Nicole Gingras - Robert-Forget Award 2026

To trace Nicole Gingras’s path is to take the measure of its density, remarkable coherence, and sustained, exceptional refusal to compromise. Beneath the sheer number of her undertakings—film and video programs, exhibitions, listening events and performances, essays, interviews, commentaries, public conversations, publications, event production, and her teaching—lies the profound bond she sustains with practices, works, artists, and audiences, a bond so intimate it can only be called symbiotic. Rather than yielding to professional or career-based concerns, what asserts itself is a way of living and thinking wholly turned toward the work and born of it, charting the path ahead and pressing her onward. As she accompanies a practice and its maker, layers of experience and traces accumulate, generating a state of latency that, at a given moment, will take shape in a project to come. Hers is a practice of waiting, of duration: every project comes in its own time and place, sometimes unfolding across several years. Its form is decided gradually, as the relationship emerges over time. The nature of her listening to and looking at the work (both inseparable from each other) is defined by an openness to the mutability of the practice before her, alongside that of her own thinking. That thinking unfolds quietly and patiently within her sensibility, coming to rest in a reflection and in one or more forms of presentation, yet never hardening into fixity.

Gingras first studied visual arts at Université Laval. She went on to study film at Concordia University and Université de Montréal, where she earned a master’s degree in film studies in the late 1980s. Film soundtracks fascinated her, as did the relationship between the photographic and the cinematic. These concerns, probing the limits of each artistic form, would stay with her, in varying measure, throughout her entire career. The moving image is the point of entry into her work as a film and video programmer, critic, and curator. From the very start, programming, curating (understood as a form of programming), and writing were conceived as practices that reverberate through one another. A telling example is her programming of FIFA expérimental at the Festival international du film sur l’art (FIFA), which she led for over twenty years (2003–2025), and whose films and videos also found expression in written commentaries, in interviews with the artists, and at times in exhibitions.

The film and video reviews she wrote in 1989 and 1990 for the magazines 24 images and Ciné-Bulles convey her keen interest in experimental and avant-garde film and video, and in artists from here and abroad. She took part in the first Mois de la photo in 1989 and again in its 1991 edition, with far-reaching contributions that revealed a deep knowledge of experimental film and video. In 1991, she led a key section on autobiography that brought together writing, exhibitions, and a film and video strand, its research developed in close collaboration with Sophie Bellissent. Her essay appeared alongside those of historians, critics, and artists, several of them interdisciplinary, such as Georges Bogardi, Raymond Depardon, Philippe Dubois, Christine Ross, and Allen S. Weiss. Her film and video program at the Cinémathèque québécoise and Cinéma Parallèle echoed concerns that probe the boundaries between the moving image and photography. It brought together feature films and short videos alike—by international, Canadian, and Québécois artists—alongside solo and group exhibitions mounted in several Montreal venues, among them the Musée d’art contemporain².  This convergence of writing, of programming and exhibition, and of the range of experiences they offer runs the length of her career. From the outset it reveals how forms of reflection interweave and complement one another in her practice.
 

In 1994, she conceived and proposed to the independent distributor Cinéma Libre an ambitious program titled Les Absences de la photographie, accompanied by an essay that reflects deeply on the questions the photographic raises at the intersection of film and video.  The program, which ran over eight days at the Goethe-Institut Montréal, gathered more than a hundred films (35 mm and 16 mm) and videos, ranging from Derek Jarman to Trinh T. Minh-Ha by way of Bernard Émond, Vincent Grenier, Raoul Peck, Thierry Kuntzel, Lisa Steele, Esther Valiquette, and Michèle Waquant. At once visual and sonic landmarks, references, and vectors, these works stand neither short of nor beyond the written reflection: together they form a single, reverberating whole. These works for the Mois de la photo also opened her sustained, ever-renewed exploration of how the work is experienced—of what is at stake in the image and all it makes possible. From her first public appearances, Gingras affirmed her commitment to the specificity of local practices, even as she set them within the wider field of international production. 

Gingras has created numerous programs for film and video³ venues and artist-run centres, sometimes at their invitation, sometimes at her own initiative: among them Vidéographe, GIV, Séquence, the Cinémathèque québécoise, the Goethe-Institut Montréal, Western Front in Vancouver, VTape in Toronto, and the Centre for Art Tapes in Halifax. Her expertise was also called upon by museums in Quebec and across Canada, by the Canada Council for the Arts, and for events abroad in Oberhausen, Manchester, London, Paris, and Berlin. Her contribution to the international reach of Quebec video has been considerable.
 

