Leila Zelli. Terrain de jeux

Galerie de l’UQAM will start the year off with the exhibition Leila Zelli. Terrain de jeux. Zelli, a graduating MFA student in Visual and Media Arts at Université du Québec à Montréal, will present an experiential installation that questions our relationship to online and mediated images.

The exhibition

No image can ever be understood in just one way because it exists under the kaleidoscope of human interpretation. We only read images through the lens of our own knowledge, experiences, beliefs, and a priori culture, which together make up our singular vision of the world. Nevertheless, each day, we see hundreds, if not thousands of images on TV, the Internet, social media, in the street, in newspapers, books, archives or magazines, and we assume our point of view is right.

Images of daily life, namely images of war zones, are presented here as a way to make us experience how we view one another. These have been re-contextualized within an in-situ installation that gives viewers the impression of being in a “playground” of sorts, one of children’s games and one of political image games. The audio and the positioning of the images generate the effect of being off-screen, out of sight, out of reach (i.e. hors-champ, hors de vue, hors d’atteinte), and interact to create a fictional space that activates curiosity and our desire to see, thereby questioning our position in the face of current events.

The artist

Leila Zelli is an MFA student in Visual and Media Arts at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). In her digital, in-situ installations, she uses existing media images and videos found on the Internet to create visual and sound experiences that generate a moment of reflection on the state of the world, our relationship to the Other, and on the effective impact of our actions on humanity. Zelli is a recipient of the FARE Graduate Excellence Awards of Université du Québec à Montréal (2018) and winner of the Coup de coeur du public prize at the 36th International Symposium of Contemporary Art of Baie-Saint-Paul, Art & Politics (curator: Sylvie Lacerte). In the winter of 2019, Zelli will begin an artist residency at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, as part of the Empreintes program, the results of which will be exhibited in November 2019 at the Conseil des arts de Montréal.
vimeo.com/leilazelli

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