Montreal Cultural Calendar

In her first solo exhibition, Arta Ajeti presents a new body of intimate graphite drawings based on a personal archive of photographic references. Feminine figures appear in shadowy, dreamlike scenes populated by wrecked cars, theatrical curtains, static-filled screens, stairwells, storm clouds, and ornamental surfaces, where glamour and decay sit in uneasy proximity. Using graphite, Ajeti pushes the image toward both clarity and breakdown, creating works suspended between memory, fantasy, and desire.

Carrefour is opening on Wednesday, April 8th with histamine, Shahan Assadourian's first solo exhibition. Located in Family's former gallery space on Laurier West, Carrefour is the brainchild of Sophie présente and Family. The show brings together an entirely new body of work that investigates Shahan's previous exploration of infection, emotional freedom, and cuteness overload.

Jérôme Nadeau will present his solo show A GOOD SLEEPER. The paintings in the exhibition were developed through multiple phases. Images shift and transform from one state to another: drawings and photographs are digitized, compressed, translated into sound, then reconverted, printed, altered, scanned, and digitally reconfigured before being screen-printed at the limits of legibility. The works do not seek to illustrate or stabilize, but to probe what wavers: blurred thresholds of perception, zones of noise, surfaces shaped by error and uncertainty.

Patience is a solo presentation by Ontario-based artist Tony Romano. Carrefour is pleased to host Romano's work in Montreal, revisiting a selection of video and sculptural works produced between 2022 and 2024. This exhibition is made possible thanks to Franz Kaka.

As Concordia rounds out the academic year the VAV gallery is hosting a finissage for Idyll and Labour, a group show featuring works by Renée Rothe, Kelly Halseth, Gemma Else and Laure-Charlotte Côté.

Le Jeu is a photographic exhibition that explores the perceptions of day, the temporality of night. The intimacy of the body. The gazes cast upon the other that teach us about ourselves. How we look, what we feel. Lussier's work often employs experimentation, fragmentation and distortion to highlight feelings and spaces of intimacy surrounding the body. The opening reception is BYOB.

Event by OBORO

OBORO vous invite au vernissage de sa programmation du printemps 2026, présentant les expositions "Common Absurd" d'Adam Basanta et "LUCABOT" de Julie Tremble.
Joignez-vous à nous pour découvrir des oeuvres qui interrogent notre relation au monde, du microscopique au numérique, à travers la vidéo, la sculpture et l’installation.
L’équipe d’OBORO et les artistes seront sur place pour accueillir le public dans une atmosphère chaleureuse. Une belle occasion de célébrer le début de la belle saison, d’échanger et de rencontrer les artistes.
Entrée libre, bienvenue à toustes.
Plus d'informations sur les expositions ici :
oboro.net/exhibition/common-absurd
oboro.net/exhibition/lucabot
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OBORO invites you to the opening of its Spring 2026 Programming, featuring the exhibitions "Common Absurd" by Adam Basanta and "LUCABOT" by Julie Tremble.
Join us to discover new works that question our relationship to the world, from the microscopic to the digital, through video, sculpture, and installation.
The OBORO team and the artists will be on hand to welcome the public in a warm atmosphere. A great opportunity to celebrate the start of spring, exchange ideas, and meet the artists.
Free admission, everyone is welcome.
More information about the exhibitions here:
oboro.net/en/exhibition/common-…

The Open House series, presented by Collection Collection, invites viewers to see the private collection as a space for exchange and reflection. The works chosen from within the collection reflect the collectors' singular perspective and shape an exhibition in their own image. This curatorial gesture explores collecting as a living practice, made up of correspondences, affinities, and shared narratives. This edition features works from the private collection of artist Anne-Renée Hotte and Martin Schop of Schop Framing.

Blind Field Shuttle (2010–aujourd'hui) est une performance de marche collaborative où Carmen Papalia guide de grands groupes de participant·es lors d'un parcours non visuel à travers des environnements urbains ou ruraux. Placé·es en file derrière l'artiste, les participant·es tiennent le bras de la personne devant eux·elles et acceptent de garder les yeux fermés pendant toute la durée de la marche, d'environ une heure. Prolongement de la pratique personnelle de marche de Papalia, cette performance invite les participant·es à mobiliser leurs sens non visuels tout en négociant collectivement les déplacements, les obstacles et le contexte culturel dans lequel la vision est dominante. À mesure que les participants avancent ensemble, l'œuvre révèle à la fois les barrières créées par la primauté du visuel et les réseaux de soutien interdépendants qui sous-tendent la culture du handicap. Blind Field Shuttle remet en question les idées reçues sur le handicap et l'accessibilité en considérant le handicap comme une expérience révélatrice et précieuse, et l'accessibilité comme un « espace temporaire et collectif ». Rendez-vous au Café du MAI – Parcours de marche à déterminer. Événement en français & anglais. Cet événement fait partie de la programmation public +.

