The 2025 MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award - A fascinating group exhibition showcases the five prize-winners
QUÉBEC CITY, Feb. 12, 2025 /CNW/ - The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Fondation du Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, in partnership with the RBC Foundation, are committed to Québec artists and are presenting a major group exhibition that highlights recent works by Eruoma Awashish, Rémi Belliveau, Michelle Lacombe, Anne-Marie Proulx, and Santiago Tamayo Soler. The five artists are the winners of the latest MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award announced last spring.
The artists, from varied backgrounds, epitomize the effervescence of the contemporary Québec art scene. The exhibition, which will run from February 13 to April 21, 2025, will afford them outstanding visibility.
"By partnering with the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and its Foundation for 12 years now, RBC is proud to contribute to the prominence of contemporary art in Quebec through the 2025 MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award. Celebrating diversity and excellence, both through the winners' selection and their respective mediums, this exhibition promises to transport us to several worlds that are as distinct as they are fascinating," explains Nicolas Audet-Renoux, Regional Vice-President, Quebec, Beauce, Centre of Quebec and Mauricie.
An exhibition encompassing five universes
This multi-faceted adventure proposes five diverse universes. The territory, culture, migration, and identity are the themes at the heart of the artistic approaches of Eruoma Awashish, Rémi Belliveau, Michelle Lacombe, Anne-Marie Proulx, and Santiago Tamayo Soler.
Nature is never far removed and expresses itself in all its glory through historical works or landscapes transformed by humankind. It is also evoked through literature or digital postcards.
The artists' approaches and career paths are surprisingly diverse. Their artistic practices include installations, video, photography, painting, body art, and music.
Visitors are invited to discover the five outstanding artists at the forefront of Québec contemporary art and to vote for their favourite work in the exhibition.
A unique award in Canada
The RBC Foundation has been the valued financial partner of the MNBAQ and the Fondation du Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec since 2013. The MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award that it supports is the only award in Canada that combines an exhibition, a cash award, a publication, and an acquisition. The award celebrates the careers of artists with 10 to 20 years of practice and gives a major boost to their careers.
Moreover, during the exhibition, a second jury will convene to determine a winner among the finalists. A monograph devoted to the artist's work will be published in 2026 and the MNBAQ will acquire the artist's works for its collection.
Five artists, five unique adventures
Eruoma Awashish
Eruoma Awashish is an Atikamekw Nehirowisiw who grew up in the community of Opitciwan. She is a mother and an engaged artist. Now living in Pekuakami (Lac-Saint-Jean), she works in her studio in the Ilnu community of Mashteuiatsh. She holds a BA in interdisciplinary arts from the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi and is interested in painting, installation, performance, video, serigraphy, and traditional dance. Decolonization of the sacred is a core facet of her practice.
Spirituality and symbolism imbue Eruoma Awashish's work, which is often conceived as an offering. The floor installation Nimisak otci / Pour mes sœurs (2025) is an eloquent example. The artist explores the mixing of cultures and metamorphosis, including a melding of Indigenous spirituality and Christianity. Halos also appear frequently in her works, which also integrate abstract spots and symmetrical effects inspired by the Rorschach test (1921).
In the dreamlike video Kiwew/Elle entre chez elle, the artist's daughter Onimskiw runs in the woods. In this way, the child joins her sisters who have disappeared, some of them cruelly, in the heart of the territory of her ancestors. The forest, which is often perceived as threatening in the Western imaginative universe, becomes a peaceful, welcoming, protective place.
Rémi Belliveau*
Rémi Belliveau is an interdisciplinary artist and musician from Belliveau-Village (Memramcook Valley, New Brunswick), an Acadian hamlet situated in Mi'kma'ki, an unceded ancestral territory of the Mi'kmaq people. Belliveau was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award for the Atlantic region in 2021 and on the award's long list in 2024.
The artist is interested in the Acadian cultural heritage, in which they have been immersed their entire life. Since 2018, Belliveau has been developing a long-term project – fictional yet historical in inspiration – around Joan Dularge, a key Acadian progressive rock musician of the 1960s and 1970s, whose life has been entirely fabricated by Belliveau.
Filmed in the vestiges of Fort-Beauséjour in Aulac, New Brunswick, Rémi Belliveau*'s L'Empremier Live à Beaubassin (1970) draws inspiration from Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972). By means of psychedelic tributes to songs such as Beausoleil Broussard's "Le mitan du siècle qui s'en vient" or Zachary Richard's"La ballade de Jackie Vautour," the artist creates a myth, a historical fiction in which resonates simultaneously the singular, changing identity of Acadia and the artist's queer identity.
*This non-binary person wants writing to be adapted to their gender identity. |
Michelle Lacombe
ichelle Lacombe lives and works in Montréal. Since earning her BFA from Concordia University in 2006, she has developed a unique body-art practice, at the intersection of visual arts and performance. She received the Bourse Plein sud in 2015 and presented her work at the Art Encounters biennial in Romania in 2017. She is the coordinator of the VIVA! Art Action festival in Montréal.
