SIGHTINGS 2025-2027
Decorum
Launched in 2012 in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery’s Permanent Collection, the SIGHTINGS satellite exhibition program was conceived as an experimental platform to critically reflect upon the possibilities and limitations of the modernist “white cube.” As part of this program, artists and curators are invited to develop projects for a cubic display unit located in a public space at the university, with the aim of generating new strategies for art dissemination.
The 2025-2027 SIGHTINGS cycle, Decorum, engages with the emancipatory histories of Concordia University’s Henry F. Hall Building. Since its inauguration in 1966, the building has been a key site for student activism—from the 1967 lobby sleep-in protest against high textbook prices, where 150 students camped in the lobby, to the landmark 1969 Sir George Williams Affair, marked by a multi-day occupation of the 9th-floor Computer Centre by students and demonstrators to denounce racist grading practices. Originally conceived as a central hub for the downtown student body, the Hall Building remains a space where students gravitate to exchange ideas, mobilize and make their voices heard. The projects presented in SIGHTINGS build on this legacy, reflecting on the memory of protest embedded in institutions and their architecture.
SIGHTINGS is located on the ground floor of the Hall Building: 1455, blvd. De Maisonneuve West and is accessible weekdays and weekends from 7 am to 11 pm. The program is developed by Ronald Rose-Antoinette.
First Provisional Reformed Didactic Chapel of Our Lady of Discernment
November 11, 2026 – February 7, 2027
A project by Kriss Li, Patrick DeDauw, and Kay Gabriel
Kriss Li creates films, installations, and collaborations that investigate structures of power.
Patrick DeDauw is a geographer, has worked in the labor movement, and has published a few places under a few different names.
Kay Gabriel’s latest book is Perverts (Nightboat, 2025). She works at the Poetry Project and edits the Poetry Project Newsletter.
How do we know the work we’re doing together can change the things that have to change? Questions about political discernment occupy this iteration of SIGHTINGS, transformed into a temporary non-denominational reading room.
The outside structure, part stained-glass scripture and part propagandist big-character poster, includes two quotes from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography (2022) where she reframes Audre Lorde’s oft cited “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Gilmore’s words sandwich a verse from Bertolt Brecht’s 1930 play The Decision, about a young Soviet comrade whose passionate reactions to sights of oppression undermine a revolutionary mission.
Inside the structure are places to sit and read tiny red books: ten parables about goal-oriented collaboration during periods of terror. Provocations that you can turn into your own lessons about common purpose and warnings against misplaced targets unfold across tales of ice storms, locust plagues, and owl attacks in biblical proportion.
Some authorized ways to use this transitional institution toward your own ends:
1. Pick up and read.
2. Gather your friends here. Disagree and complain together.
3. Assemble your enemies here. Be astonished by what they care about.
4. Rage against failure, or that there is no God.
5. Meet others agitated enough to read. Make choices about things to do together.
6. Satirize the shortcomings and omissions of the parables.
7. Practice discernment, set priorities, then practice it again.
8. Stand at the door and encourage people to do something else.
9. Stage a morality play based on skimming the headlines outside.
10. Compose your own parables. Leave them inside.
Kriss Li creates films, installations, and collaborations that investigate structures of power.
Patrick DeDauw is a geographer, has worked in the labor movement, and has published a few places under a few different names.
Kay Gabriel’s latest book is Perverts (Nightboat, 2025). She works at the Poetry Project and edits the Poetry Project Newsletter.