Vernissage for A Taste of Queer Montreal: A Multi-lingual Exhibition of 2SLGBTQ+ Food and Drink History. See the new exhibition, hear talks from the curators, and enjoy the newly composed Exhibition House Mix Track interweaving oral histories, Montreal's historical house music, and new compositions. Talk/speeches will start at 2:30 pm. Free coffee, sparkling wine, and sparkling water provided. The physical exhibition includes materials from the Archives gaies du Québec, the Archives lesbiennes du Québec, and private collections. This digital exhibition available at cafequeermontreal.com compliments the physical exhibition. A free walking tour related to the exhibition is available at: https://www.cafequeermontreal.com/p/walking-tour-visite-guidee.html A database with 2SLGBTQ+ food and drink spaces in Montreal over time is available at: https://www.cafequeermontreal.com/p/directory-of-montreals-2slgbtq-food-and.html Exhibition curators and creators of the walking tour are Alex D. Ketchum, Al Dervisevic, and Kerrilee Commier.

Organized by Jarrah Csunyoscka and Rosy Hanna, A Set of Favours is a group exhibition presenting sculptures, paintings and works on paper by Jarrah Csunyoscka, Joss D'Alton, Rosy Hanna, Stéphanie Alèxe Hébert, Beatrix Prior.

Every Part of Me Feels explores somatic memory: how green spaces, damaged or destroyed by human activity, live on in our collective bodies. The exhibition presents the practices of Mila Figuet, Oriana Confente, and Bastik (Anick Jasmin), who explore the retention of emotional memory of Boisé Steinberg.

Artefacts is a showcase of graphic, object, and multimedia design bringing together the work of Concordia's Design and Computation Arts students. The show focuses on critical perspectives and sustainable approaches to materialism, crafting meaningful experiences that challenge design's role in contemporary and future societies.

Receptacle is a foundry-focused exhibition that brings together advanced metal casting undergraduate students from Concordia. The show foregrounds the labour, process, and collective knowledge at the heart of foundry practice. The showcased cast works were developed in part from recycled aluminum and bronze. The exhibition invites viewers to find the art hidden within the everyday objects of the historical site.

As part of the eighth edition of the Indigenous Contemporary Art Biennial, this exhibition brings together a wide breadth of Indigenous and diasporic artists whose work explores cultural survival, spiritual continuity, and embodied knowledge within their contexts shaped by colonial borders, displacement, and erasure. An ancestral tattooing performance by Megan Samms, Dion Kaszas, and Dr. Mel Lefebvre will take place as part of the reception.

Experience an immersive exhibition by Jakob Kudsk Steensen that explores contemporary ecological realities through virtual reality, sound, and video installations. Drawing from global fieldwork, the artist creates speculative digital worlds that blend scientific observation with imagination to examine the impacts of climate change. Featuring interconnected works, including the North American premiere of Psychosphere (2025), the exhibition unfolds as a layered, dreamlike narrative.

Discover Paola Pivi's first major exhibition in Québec, a traveling show featuring sculptural installations that explore themes of freedom, truth, and misinformation. Through immersive and imaginative works, the artist reinterprets familiar symbols to challenge our perception of contemporary reality. At the heart of the exhibition, Lies (2018) invites visitors to reflect on the blurred line between truth and falsehood.

Dissecting and reassembling the elements of photonovels, Gaudreau draws forth details that disrupt its usual narrative continuity. This pop literary genre is thus reconfigured into a choreographic space in which texts and images tumble out of sync.

By adopting strategies akin to visual ethnography, the trio, composed of Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko, multiplies perspectives on the modernization of Iran, its rural regions, and the families witnessing their industrialization. Archives and image-making apparatuses become playgrounds and sites of subversion as much as catalysts for encounters, from which the artists conduct an autopsy of a territory.

Presented each spring at Galerie de l'UQAM, Passage à découvert showcases the work of UQAM's graduating students in the Bachelor of Visual and Media Arts program, highlighting their creative vitality, freedom, and curiosity. Thanks to the multidisciplinary approach favoured by UQAM's School of Visual and Media Arts, the student works on display address a wide variety of subjects, approaches, and techniques in dialogue with the contemporary world. This year, several projects reimagine the concept of materiality by examining its transformations and modes of perception. Others explore the relationship to the body, identities, and performativity, deploying playful displays that convey a sensitive relationship to reality.

