L'art de perruquer | Parallel Play Exhibition
Call for artistic projects for a two-part exhibition exploring museums as living, inhabited spaces through creative interventions and community engagement.
L'art de perruquer / Parallel Play is a collaborative exhibition between Stewart Hall Art Gallery in Pointe-Claire and Musée d'art de Joliette, celebrating the latter's 50th anniversary. This project invites professional artists and collectives to reimagine museum spaces as dynamic, living environments where creativity flourishes.
Drawing from Michel de Certeau's concept of "perruquer" (everyday ruses and clever subversions of institutional codes), the exhibition seeks to transform constraints into creative opportunities. The curators, Manel Benchabane and Ariane De Blois, are interested in how places of memory and culture can be activated as inhabited spaces that foster dialogue between artists, museums, and communities.
The project explores fundamental questions: How can discarded things be reused? How can fragments be valorized? How can museums be physically, symbolically, or emotionally inhabited? How do we blur boundaries between artwork and everyday space?
Artists are encouraged to submit proposals that activate spaces through simple or subversive gestures, using institutional frameworks as creative material. Projects may include inhabitable installations, in situ performances, interventions in unconventional areas, participatory experiences, or works examining the museum-house concept.
Selected artists will receive exhibition fees according to CARFAC standards, with transportation costs covered in whole or part. The exhibition will be presented at Stewart Hall Art Gallery (July 5 - August 23, 2026) and Musée d'art de Joliette (June 27 - September 7, 2026). Projects can be shown at one or both venues.