Michelle Lacombe's body-based practice is situated at border between performance and visual arts. It is a line that traverses all of her works, through her explorations of her own body and her place in society and history. Her body becomes the site of a controlled transformation with symbolic, historical, and formal references. This process is manifested most often in drawings that take the form of tattoos or scarification, to which she attributes values of positivity and redemption.
In Bartolo di Fredi's Bloody Gash: la césarienne et la chute de l'homme, Lacombe takes direct inspiration from art history, with imagery from a fourteenth-century Italian fresco. She also draws on science, evoking the history of the Caesarean operation, early attempts at which were atrociously brutal. Lacombe thus presents the female body as a site of tension between science and religion, even as she seeks to regain control over her own body through deliberate action. This work, incorporating painting, photography, and installation, may seem disturbing due to its frank nature, but it is set in a Garden of Eden painted long ago by a male artist who chose to represent woman as the future of humanity.
Anne-Marie Proulx
Anne-Marie Proulx lives and works in Saint-Roch-des-Aulnaies and Québec City. She holds a master's degree in art history from Concordia University, in Montréal, where she also earned a BFA in studio arts that she had begun at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. She has presented numerous solo and group exhibitions in Québec and internationally. Her photobook Le jardin d'après was published by Éditions LOCO in 2021.
Anne-Marie Proulxdisperses photography in installations that recount her reading, expeditions, and encounters. The photographic installation Être encore (2024-2025), freely inspired by the career of Flora Fontanges, the key character in Anne Hébert's novel Le premier jardin (1988), assembles images and texts stemming from a rereading of the novel. The work proposes new avenues based on Fontanges' literary voyage and the artist's actual transatlantic crossing. It is no coincidence that the motif of the window is present in this installation, near a mirror damaged by time. The images seem to pitch like the boats that transported the artist and the novel's hero, thus reflecting the vertiginous quest for identity.
Santiago Tamayo Soler
Santiago Tamayo Soler, who lives in Montréal, was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1990. A multidisciplinary artist, he has training in performance art and film. He holds a BFA from Concordia University. The 2023 recipient of the Emerging Digital Artists Award, presented by EQ Bank and Trinity Square Video in Toronto, in 2024 he was artist in residence at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in the Impressions residency, which supports emerging artists from Montréal's diverse cultural community. He produced Postales during this residency.
Santiago Tamayo Solercreates digital universes that incorporate elements from sampled archives such as video, photography, and images found online. These virtual environments explore Latin American identity through the prism of the diaspora.
In Postales, Tamayo Solar presents a series of four hybrid postcards illustrating elements of Canadian and Colombian landscapes and geographies. These new panoramas offer a vision of immigration from Colombia to Canada, in which he explores the subtle transition between the two countries. The postcards, addressed to his family in Colombia, relate key moments of his migratory experience.
In a video portraying an animated version of these landscapes, he invites members of the Colombian diaspora to describe noteworthy memories of their first years in Canada. By bringing their stories and the landscapes together, he offers them a symbolic permanent "home" and celebrates their importance within the growing Colombian diaspora in Canada.
A noteworthy Québec distinction
The MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award is the only such award in Canada that combines an exhibition, a cash award, a publication, and acquisitions. It fulfils a need to recognize and disseminate contemporary art among the general public in addition to offering support to the artists and to their career development. The award confirms the MNBAQ's desire to play a leadership role in the realm of Québec art by encouraging the most promising artists and supporting their career development.
Since 2013, through the generous contribution of the RBC Foundation to the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Fondation du MNBAQ, the work of four Québec artists has achieved outstanding recognition: Diane Morin (2015), Carl Trahan (2017), Numa Amun (2019), and Stanley Février (2021). In 2023, five artists were chosen: Maria Ezcurra, Anahita Norouzi, Celia Perrin Sidarous, Eve Tagny and Sara A.Tremblay. Anahita Norouzi was named the overall winner of this edition. In addition to a cash award and her participation in the group exhibition, the MNBAQ will publish a monograph devoted to her work and acquire works for the MNBAQ's collection.
The MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award is granted every two years through a remarkable partnership between the MNBAQ and the RBC Foundation. The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec is a government corporation subsidized by the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec. |
Credits
The 2025 MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award is organized by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.
Curatorship
Bernard LAMARCHE
Curator of the exhibition and curator of contemporary art (1960 to date), MNBAQ
Philippe LEGRIS
Design and graphic design, MNBAQ
Management
Marie-Hélène AUDET
Head of Mediation, MNBAQ
Yasmée FAUCHER
Head of Museography, MNBAQ
Catherine GAUMOND
Head of the Collections Department, MNBAQ
Selection Committee
Anne D'AMOURS MCDONALD
President and CEO,
Foire en art actuel de Québec
Mike PATTEN
Artist and Director, BACA
Caroline LONCOL DAIGNEAULT
Independent curator
Cheryl SIM
Managing Director and Curator, PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art
Michèle THÉRIAULT
Independent curator
The 2025 MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award
Pierre Lassonde Pavilion of the MNBAQ
From February 13 to April 21, 2025
SOURCE Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec