attitude d’artistes: Resolute Bay

Additional Information

Other associated events: Opening reception, Friday, January 23, 7:30 pm

The multidisciplinary duo attitude d’artistes, Jacky Georges Lafargue (Montreal) and Louis Couturier (Paris) has been active for over 16 years. They work with communities using a simple, direct aesthetic based on participatory interaction to reflect their specific environment and context.

Resolute Bay, a small village that was artificially created in the 1950s, is the second northernmost community in Nunavut, Canada. During the Cold War, the Canadian government relocated a few Inuit families from the relative warmth and good hunting grounds of northern Quebec to the country’s northern reaches, where there is little to hunt. The residents of Resolute Bay chose to express their past in the form of a documentary-style video. Other works depict the present-day life of this small, extremely isolated community.

The exhibition consists of a collection of photographs of Resolute Bay houses and buildings printed on plywood. In Resolute Bay, daylight images, taken during the summer of 2004, were projected during an endless Arctic winter night — in 2006 — onto a huge screen that the community made out of snow. Another video entitled Voyage du jour dans la nuit (detail on cover) portrays the moving, almost magical moments that occurred when young and old gathered together at -40 degrees to watch this projection of images portraying their lives.

Attitude D'artistes, Resolute Bay (Installation View), 2009.