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 Julia Eilers Smith.
HALL BUILDING, 1964
June 3 – September 22, 2026
A project by Alexia Laferté Coutu
Alexia Laferté Coutu (b. 1990) lives and works in Montreal / Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang. Her practice revolves around processes of imprinting and transposition, processes during which forms become imbued with memory and reveal layers of time normally invisible to the naked eye. Her sculptures and installations have been shown in solo and group exhibitions, notably at Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto (2023), the Darling Foundry, Montreal (2022), Occurrence, Montreal (2022), Doosan Gallery, Seoul (2020), and Pangée, Montreal (2019). Recipient of the Prix Pierre Ayot (2023), Laferté Coutu studied at Concordia University, Bauhaus Universität Weimar, and Université du Québec à Montréal. Her works are part of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and Ville de Montréal collections.
Plate glass, metal
Between the forces of formed concrete and igneous rock, as well as our own forces—those of Alexia, M, J, and myself, her ad hoc assistants. Between the materiality of our tools and the fragility of mulberry fibres and wet paper under Alexia’s brush, something new and delicate is created. To make is to take action in a world of active matter, matter with which we must contend, convey, and join forces.1 The paper is finally dry, and we organize the brushes, small tools, and precious moulds that will soon give form to wet plaster, and thus to the dry plaster where supple, hot glass will come to rest.
1 Tim Ingold. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, (Routledge, 2013), 20-22.
* Excerpted from exhibition text by François Lemieux
Alexia Laferté Coutu (b. 1990) lives and works in Montreal / Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang. Her practice revolves around processes of imprinting and transposition, processes during which forms become imbued with memory and reveal layers of time normally invisible to the naked eye. Her sculptures and installations have been shown in solo and group exhibitions, notably at Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto (2023), the Darling Foundry, Montreal (2022), Occurrence, Montreal (2022), Doosan Gallery, Seoul (2020), and Pangée, Montreal (2019). Recipient of the Prix Pierre Ayot (2023), Laferté Coutu studied at Concordia University, Bauhaus Universität Weimar, and Université du Québec à Montréal. Her works are part of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and Ville de Montréal collections.