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Indepth Arts News:
"The Dahan Bunch: Perdus dans l espace"
2001-02-15 until 2001-04-12
Ottawa Art Gallery
Ottawa, ON,
USA United States of America
The Dahan Bunch: Perdus dans l espace is a new ficto-biographical modular universe in which artist Chantal Dahan carefully combines space, objects, sound and images of various types (photographic, cinematographic, and videographic) to explore her bicultural, binational, bireligious, multilingual identity, an existence extricated from the sometimes discontinuous spaces between many polarities, replete with stories of struggle and conflict, of love and aspiration.
Her universe is the family; her modules are portraits of family members, coloured by fiction and abstracted to act their scripted part in an installation where proximity and distancing are enlisted to tell stories of origins, migration, trajectory and identity. Dahan's careful manipulation of family documents and their conversion from one medium to another – a process similar to linguistic translation in its shading of meaning – produce an open space where biography and fiction playfully come together, welcoming us to contribute to its meaning.
Born in Marseille, France, in 1958, Chantal Dahan now lives and works in Hull, Quebec. She obtained a B.A. in Visual Arts from the University of Ottawa in 1993 and an M.A. in Visual and Media Arts from the Universite du Quebec a Montreal (UQAM) in 2000. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at several Quebec galleries, including the UQAM Gallery and the Centre d'exposition de la Maison de la culture du Plateau Mont-Royal in Montreal, the Centre d'exposition de Val d'Or, the Centre d'exposition de Rouyn-Noranda, and Galerie Montcalm and Axe Neo-7 in Hull. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in Quebec, Ontario, France and Korea, including Passart at the Centre d'exposition de Rouyn-Noranda (Quebec) and Body Language at the Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa (Ontario) last year. Her recent video work, Terra-Terra, will be presented at the Rendez-vous du cinema quebecois to be held in Montreal later this year.
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