Choublak, or hibiscus in Haitian Creole, is a cultural symbol and national emblem of Haiti. Thought to originate in Asia or Africa, this ornamental, edible, and medicinal plant is deeply rooted in contemporary Caribbean culture. For Canadian-Haitian artist Ésery Mondésir, choublak embodies the fundamental subjects of his practice: in-betweenness, hybrid origins, uprooting, migratory paths, as well as Creoleness and diasporic communities.

Working with still and moving images, Mondésir combines documentary and experimental approaches that are centered on his connections with individuals who, like him, were forced to leave Haiti. His works unfold in micro-narratives of exile, resistance, and clandestinity, but also of belonging and of the legacies linked to his native country. Like his images, poetry acts as a centrifugal force that allows a multiplicity of voices and experiences from the margins to be heard.

The exhibition Choublak presents the artist’s recent body of work, produced in collaboration with members of the Haitian diaspora in Montreal, Toronto, Tijuana and Havana. A series of abstract portrait films and images captured via pinhole camera while travelling through Chile and Trinidad and Tobago were developed with various image processing techniques, often incorporating plant residues. These interventions on the actual film reveal latent shapes and nascent stories buried deep within the materiality of the celluloid.

One of the rooms in the exhibition features archives from Montreal’s Centre international de documentation et d’information haïtienne, caribéenne et afro-canadienne (CIDIHCA), dedicated to the 1960s poetry group Haïti Littéraire.

Ésery Mondésir se atis, vidéyas ak sineyas. Li fèt an Ayiti, li baze Towonto nan peyi Kanada. Li te pwofesè lekòl segondè epi òganizatè sendika nan peyi Etazini ak Kanada, anvan l te fini yon metriz nan pwodiksyon sinema nan Inivèsite York an 2017. Zèv li yo pran sous yo nan memwa pèsonel oswa kolektif, nan achiv ofisyèl ak achiv popilè, nan lavi toulèjou pou l ofri yon lekti ki soti nan maj sosyete nou yo.

Li reyalize dènye pwojè li yo, nan kolaborasyon avèk manm dyaspora ayisyen an nan vil La Havana, Kiba ak Tijuana, Meksik. Travay sa yo pase toupatou, tankou nan Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Art Gallery of Ontario, George Eastman Museum (Rochester, NY), Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach), Third Horizon Film Festival (Miami) epi nan Open City Festival (Londres). An 2021, li vin pwofesè adjwen Fakilte Atizay nan inivèsite OCAD. Kounye a, li ap rapousib rechéch sou mannyè yo fè fim, sou imaj an mouvman, imaj yo fè alamen ak mouvman migrasyon nan yon kontèks postmigrasyon.

Ésery Mondésir is a Haitian-born video artist and filmmaker based in Toronto. Before earning his MFA in cinema production from York University in 2017, he worked as a high school teacher and labour organizer in the US and Canada. His work draws on personal and collective memory, official and vernacular archives, and the everyday to generate a reading of our societies from the margins.

His recent projects, in collaboration with members of the Haitian diaspora in Havana and Tijuana, have been exhibited worldwide, including at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the George Eastman Museum (Rochester), the Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach), the Third Horizon Film Festival (Miami), as well as the Open City Festival (London). In 2021, he joined the art faculty at OCAD University as an Assistant Professor, where he continues to research process cinema, artisanal/handmade moving images, and migratory movements in a “postmigration” context.