Aire de jeu is the collective exhibition of Samuel Alie, Zélie Delespierre and Gilliane April, graduate students in visual and media arts at UQAM. This exhibition is carried out as part of the Atelier II course facilitated by Professor Claire Savoie, at the CDEx Dissemination and Experimentation Centre.

Performance à 19h30

Racines créatives is a group exhibition bringing together seven artists and designers from the Afro-descendant community, spanning from Montreal to Martinique. The exhibition creates a dialogue between their creative expressions, offering a rich and multifaceted cultural portrait. Through a variety of mediums and themes, each participant contributes a unique vision, fostering a collective reflection on cultural identities and urban interactions.

Photographer Vincent Castonguay and filmmaker David Simard captured the final days of the residency, translating the essence of the space, the richness of gestures, and the beauty of shared daily life into images. The exhibition features photography, ceramic objects by Alexandra Gelinas, and the short film reflecting this living cultural transmission. Beyond borders, this collaboration embodies a choice: to become together. For the past year, Dan, Alexandra, and Quartier Artisan have joined forces to develop a future maker-space in Lac-Mégantic: a multi-disciplinary workshop site dedicated to preserving artisanal knowledge and hosting Québec artisans and designers. Deux Artisans stands as a manifesto for a resilient community in the making. Exhibition presented by SIALart.

The exhibition will present the work of designer-makers in ceramics, glass, textiles, and woodworking who were invited to reflect on the revalorization and creative reuse of production offcuts and scraps. An inevitable by-product of artisanal production, these materials are either reimagined through new techniques and materials or approached through installative works that reveal their technical, economic, ecological, and poetic dimensions.

After a two-year hiatus, Lambert & Fils is reopening its gallery located in the heart of its Mile End workshop. To mark this happy news, the studio is welcoming Ourse, a Toronto-based contemporary furniture manufacturer with production workshops in Montreal, as its first guest. A reservation is required for this one.

Bonus Room addresses the gallery as a third space estranged from the digital sphere. In a distinct moment in time when artists are producing for both physical and digital spaces, the art process and experience can be dissonant from their social intent. Through painting, drawing, and sculpture, seven artists–Andrea Chenier, Julia Mobbs, Thomas Prodani, Dane Matthews, Meriem Haddou, Beatrix Prior, and Colin Mills–explore the contradiction between the flat digital image and the real experience of art's material origins. Responding to the saturation of artwork in the digital sphere, artists question the physical experience of trend-oriented artworks, playfully considering space, material, and image origin. Bonus Room is open for one night only. BYOB.

Ex-Tension is an interdisciplinary group exhibition bringing together designers and artisans from Mile-Ex. Conceived as an extension of a neighbourhood, a network, and a place, the project highlights the creative density of this area through an immersive experience. This event will inaugurate Atelier L'Abri's new space with a group exhibition orchestrated by Procedures Industry. The proposal invites the public to discover the richness of the practices and partnerships that animate this creative ecosystem, made up of collaborations, materialities, processes, and exchanges.

New Age Contamination. MOLD, a nomadic gallery, presents Passengers, an exhibition highlighting the work of designers and artists Emile Algue, Geneviève Grenier, Jacqueline Beaumont, Jean-Michel Gadoua, Juliette Dupont, L.L.Y. Atelier, Olivier Bonnard, Philippe St-Denis, Rachel Bussin, Simon Johns and Sophie Murphy, who challenge the established order, push boundaries, and follow their own path.

Sténopé is the first solo exhibition of Matéo L. Sampaio curated by Mathieu Deschênes. Developed from photographic negatives discovered in an abandoned site, the project unfolds at the intersection of reality and fiction, activating fragments of memory linked to a forgotten family.

Soft Goods, an exhibition organized by Double Entendre, explores how soft materials can give rise to objects through the creative process. Bringing together Canadian designers, artists, and architects, the exhibition invites experimentation with malleable and flexible materials such as fabric, foam, paper, silicone, and other mediums to shape objects that reveal the full creative potential of softness. Focusing on furniture, objects, and small-scale lighting, the exhibition creates a coherent dialogue between works ranging from tactile, organic forms to pieces that evolve toward more structured or unexpected results.

Genuinely one of the most interesting artist studios within walking distance from the Mile End. Studio Beaumont, once a functioning industrial building, is now a creative home for an assortment of artists and designers. The tenants are neither an organization nor collective, but instead neighbours sharing walls, tools, and ideas; cooperating to maintain one of the few remaining affordable spaces for independent practices in Montreal.

As part of Montreal Design Week, MAAT Gallery presents Corps habité, a design exhibition at Studio Idéal featuring a curated selection of local creators.