MONTREAL.- With Turn or Burn, Jean-François Bouchard’s first museum-scale exhibition, and ANTHEMS, Stephanie Comilang’s most comprehensive presentation to date and her first exhibition in Québec, PHI presents two perspectives on the narratives, beliefs, and invisible forces that shape our societies.

Through distinct approaches—one documentary and installation-based, the other speculative and immersive—the two artists explore systems of belief, collective narratives, and invisible networks that shape the way we understand the world.

Jean-François Bouchard: Turn or Burn

For his first museum-scale exhibition, Jean-François Bouchard’s Turn or Burn brings together a series of new works that document his encounters with evangelical street preachers in the United States of America. The project examines how their words and actions replay, with growing intensity, the tensions between faith, performance, and politics in public space.

By meeting with these preachers and mobilizing a range of formal approaches—photography, video, and installation—Bouchard continues to explore contemporary culture’s marginal areas. In doing so, he questions how beliefs and ideologies are socially perpetuated between individuals and the systems they are embedded in.

Curator: Daniel Fiset
An exhibition presented at 407 Saint-Pierre Street.

Stephanie Comilang: ANTHEMS

Through a layered and multifaceted approach, Stephanie Comilang poetically humanizes the weighty subject of how global flows of capital impact real lives. Through the cultivation of intimacy, Comilang creates deeply engaging single- and multi-channel video installations that also include VR, textile works and 3D-printed objects. This is the artist’s most comprehensive exhibition to date, and the first time her work is being presented in Québec.

Broadly defined, anthems inspire and connect people together in a spirit of community. In this way, each of Stephanie Comilang’s works is an anthem. They honour the cultures, histories, and lives of courageous individuals brought together by invisible yet extraordinarily powerful forces, stirring up a sense of kinship in the viewer that transcends geography and nationality.

Curator: Cheryl Sim
An exhibition presented at 451-465, Saint-Jean Street.