RICHARD IBGHY & MARILOU LEMMENS: PUTTING LIFE TO WORK

Curator: Véronique Leblanc

The art practice of Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens investigates the ways in which the economic sciences and the theories of management represent the world. It focuses on the influence of productivist logic on all spheres of human activity and its internalization by individuals.

The exhibition brings together works realized since 2009 including installations, sculptures, videos and performative projects and will present the new work Each Number Equals One Inhalation and One Exhalation. The works selected by the curator Véronique Leblanc and the artists examine the ways in which the injunction to perform affects the body—actions, thought, attitudes, language—from the point of view of work and life, two spheres that tend to be conflated within a model that many researchers refer to as “cognitive capitalism.” The works underline the physiological, subjective and cognitive dimensions of the body and is a central element in the artists’ critical stance against neoliberalism’s ideology. It is defined both as the site where the mechanisms of productivity are realized and as an agent of their disabling.

Putting Life to Work is the first exhibition in Canada that examines Ibghy & Lemmens work in-depth. The artists were part of the last Montreal Biennial “L’avenir (Looking Forward)” and most recently the Istanbul Biennial “SALTWATER : A Theory of Thought Forms.”