The MNBAQ and the Fondation du MNBAQ, in collaboration with the RBC Foundation, are proud to contribute to the recognition and effervescence of the Québec contemporary art scene and have announced the five new recipients of the MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award: Eruoma Awashish, Rémi Belliveau, Michelle Lacombe, Anne-Marie Proulx, and Santiago Tamayo Soler.
A group exhibition
A jury selected the artists from diverse backgrounds based on the excellence, sustained nature, and relevance of their output. The recipients are being announced this year and will benefit from outstanding visibility at a group exhibition to be held from February 13 to April 21, 2025 at the MNBAQ in addition to receiving an individual cash award of $10 000.
The jury sought to represent broad artistic experience through intentionally eclectic choices. The diversity of the approaches adopted by these artists is equalled only by their respective careers and practices, including prints, video games, photography, performance, body art, and music.
Moreover, during the exhibition, a second jury will convene to determine a winner among the five finalist exhibitors in 2025. A monograph devoted to the artist’s work will be published in 2026 and the MNBAQ will acquire the artist’s works for its collection.
Profile of the five winners
The 2025 MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award supports artists living in Québec with five to 20 years of practice, regardless of the discipline or medium. The artists have several exhibitions to their credit, but they lack representation in museums and have not yet had a significant monograph published. This recognition seeks to contribute to the blossoming of their careers by giving them a significant boost.
Eruoma Awashish
The Atikamekw artist Eruoma Awashish holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Arts from the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi and since 2023 has been pursuing an MA in visual arts at the same university. Her artistic approach seeks to create spaces for dialogue to facilitate the understanding of First Nations culture.
Euroma Awashish has lived in the Opitciwan, Wemotaci, and Mashteuiatsh communities and has a keen sense of belonging to her Indigenous culture. Her work speaks of métissage and metamorphosis and is imbued with spirituality, symbolism, and syncretism.
She has exhibited her works since 2007 at various venues. In 2018, she participated in BACA (Contemporary Native Art Biennial) and presented an installation at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. More recently, her work was exhibited at the Biennale Révélations 2023 at the Grand Palais in Paris. Her work will be exhibited in 2024 at the Art Souterrain Festival in Montréal and at the permanent exhibition Le Québec autrement dit at the Musée de la civilisation de Québec.
Rémi Belliveau
Interdisciplinary artist and Acadian musician Rémi Belliveau is a native of Belliveau-Village in the Memramcook Valley in New Brunswick, an Acadian hamlet situated on Mi’kma’ki, an unceded ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaq people. Since 2012, their work has been presented at several events, group exhibitions and solo exhibitions, including the Sobey Award exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada for which they were a finalist for the Atlantic region.
In parallel to their artistic practice, they co-curated the Galerie Sans Nom in Moncton from 2014 to 2018 and lectured at the Université de Moncton in 2017. They have contributed texts to Canadian Art magazine. Acadian cultural heritage and the fiction underpinning the construction of the founding narratives are at the heart of their practice. Rémi Belliveau’s artistic work seeks to deconstruct and reprogram the foundations, structures, and imaginative world of the Acadian culture to which they belong with the intention of cultivating the capacity for (self)analysis and critical faculties. They were longlisted for the 2024 Sobey Art Award (Atlantic region). The artist lives and works in Montréal.
Michelle Lacombe
Michelle Lacombe lives and works in Montréal. Since obtaining her BFA from Concordia University in 2006 she has developed a unique body-based practice that is located at the intersection of visual arts and performance. Her work has been shown in Canada, the USA, and Europe in the context of performance events, exhibitions, and colloquiums.
She received the 2015 Bourse Plein Sud and exhibited her work at the Art Encounters Contemporary Art Biennial in Romania in 2017. Her practice as an artist is paralleled by a commitment to supporting action art and other undisciplined practices. She is currently the director of VIVA! Art Action.
By means of various alterations of her body such as tattooing or scarification, she calls into question the representation of white women’s bodies and the archetypes linked to feminine gender through a historic and cultural perspective. Her work is characterized by a material simplicity, conceptual precision, corporal intensity, and assuredly feminist perspective.
Anne-Marie Proulx
Anne-Marie Proulx draws mainly by means of photography on our conversations with the territories. She creates poetic universes that concern the simultaneously individual and collective links that we maintain with our environments. Her current projects reflect in particular on the reciprocal links to be created or maintained with living beings and the natural spaces around us, a reflection that hinges on the sharing of ideas and perspectives, especially through Innu-Québec friendship and various collaborative approaches.
She holds an MA in Art History from Concordia University, where she also completed a BFA in Studio Arts after a year of attending NSCAD University. Engaged in her community, she has been working since 2014 as Codirector of VU, centre de diffusion et de production de la photographie. She lives and works between Saint-Roch-des-Aulnaies and Québec City, along the great river where she grew up and whose shores the Wendat, Wolastoqiyik, Innu, Abenaki, and Atikamekw have frequented for thousands of years.
Santiago Tamayo Soler
Santiago Tamayo Soler was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1990. He is a Montréal based multidisciplinary artist working in video, with a background in performance art and film. He holds a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University. The artist is interested in world-building and juxtaposing digitally built locations with archival footage.
Through the use of multiple narrative devices, Santiago Tamayo Soler proposes an eco-political examination of Latin America from a diasporic perspective, giving a home to immigrant and queer stories that suggest a radical futuristic fantasy. He has presented his works at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, Trinity Square Video in Toronto, the Chromatic Festival in Montréal, and the Bradley Ertaskiran Gallery in Montréal. He is one of the recipients of the 2023 EDAA Emerging Digital Artists Award presented by EQ Bank and Trinity Square Video. Santiago Tamayo Soler is currently artist in residence at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts as part of the 2024 Impressions artist residency.
A noteworthy Québec distinction
The MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award is the only contemporary art award in Canada that combines an exhibition, a publication, and acquisitions. It fulfils a need to recognize and disseminate contemporary art among the general public in addition to offering support to the artists and to their career development. The award confirms the MNBAQ’s desire to play a leadership role in the realm of Québec art by encouraging the most promising artists and supporting their career development.
Since 2013, through the generous contribution of the RBC Foundation to the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Fondation du MNBAQ, the work of four Québec artists has achieved outstanding recognition: Diane Morin (2015), Carl Trahan (2017), Numa Amun (2019), and Stanley Février (2021). In 2023, five artists were chosen: Maria Ezcurra, Anahita Norouzi, Celia Perrin Sidarous, Eve Tagny and Sara A.Tremblay.
Credits
1 Eruoma Awashish : Photo : © Nadya Kwandibens
2 Rémi Belliveau
3 Michelle Lacombe
4 Anne-Marie Proulx : Photo : © Photo Marcin Sz / Marie Claude Tremblay
5 Santiago Tamayo Soler
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