Discussion

Saturday, September 7, 12:00 pm – 4:00 pm

María Wills Londoño with Elisabeth Belliveau, Karen Paulina Biswell, Jonathas de Andrade, Patricia Domínguez, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Meagan Musseau, Juan Ortiz-Apuy, Miguel Angel Rios, and Victoria Sin.

Come and participate in a discussion with the artists of MOMENTA 2019, hosted by the curator of the 16th edition, María Wills Londoño.

As part of the public activities for MOMENTA 2019.

At the Gallery
Free admission
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Opening

Saturday, September 7, 4:30  pm – 6:30 pm
At the Gallery
Free admission
Facebook Event

MOMENTA Time

Thursday, September 26, 5:00 pm — 6:00 pm
Saturday, October 5, 2:00 pm — 3:00 pm

Bilingual guided tours of the exhibition Jonathas de Andrade: Counter-narratives and Other Fallacies.

As part of the public activities for MOMENTA 2019.

At the Gallery
Free admission
Facebook Event

Tour in Arabic

Monday, September 30, 6:00 pm

Join educator Emma Haraké for a commented tour and conversation on the exhibition in Arabic.

At the Gallery
Free admission
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Local Records
Racial difference through the theory of humors? Depictions of race in medicine within the holdings of the Osler Library of the History of Medicine.

Friday, October 4, 4:30  pm – 6:30 pm

Archive session on the categorization of bodies, human races, and emotions in ethnographic and physinomic studies from the 19^th and 20^th century.

In 1812, one year before succumbing to tuberculosis contracted in the course of medical study, military surgeon and artist Jean-Galbert Salvage published an impressive elephant folio work, Anatomie de gladiateur combattant. The purpose of the work was ostensibly to provide anatomical information to artists hoping to perfect their depictions of the human form, but it is far more than an anatomy primer for artists. Near the back of the book, Salvage includes two-page of discussion on the characteristics of human races. Though he starts with a Biblical explanation, his descriptions draw from the theory of the four humours, and thus betray his medical training. This unexpected finding is the starting point of analysis of and challenge to writings about humanity, race, and physiognomy.

Examining material spanning several centuries, participants will have the opportunity to seek answers to such questions as: is it appropriate to say that race was discussed in medical terms? What assumptions are evident in the works on display? What ideas are present that may be unexpected to a 21^st-century reader?

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Mary Yearl is the Head Librarian at the Osler Library of the History of Medicine and an Associate Member of McGill’s Department of Social Studies of Medicine. She studied the history of medicine at Yale (Ph.D.) and Cambridge (M.Phil) before turning to archives and special collections librarianship. Her research interests lie in the interplay between medicine and religion in the pre-modern period, and in the transformation of concepts from humoral medicine into scientific paradigms in the modern period.

Local Records is a program that pairs exhibitions with relevant archival holdings in Montreal. Animated by a guest researcher each seminar coordinates encounters and discussions around a selection of primary documents, offering a local lens through which to consider the exhibition and a point of departure for new research.

Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University
4th floor – 3459 rue McTavish
Free admission
Limited spaces, RSVP (robin.simpson@concordia.ca)
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Projection

Saturday, October 5, 6pm

Barravento, dir. Glauber Rocha (1962)
80 min., DCP, In Portuguese with English subtitles

Shot in the north-eastern state of Bahia, Rocha’s Barravento (trans. The Turning Wind) is one of the foundational films of Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement. The film follows a young villager’s return home after studying in Salvador. Newly awakened to Brazil’s economic and social contradictions, he spurs revolt among the village’s Afro-descendant fishermen and equally attempts to dislodge the local religious authority.

Featuring Candomblé ritual, song, and dance, the film’s analysis takes form through an overlap of political, theatrical, and quasi-ethnographic lenses. Writing under the military dictatorship in 1967 in Cahiers du Cinéma, Rocha positioned Barravento, his directorial debut at 20, as a step towards a new guerrilla cinema in Brazil:

I see in these films the disasters of a violent transition. But it is through this rupture that I have come to see the possibilities for Tricontinental cinema. The goal of epic-didactic cinema cannot replace the epic-didactic mise-en-scène of a true revolutionary like Che Guevara, it can only fuse itself with it [… ] At the moment when Che Guevara’s death becomes legend, poetry becomes praxis. (trans. Burnes Hollyman and Robert Stam)

J.A. De Sève Cinéma, 1400 boul. de Maisonneuve O.
Free admission
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