I work in silence, drafting words on scraps of paper. Words that belong to my memory, that tell nothing extraordinary. I write and I accumulate these daily fragments, which I keep like a patchwork on my desk, in my drawers, on my kitchen table, on my bedside. I collect and manipulate them until they can speak by themselves, until they talk together. The text then calls up images, display modes – and sometimes nothing at all.

Attempts to objectivise things said or done in the past. I would say: a means of holding sway over these persistent worlds that cannot be erased. These are realities that offer themselves to the other like fictions, and the more I compose and recompose them, the more they become fictions to me too. But then aren’t all memories products of the imagination, to various extents? I can’t help it, I have always questioned what is believed dead and buried.

Biography

Véronique Béland currently lives in Montreal, where she is completing a master’s degree in Visual and Media Arts at the UQÀM. Since 2005, her work has been exposed at individual and collective exhibitions in Canada and France. She has taken part in various international video programs, namely in Stuttgart, Germany and in Lisbon, Portugal. In Fall 2010, she will undertake a residency at the Studio national des arts contemporains Le Fresnoy, in Lille, France. Over the past years, she has received several awards for academic excellence and a grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Multidisciplinary artist, she focuses primarily on materializing textual forms in visual creation. Her work highlights our numerous ways of dealing with memories and tries to understand the identity construction that they bring about. She thus examines the gap between the ordinary and the singular, between the self and the other.

Contact: info@veroniquebeland.com
Website: www.veroniquebeland.com