In Search of Expo 67was a group exhibition created at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in the summer of 2017, which marked the 50th anniversary of Expo 67. Co-curated by Monika Kin Gagnon and Lesley Johnstone, this major exhibition featured new and existing works by nineteen contemporary Québec and Canadian artists, inspired by the Montreal world exhibition, Expo 67. This talk will present some of the artworks in the exhibition, and discuss the myriad strategies through which archival artifacts about Expo 67 were activated.

Monika Kin Gagnon is Professor of Communication Studies and Concordia University Research Fellow (2017–2018). She has published widely on cultural politics and the visual / media arts since the 1980s. Her book publications include Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (2000), 13 Conversations about Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002) with Richard Fung; and with Janine Marchessault, Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (2014). She is co-curator of the 2017 group exhibition In Search of Expo 67 at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal with Lesley Johnstone, which extended her ongoing research into the original Expo 67 large format and multi-screen films with the research group CINEMAexpo67.ca. Current projects include Expo 67 Brouillements numériques, an experiment exploring the potentials of augmented reality for the Expo 67 islands and its scattered archives.             

Talk in English with bilingual questions and answers.

Relevant websites:

MAC website of exhibition: https://macm.org/en/exhibitions/in-search-of-expo-67/Faculty webpage: https://www.concordia.ca/artsci/coms/faculty.html?fpid=monika-gagnon

CINEMAexpo67 research group: http://cinemaexpo67.ca/

Podcast on Expo 67 hosted by Monika Kin Gagnon

http://www.concordia.ca/events/conversation-series/thinking-out-loud/expo67.html

On iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/thinking-out-loud/id1216785912?mt=2