In Praise of the Missing Image

From September 5 to October 25, Galerie de l’UQAM will present solo exhibitions by the artists Raphaël Barontini, Gabrielle Goliath, and Caroline Mauxion, whose works invite us to imagine, together, political and poetic ways to inhabit the impasses of the present by sketching out paths to the future.

In a world saturated with images, some, strangely, are lacking. This edition of MOMENTA aims to open up multiple perspectives for experimentation and speculation on the nature, uses, and production of missing images. With a focus on what is beyond our view – the silences and breaches in individual and collective memory   – In Praise of the Missing Image explores both contemporary challenges in relation to the image and the current consequences of the complex dynamics involved in constructing narratives. Which stories are told, how, and by whom?

The exhibitions

Raphaël Barontini (France and Guadeloupe)
Twòn Kreyol

Twòn Kreyol unfolds a space where memory intertwines with dream. Through collage and assemblage, Raphaël Barontini combines the iconography of art history, colonial-era ethnographic photographs, and sculptural objects such as West African masks and sacred artefacts to create portraits, costumes, and frescoes inspired by carnival parades and rites of resistance. Barontini focuses on several emblematic figures in the struggle against slavery, setting them in tension with the mechanisms of their erasure from official history—thereby examining the power relations at play in representation. 

Gabrielle Goliath (South Africa)
Elegy – for two ancestors

Gabrielle Goliath’s video and sound installation is part of a long-term performative series that undertakes collective mourning for women and LGBTQIA+ individuals lost to patriarchal violence. It commemorates two Nama women who were displaced and killed during the Ovaherero and Nama Genocide (1904–08) perpetrated by the German colonial regime in Namibia. One by one, seven opera singers sustain a single note over the course of an hour, creating a space for shared grief and radical refusal. This sonic vigil becomes a political act of remembrance and love in which the public is invited to take part.

Caroline Mauxion (Canada and France)
Must Every Step Touch the Ground?

In an exhibition at the intersection of care and desire, Caroline Mauxion — PhD candidate in art studies and practices, UQAM — explores the ways in which the body is constrained, supported, or transformed. Grounded in an autotheoretical, crip, and queer approach, she interrogates the norms that shape our embodied experiences. Drawing on her own history, she reflects on what deviates, on what is not straight, and proposes a gaze anchored in the lived experience of disability. Her works, inspired by orthopedic language, closely intertwine image, material, and corporeal memory to expose the mechanisms of normalization that structure bodies and desires.