DOMINIQUE SIROIS
INDICE ÉTERNITÉ
Dominique Sirois obtained a Master's degree in Visual and Media Arts from Université du Québec à Montréal in 2010. Her projects have been presented in artist-run centres in Canada and abroad. Her exhibitions include Action Art Actuel (Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, 2014), Latitude 53 (Edmonton, 2015) and AXENÉO7 (Gatineau, 2015). She has collaborated with Grégory Chatonsky at the Unicorn Center for Art (Beijing, 2015) and iMAL (Brussels, 2015). She has also done residencies at the Couvent des Récollets (Paris, 2010) and at the Center for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow, 2013)
Galerie B-312 is pleased to present Indice éternité in its main room, the most recent exhibition of Dominique Sirois. Eternal life, a foolish dream? Mimesis Trinity, a pioneering fictional finance company, acts as a conceptual and narrative framework for the artist's research. Here, the company offers luxury mortuary services to wealthy shareholders who can now see the possibility of an eternally extended life thanks to trans-humanistic technologies.—Combining sculpture, video, animation and sound art, playing as much with a biomorphic aesthetic as minimalist, the installation is thought of as both a funeral home and a place of research. The iconography of the artist reflects these worlds, but also cuts across those of finance, computer science and art. Indice éternité explores the relationships of the power and impulses that capital allows by acting on the materiality of life. Killing death, pure fiction? Maybe not. But it is still necessary to have the means of this excessive ambition. —Since 2011, the Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov founded 2045 Initiative, an NGO gathering a community of researchers with the aim of prolonging the life by transferring the spirit of a human in an android or hologram. Death would only take away the biological body. Transposing everything that creates the essence of a human being into another matter, physical or virtual, blurs the line between life and death and raises several ethical questions. The figure of the miser, realizing that his assets will no longer be of any use to him beyond the grave, is it called to change? Indice éternité gives us a glimpse of a world where we would no longer be equal in the face of death.
—Original text in French by ISABELLE GUIMOND
Dominique Sirois obtained a Master's degree in Visual and Media Arts from Université du Québec à Montréal in 2010. Her projects have been presented in artist-run centres in Canada and abroad. Her exhibitions include Action Art Actuel (Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, 2014), Latitude 53 (Edmonton, 2015) and AXENÉO7 (Gatineau, 2015). She has collaborated with Grégory Chatonsky at the Unicorn Center for Art (Beijing, 2015) and iMAL (Brussels, 2015). She has also done residencies at the Couvent des Récollets (Paris, 2010) and at the Center for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow, 2013)