Montreal, CA.
March 3th – 25th 2018

With Edmund Alleyn, Fortner Anderson, Mel Arsenault, Matilda Aslizadeh, Jan Banning, Steve Bates, Philippe Battikha, Johan Bävman, Marie-Eve Beaulieu, Sophie-Anne Bélisle, Patrick Bérubé, Marie-Claire Blais, Caroline Boileau, Nans Bortuzzo, Olivia Boudreau, Mathieu Cardin, Alejandro Cartagena, Sébastien Cliche, Claude Closky, Marie Cool & Fabio Balducci, Carole Condé & Beveridge Karl, Louis-Philippe Côté, Marc-Antoine Côté, Raphaël Dallaporta, Alexandre David, Francisco de la Barra, Dries Depoorter, Mathieu Deschênes, Jannick Deslauriers, Adriana Disman, Naomi Dodds, Pierre Durette, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Erika Dueke, Antje Ehmann (& Harun Farocki), Eliane Excoffier, Jean Baptiste Farkas, Stanley Février, Brian Finke, Lucian Freud, Karine Giboulo, Sally Gorham, Michel Goulet, Maxime Goldstyn, Isabelle Guimond, Maggy Hamel-Metsos, Adad Hannah, Nelson Henricks, Ciprian Homorodean, Alexandre Huard, Raphaël J. Dostie & Terence Chotard, Babis Kandilaptis, Marc Antoine K. Phaneuf, Olga Kisseleva, Moridja Kitenge Banza, Harold Klunder, Kitty Krauss, Hugh Kretschmer, Stéphane La Rue, Alexis Lavoie, Claude Labrèche-Lemay, Emmanuel Laflamme, Florent Lamouroux, Martin Le Chevallier, Catherine Lescarbeau, Sara Létourneau et Magali Baribeau-Marchand, Elsa Maillot, Kelly Mark, Carolina Mayorga, Adrian Melis, Mindy Yan Miller, Allison Moore, Nøne Futbol Club, Alexandre Nunes, Cheryl Pagurek, Martin Parr, Paolo Patrizi, John Pilson, Dulce Pinzón, Carlo Polidoro Lopez, Jessica Peters, Julien Prévieux, Alana Riley, Guillaume Saur, Laura Simard-Lemaire, Mark Stebbins, János Sugár, Pilvi Takala, Laurence Thériault-Lainé, Jacqueline Van de Geer, Philippe Vaz Coatelant, Megan Young, Johannes Zits

Art Souterrain aspires to transform the underground city of Montreal by exhibiting 70 local, national and international artists.
Seven exhibition venues linking the Complexe Guy Favreau to the 1000 de la Gauchetière will be set up for three weeks to create an exceptional 5km-long artistic itinerary. During the launch of the exhibit at the Nuit Blanche (March 3, 2018), the Place Bonaventure building will also be added to the course. Each artist will be accompanied by one or two volunteer cultural mediators, whose mission is to inform the public about the artist’s work.
As in the last two editions, several “satellite” exhibits will be added in order to reinforces the programming. Composed of more traditional exhibition spaces such as galleries and artist centers, the satellite route allows the festival to include more complex works of art.
The festival is constructed as a stroll without a prescribed beginning or end. It is entirely up to the visitor to construct their itinerary according to how much of the exhibit they would like to see. The various works exhibited are punctuated along the proposed route, although while some are impossible to miss others may have more discreet locations. Some corridors are very narrow, adding a new physical relationship with the work. Unable to circumvent the work, visitors must position themselves in relation to it instead.
The narrowness of some corridors of the underground brings a new physical relationship with the work. Unable to circumvent it, the spectator must position himself in relation to it. Art Souterrain’s installations thus lead the public to question the art and the process of contemplation in a non-formal, uncommon, and ephemeral context. Unlike the art exhibited in a gallery or a museum, the works presented during the 3 weeks of Art Souterrain are constantly confronting the passers-by who discover them during its daily comings and goings.

The Philosopher Emmanuel Kant defines work as an existential necessity for humans; it’s what differentiates them from other animals. Therefore, work would be the very essence of the human being. While the Industrial Revolution has made it one of the pillars of modern society, the transition to the digital age has sparked an in depth reconsideration of our relationship to work. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of globalization remains the cause of wage standardization and an unbridled search for capital. Imprisoned in a neoliberal system, work responds to constantly renewed codes and objectives of profitability and productivity. These codes then become a constituent element in the advent of capitalist modernity. Beyond the traditional adage “work makes us live”, it becomes a factor of personal fulfillment and the boundary between the private realm and the work realm tends to fade, giving way to a new conception of working time. In constant evolution, work presents itself as one of the social and cultural issues of our century, which became an important issue also in contemporary art.