The Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery offers outreach programming that supports engaged, self-reflexive and critical forms of viewership on site, online, and beyond the Gallery and University. Working with our local communities in Montreal and circulating our exhibitions abroad, the Gallery’s outreach programing privileges and amplifies the critical angles that context, standpoint and experience can bring to thinking about and engaging with art and exhibition making.

PROGRAM FOR THE ARABIC SPEAKING COMMUNITY | برنامج باللغة العربية

Chantal Partamian, Collection Katsakh, 2023, digitized Super8 photogram

Mediterranean Explorations: Evolving archives and varied perspectives is a public program initiated by the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, examining the visual archives of the region around the Mediterranean Sea. Inviting artist-archivist Chantal Partamian to explore the constantly evolving nature of archives, the program proposes looking beyond their traditional representation as mere static collections of documents. The program questions the preservation of the integrity and completeness of archives, taking into account the challenges of displaced archives, particularly in former colonized territories and during periods of armed conflict. It also aims to broaden understanding of archives as dynamic entities, highlighting the multiple affiliations and diverse interests of stakeholders. Starting on December 5th and throughout the winter three presenters will participate.

In its first iteration, Chantal Partamian will present her research around collecting amateur films on celluloid, containing images of towns and villages in the eastern and southern Mediterranean between the 1930s and 1970s.

Program participants over the next months include Dhakira Collective, an independent research, archiving and curatorial platform, highlighting art, film and music outside the Western canon, with a particular focus on cinema from the Southwest Asian and North African region (SWANA). A conversation will also take place with Sevan Injejikian, whose multidisciplinary project includes an online database aimed at rectifying the historical oversight of certain Armenian women writers of the Ottoman Empire, due to their gender and ethnicity. Inejikian’s work highlights the issues of contact, erasure and historical risk. The conversation addresses the urgency of locating, documenting and sharing these archives within a feminist and decolonial framework.

Archives in Mouvement : Preservation and Diversity of Visual Narratives

Discussion with Chantal Partamian
Tuesday, December 5, 6 pm
In French, English and Arabic
Free, at the gallery

“A few years ago, I began researching and collecting amateur film archives that were likely to hold images of towns and villages in the eastern and southern Mediterranean between the 1930s and 1970s. I soon found that most of these archives were in European and North American collections or were made by amateur tourists, raising questions about the diversity of content in visual archives and access to them.” In this discussion, artist-archivist Chantal Partamian considers archives as living entities, reservoirs of rich narratives essential to the preservation of historical context, questioning the importance of preserving the integrity and completeness of these archives, particularly in the face of the challenges posed by displaced archives in the context of former colonized territories and periods of armed conflict. Partamian examines approaches to managing dispersed records in our modern, interconnected world, looking at the concept of archives as dynamic entities with multiple affiliations, transcending traditional notions of single provenance.

Chantal Partamian is an experimental filmmaker and archivist. Her work explores themes of migration, identity, conflict and obsolescence, using mainly Super 8mm and found footage. Her archival activities focus on the preservation and restoration of reels from the Mediterranean basin, combined with research into archival practices in regions of conflict. Partamian’s films have been presented and awarded at numerous festivals. They are distributed by Vidéographe, Groupe intervention Vidéo (GIV) and the Canadian filmmakers distribution center (CFMDC).