The project
Lignes fantômes
Ce qui subsiste brings together works by Maude Arsenault, Sarah Boutin, andes a. beaulé, Izabelle Desroches, and Alex Pouliot, whose practices explore the relationships between narrative, memory, and materiality. Through photography, textiles, video, and sculpture, the artists move writing beyond language, inscribing stories into bodies, gestures, surfaces, and objects. Writer and researcher Janick Burn will also accompany the project through a personal reflection on the works and the narratives they bring forth.
Situated between personal memory, fiction, and documentary traces, the works give shape to what remains: a fragment, an imprint, an image, a gesture, or a few words. They examine the fragile forms through which a presence may persist despite absence. Memories emerge, fade, and return, leaving traces that continue to inhabit objects and spaces.
Here, storytelling does not necessarily mean writing. Mending fragments of the past, engraving a dream, or recording the movement of a body are all ways of constructing a narrative. Gesture becomes a form of writing, and matter becomes a vessel for memory. The works thus carry stories from the self toward the other. Traces of intimate experiences intersect with broader histories, making each fragment a potential site of shared memory.
The exhibition unfolds at the margins of writing, where narrative can take forms other than words. The works shift the boundaries between writing, telling, and making, opening spaces where memory can settle, circulate, and be reinvented.
A collective publication conceived and edited by Janick Burn will extend this exploration by bringing together the artists’ voices, images, and poetic fragments. Thoughtfully crafted in both form and content, this hand-folded and handmade publication will exist as a singular object—at once book, assemblage, and space of transmission.
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The exhibition is part of PRÉSENCES, a project coordinated by Centre SAGAMIE that brings together eight partner artist-run centres across Quebec through a series of exhibitions with distinct curatorial orientations. Dedicated exclusively to the work of emerging artists, the project seeks to increase their visibility throughout the province. It will culminate in Alma, where SAGAMIE will gather and present the exhibitions developed by the participating centres.
About the artist
Group exhibit
Véronique Hudon – Curator
Véronique Hudon is a curator, writer, and researcher in contemporary art. She holds a PhD in Art Studies and Practices from UQAM, where her dissertation, Exhibiting the Living: Curatorial Practices and Performance, examined how live arts transform exhibition-making. Since 2023, she has served as Executive and Artistic Director of L’Œil de poisson in Québec City, where she develops collective and interdisciplinary curatorial projects related to performance, archives, and contemporary documentary forms. She is the founder of the Experimental School, a project that brings together artists, curators, and researchers around collaborative and transdisciplinary practices, as well as the research initiative Archives of the Future, which explores living archives, fragmented narratives, and modes of transmitting ephemeral practices in contemporary art. Her writing has been published in several specialized journals and books, including Esse, Espace art actuel, Vie des arts, RACAR, and Curating Live Arts (Berghahn Books).
Janick Burn
Janick Burn is an artist, writer, and curator from Outaouais/Anishinabewaki who has been living in Montréal/Tio’tia:ke for several years. Her practical and theoretical research focuses on the relationship between the body and the frame, approached through a reflective engagement with performance, image-making, and writing. She explores the off-screen or out-of-frame space, considering it—when chosen—as a site of freedom where one can emancipate oneself from the constraints of the frame, whether that of the image, society, or normative structures. In recent years, she has become increasingly interested in publishing as an artistic practice and as an alternative exhibition format. She curated the group exhibition Exposer avec l’autoédition to expose the self (AdMare, 2022; Arprim, 2023) and has completed several residencies, including at Dare-Dare and Est-Nord-Est (2023), La Chambre Blanche (2024), AdMare (2025), and Sagamie as part of the Borgitte Project (2026). She regularly publishes reviews and critical texts in Le Sabord and other contemporary art journals.
Maude Arsenault
Maude Arsenault is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal. She holds an MFA in Visual and Media Arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and a certificate in Art History from the Université de Montréal. Her practice explores representations of female bodies and the spaces they inhabit. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Paris Photo, Kyotographie (Japan), SHOW L.A., Galerie Echo 119 (Paris), Galerie C (Neuchâtel), the Musée d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul, and Occurrence (Montreal). She has also participated in numerous artist residencies, including at the Banff Centre (Canada), Les Récollets (Paris), Diaphane (France), Atelier Benrido in Kyoto (Japan), as well as the NARS Foundation and EFA Project Space in New York.
Arsenault is the author of two award-winning photobooks, Entangled (2020/2023) and Resurfacing (2023), published by Deadbeatclub (Los Angeles). Winner of the Hariban Grand Prize (Japan, 2020), she received the Yvonne L. Bombardier Grant (2021) and the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art (2023). In 2024, she was shortlisted for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award. Her work has also been supported on several occasions by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.
andes a. beaulé
andes a. beaulé is a visual artist, writer, friend, researcher, lover, educator, and passionate observer of the living world based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal (QC). They completed an MFA in Visual and Media Arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal in 2023, focusing on queer abstraction and autotheory as methods for challenging normative structures. Their artistic practice has developed through numerous residencies across Quebec and through the support of various arts council grants. Their excellence has been recognized within the contemporary art milieu, notably through the Prix Polygone (2025).
Alex V. Pouliot
Poet, enchanter, printer, and bookmaker, Alex V. Pouliot (b. 1992, Quebec City) seeks to rehabilitate the magic of art by investigating the forces at work in the appearance of things and in the quests through which individuals are formed. Often created in relation to specific contexts and places, his work has been presented both locally and internationally.
Sarah Boutin
Sarah Boutin is a Quebec-based writer, visual artist, and researcher. She holds an MFA in Visual and Media Arts, co-directed in Creative Writing, from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and is currently pursuing a certificate in Psychology at the same institution in order to further explore the questions of care that run through her practice.
Working at the intersection of performance, photography, and poetry, her hybrid practice investigates the ghostly narratives that inhabit bodies and the relationships we maintain with the human and more-than-human beings around us. She describes this approach as a form of “prayer,” grounded in a sensitive attentiveness to that which escapes language and perception.
Her poetry collection Une forme d’amour was published by Poètes de brousse in 2026, and her creative journal Prendre fin was published by Pièce jointe in 2021. Her visual work has been presented at the Yeast Photo Festival (Italy), the Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie, the Maison de la littérature de Québec, and Place des Arts. She has also received several distinctions in poetry, including jury mentions for the Geneviève Amyot Prize in 2024 and 2025.
Izabelle Desroches
Izabelle Desroches is a visual artist, cultural mediator, and curator who lives and works in Québec City. Through a relational approach, her practice explores the connections between body, territory, and memory. She is interested in images as a means of generating narratives, and in territory—or territories—through a sensitive and ecological lens. Her work incorporates natural dyeing and photographic development processes based on organic chemistry, drawing on the materials and resources available in the environments where she works. Travel lies at the heart of her artistic practice, both as a way of experiencing new places and as a catalyst for encounters and storytelling. Each of her projects is developed through a direct relationship with the sites, people, and memories that shape them. Her work has been presented in Québec, Iceland, Belgium, and Chile.