Althea Thauberger

Photo: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, avec la permission de/ courtesy of Guy L’Heureux

L’arbre est dans ses feuilles [The Tree Is in Its Leaves], 2017

Two-channel video installation

Featuring poems by Danica Evering, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, Kama La Mackerel and Chloé Savoie-Bernard

This two-channel video work features Althea Thauberger in a loose portrayal of Lorraine Monk, executive producer of the NFB Still Photography Division in the 1960s. The protagonist is depicted amidst photographic images from the Still Photography Division’s archive dating from 1963 to 1966, including images from the NFB’s 1968 publication Call Them Canadians as well as The People Tree. Part of the Canada Pavilion at Expo 67, The People Tree was designed to promote a vision of Canadian identity through social documentary photography and an architectural model of a “family tree.”

The protagonist’s words are quotations from interviews with Monk, and internal correspondence from the Still Photography Division. The work also features poems commissioned from four emerging Montréal writers, and reflections written by cultural historians Andrea Kunard and Carol Payne.

Acknowledgments: Canadian Photography Institute, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Milieux – Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology, Concordia University; CINEMAexpo67

Althea Thauberger is an artist based in Vancouver. Her work typically involves interactions with a group or community and provocative reflections of social, political, institutional and aesthetic power relations. Her film and video installations are often the result of long-term negotiations and collaborations with those depicted ̶ such as religious choir members, tree planters, conscientious objectors and speakers of endangered languages and explore relationships between individualism, collectivism, and conformity. Thauberger’s projects additionally involve deep considerations of the histories of the sites of their production. These have included the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital in Prague; the Kandahar Airfield, southern Afghanistan; the 200 block of Carrall Street in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside; the Haskell Opera House on the Québec/Vermont border. Thauberger’s recent exhibitions and screenings have included The Power Plant, Toronto; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; the 2012 Liverpool Biennale; the occupied Kino Zvezda, Belgrade; and the Guangong Museum of Art.