Her work, however, cannot be confined to the moving image and the media arts, nor to any single form of dissemination. Though she is often cast as a curator of sound, her engagement with the sonic⁴, rooted in her early interest in the film strip and its materiality, is not a domain unto itself but one element among others—a presence that complicates the work, whether material or immaterial, and draws her toward the conditions of its appearance. Sound can dwell in silence, as her work on Raymond Gervais attests (2007, 2011–2012)⁵. It is inseparable from listening, which, like looking, plays its full part in our relationship to the work.

As early as the 1980s, she was creating dozens of exhibitions and events. The exhibition and the event—concerts and performances alike—offer modes and conditions of presentation beyond the screening room; they invite us to rethink the work and the image within another kind of space and context, and to elicit new relationships between audiences and the works. Several solo exhibitions marked the recent history of exhibition-making in Quebec, among them Raymonde April. Les Fleuves invisibles (Musée d’art de Joliette, 1997), Michèle Waquant. Médianes (Galerie de l’UQAM, 1999), Raymond Gervais 3 x 1 (in two parts, Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen and VOX, 2011 and 2012), and Christof Migone. Trou (Galerie de l’UQAM, 2006). Over time, she has returned to the work of certain artists, among them Manon Labrecque, Mario Côté, Michèle Waquant, and Martin Tétreault. Among her large-scale group projects are biennials: Manif d’art 6. Machines. Les formes du mouvement (Quebec City, 2012) and TraficART. Les formes du temps (Séquence, Chicoutimi, 2010), along with numerous endeavors mingling objects, sound installations, performances, text, and at times lectures. Chief among them is the two-part curatorial project Tracer, retracer (Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, 2005–2006). In two exhibitions and a series of performances with eleven artists from here and abroad, it explored the inscription of the trace. Also notable is Ectoplasmes 5 x 2 (2005), a multidisciplinary laboratory-event of works created in duos, produced by MINUTE and shown at the SAT and PRIM, a part of which was later presented at MUTEK. For Gingras, exhibitions, programs, laboratories, concerts, talks, and publications all become open structures, moored to an encounter with the work that gives rise to a multiplicity of experiential passages.

Essay-writing plays an important role in her practice. Her reflective process is a written embodiment of thought held close to the work. Introspective, almost philosophical, and steeped in a deep sensibility, her writing seeks neither to explain, nor to describe, nor to historicize, but rather to produce and to convey a direct relationship with the work. Every word is weighed; every sentence reaches for the precise, true note. Sometimes a text emerges ahead of a public showing of a work, like a proto-trace, as in the long-form interviews conducted with Raymond Gervais (2004–2007), published under the title Puisqu’à toute fin correspond and followed by a retrospective exhibition in 2011–2012. The interview is a form Gingras is especially fond of, and one she often folds into an exhibition or a program. Her interviews take place only when the conditions are right. 

When they do, they are an immersion in a practice through listening to the artist and their words, unfolding at a pace attuned to the rhythm of speech and silence. In the introspective space so created, the artist and the practice reveal themselves. These interviews stand as invaluable tools for research. 

Throughout her life, Gingras has been an independent worker and curator, an exceptional achievement in the art world, and one that merits the highest regard. Such a position carries a precariousness of existence, demanding both determination and discipline. It also brings a kind of mobility (she has worked with dozens of organizations and institutions) that one might call deliberate, for it never seems to have led her to compromise her choice of artists, works, programs, or exhibitions. This freely claimed agency led her to found her own publishing house in 1996—which to date numbers some ten titles⁶—and in 2002 to co-found, with Eric Mattson, MINUTE, a structure devoted to the production and circulation of media-arts practices bound to image and sound.

Her path reveals an exemplary work ethic and an unwavering commitment to art-making and to curating. Nearly forty years ago, she imagined the threshold as a privileged place from which to glimpse all that might be possible. This in-between, transitional space, where one stands at once here and there, is a rich position, dense with experience. Above all, it calls for sustained availability and attentiveness. The art milieu as a whole is indebted to her for the path she traced, and for all that has flowed from it.