Drawing conversations Montreal, Canada by UQAM Design Center

14 Sep 2022

Dates: 15 September to 6 November 2022 Opening: 14 September 2022 Curators: Carole Lévesque and Thomas-Bernard Kenniff

Drawing conversations Montreal, Canada by UQAM Design Center

Drawing Conversations is an invitation to talk about drawing, through drawing. Presented at UQAM’s Design Centre, this exhibition brings together the work of 16 architects and academics in an exchange on contemporary drawing practices in architecture. The exhibition leads us to consider drawing beyond its qualities as a graphic object to glimpse the open conversation it sets up, a dialogue that is as much individual (with oneself as a practitioner) as it is collective (with other drawings, people and practices). 

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Grounded simultaneously in the real world and a world-in-making, each drawing and each conversation is an opportunity to explore different techniques, trace possible worlds, play with words, give way to fantastical fabulations, engage in poetic exchanges about the world, the practice of drawing, about architecture, about those who draw.

Drawing conversations Montreal, Canada by UQAM Design Center
Photo credit: Bryan Cantley, untitled

The exhibition originates from the meeting between the curators and professors at the École de design from UQAM Carole Lévesque and Thomas-Bernard Kenniff, and the Drawing Architecture research project initiated by Riet Eeckhout and Arnaud Hendrickx of KU Leuven university in Belgium. The project convened biannual meetings between a group of renowned international practitioners, offering them the opportunity to discuss their drawing practice. In a world premiere, Drawing Conversations offers a pause on these encounters by foregrounding their collective interrogation through drawings put in conversation.

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The exhibition expands on these encounters by focusing on the capacity of drawing to engage reflection on modes of representation, design practices and research fields, and the role of this reflection in the construction of a common world. It focuses on the collective exercise of interrogation and develops around drawing as a mechanism of interaction.

The exhibition

Drawing Conversations brings together a remarkable corpus of 75 drawings, the majority of which have never been shown to the public, punctuated by sound extracts from conversations recorded during the group’s meetings over the past four years. These conversations, initially restricted to the collective, are expanded in the exhibition as it creates a space for new dialogues: The exhibition will host the 2nd international colloquium of Bureau d'étude de pratiques indisciplinées (BéPI), -in drawing, from 14 to 16 September, and drawing workshops open to the public, led by five participants in the exhibition from Europe and Canada, from 24 to 27 October.

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Publications

The work of the 16 artists and designers is the subject of a special issue of AD (Architectural Design) magazine: Radical Architectural Drawing (July 2022). A book on the work of the collective is also in production.

Partners

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Faculté des arts de l'UQAM, École de design de l'UQAM, bureau d'étude _de pratiques indisciplinées, Mp, v2com and UQAM Design Center.

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