ways in which the past continues to influence our present. Each of the four performances unfolds as a series of narrative episodes, aiming to give voice to these women who have been silenced in their lives.

Tatiana Koroleva
Tatiana Koroleva is a multi-disciplinary artist, educator and researcher who works in the mediums of performance art, video art and creative writing. Focusing on participatory aspects of performance art, Koroleva explores the potential of folk ritualistic practices in the context of late-capitalist cultures. Since 2008, Koroleva has performed locally and internationally including her participation in Miami International Festival of Performance Art (FL, USA), International Biennale of Performance Art DEFORMES (Santiago de Chile, Chile), ITINERANT Festival of Performance Art (New York, USA), and Nuit Blanche Festival of Contemporary Art (Montréal, Canada), among others. Her most recent performances were presented at Queens Museum (New York, NY, USA) and Sofia Underground International Performance Art Festival (Sofia, Bulgaria). Currently, she teaches theory and practice of performance art at the Department of Studio Arts, Concordia University.
http://www.tatianakoroleva.com/

Diyar Mayil
Diyar Mayil is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation and performance. Her work explores the public life of marginalized bodies. Comfort,
discomfort, adaptation, and the acceptance of different bodies in both public and private are recurring subjects in her work. These bodily gestures and subjects become filtered through the differing materials present in her practice. She holds a BFA from Concordia University, where she is currently pursuing her MFA. Originally from Istanbul, she now lives and works in Montreal.
https://www.diyarmayil.com/

Members of the Performance Committee :
Nuria Carton de Grammont, Stéphanie Chabot-Nobert (Steco), Venus Lukic, Anik St-Arnaud, Laurence Beaudoin Morin, Pauline Lomami

Photo Credits : Svetla Atanasova (Zero Gravity, performance of endurance, 2019 by Tatiana Koroleva) / Rixt De Boer (Femmestatistics, 2019 by Diyar Mayil)