Nicole Gingras - Robert-Forget Award 2026

A lone artist trying to portray a curator who has worked with so many people seemed insufficient as a departure point for this text. How could just one individual perspective cover someone who has researched, written, accompanied, programmed and developed exhibitions with and about an entire community? Inspired by Nicole Gingras’ own approach of weaving multiple voices together to reveal a broader picture, I reached out to seven Montreal-based artists – friends, acquaintances and strangers – with a request to discuss their experiences working with Nicole. Each of them responded positively, and without hesitation, to my informal interview proposal. They also agreed to let me chop up their transcribed thoughts and stories into fragments that I could then stitch together into a conversational collage. The content of these seven separate encounters became an amorphous artist-creature who created the following portrait, albeit incomplete, of Nicole Gingras. Paying careful attention to artists’ perceptions instead of predetermining an outcome reminded me of the way that Nicole has expressed her working process: “Reading, writing, speaking, listening, looking, feeling and questioning are essential activities that bring thought alive.”¹

I am grateful to my collaborators for generously sharing their thoughts and for trusting me to use them freely in creating this text. Although there is purposefully no indication of who said what, it is entirely structured from selections of their spoken words. Moving from their attempts to describe Nicole’s work to their personal working relationship with her, the text focuses on the impact she has had on their art practices as well as on the larger Montreal video art community

Not the story itself, but details within the story

We discover Nicole’s sensibility in the attention she pays to the everyday object, to intimacy and to secrecy. This dimension of the intimate always conceals something deeper, something of the order of the enigma.

One aspect of her practice lies precisely in the pleasure of discovering things — sometimes obscure or little known — and bringing them to light. As if she were saying: look! there’s something here you may have missed.

She is deeply interested in what is not obvious. She is drawn to that which evades us, to what might go unnoticed.

The way she arranges works seems to rely heavily on intuition. I get the sense that, in her practice, she trusts something she feels.

I sense that Nicole’s work is a mixture of thinking and intuition. It’s a clear-eyed sharpness to curating.

She's not afraid of risky work 

I have the impression that Nicole is very experimental and very bold, almost anarchist or punk in her own way. Sometimes her love for certain films deeply surprises me, and it pushes me to appreciate another kind of beauty.

At a Nicole Gingras video screening there is going to be sound. You can expect challenging and interesting audio-based work. There will also be a couple of off-the-wall pieces that you might not like, but you think: Nicole saw something in it so I'm going to sit through it and try to appreciate why this was interesting to her; and you will also discover a couple of gems that you just absolutely adore.

If someone is identifying, through their own sensitivity, that there's something interesting, something special, it makes the work live in another way. Sometimes work is quiet and kind of easy to miss, but it’s very encouraging when someone actually spends the time with it.

I was fascinated that she would choose this particular work, I said: Really? People are going to watch this for four minutes? And she said, Yes, of course. It's really fascinating. Well, I find it interesting, but I guess I doubted that other people would.

Nicole has this exacting kind of thing, where she knows that a piece is difficult: I know it's challenging and I'm gonna make you watch the whole thing! She pays careful attention to detail, and I think that is feeding what she's selecting.

Accepting Nicole’s exacting standards in her choice of works also means acknowledging the rigour of the artists who made them. If Nicole shares with us something she detected in a work, let us also venture to discover the path the artist braved.

It’s as though she were revealing potential

Every time Nicole included one of my films in a programme, it felt like I was seeing it anew. This can happen through the placement of a work in a gallery, or through the dialogue between works in a programme or installation.

There were moments when I’d think: right, yes, now I see why my work is shown alongside that one — this is how they speak to each other. I’d give it a lot of thought, and discover aspects I hadn’t perceived myself.

Nicole was not only interested in talking about one work, but across many works; how things change and then return in different iterations through new projects. Seeing what she was seeing made me think about the work differently. 

It’s fantastic and rare to be able to work with such an intense and exacting curator. My experience with Nicole Gingras brought certain things I’d thought secondary into focus, and revealed unknown aspects.

When I think about the questions she asks me, I sometimes wonder: but why is she asking me this, how did she notice that thing, that detail in the video, that passage?

It’s true that Nicole often sees things I don’t. Sometimes I get it right away, sometimes it takes me a while. But I always sense that I can learn something from the way she sees.

I've definitely had this experience where Nicole has noticed things that I wasn't even noticing. That is very generative because the work becomes a kind of channel for different energies: someone brings their creative, imaginative energy to looking and listening and that feeds back into my creative energy for moving forward. I see the work of curation and writing as potentially a very creative imaginative practice. I think that Nicole is really doing it in that way.

It was really interesting because when she asked me questions, she awakened ideas about my own work that I hadn’t necessarily thought of or seen from that angle. I really have the sense that the questions she asks me, or the conversations we have, are part of one single ongoing conversation that continues as we go.

But with Nicole it’s very different

In other contexts, the relationship is often very functional: you send the work, it’s programmed, and that’s it. People don’t come to the studio, you don’t meet for coffee, there isn’t really any dialogue.

Often the conventional exhibition curator, the more traditional kind, starts from what they already know or what they’ve read to build their exhibition. That kind of person often arrives at a result that confirms their initial idea. It may be good work, but neither the artist nor the public learns anything new from it.

With Nicole, I always felt there was no calculation. You don’t count the hours. It’s a long-term relationship. I’d say it’s more a commitment than a simple one-off job.

I haven’t had very deep conversations with the other curators I’ve worked with. With Nicole it was different. It was very different, because it went beyond simply organizing an event or a project. It also included preparation, sharing ideas, reflection.

It was very interesting for me to meet Nicole because she brought a kind of thinking and sensitivity to curating. She also brought a kind of conversation that I hadn't really experienced before. 

As an independent curator she has a deep understanding of the life of an artist and is therefore very respectful of your practice, ideas and work.

Nicole is someone who sits at the boundary between the artist and that social function we call the exhibition curator. And I think the boundary is a thin one. In any case, Nicole works very much like an artist.

She read all of my writing. It was pretty wild that she even read texts that weren’t videos yet, and never even became videos. We had a lot of e-mail conversations at that time. If I went into my inbox and I opened up all of the messages from Nicole, it would probably be chapters of back-and-forth writing.

I get the sense that there is follow up whenever I talk with her — it’s not just a one-off. It’s Nicole, so I know we’ll talk again.

She's a very acute listener, that's for sure.

Ah, that’s her real strength: an incredible capacity for listening. And so once you’re in conversation with someone who listens that well, things can go anywhere. 

She’s so present when she’s with someone

It’s a true discussion-based relationship that nurtures a friendship. Friendship and work are so intertwined that I sometimes can’t tell which is which.

I've gotten to know Nicole more personally over a long period of time. You just start to know a person and they begin to know you as a person. When she's interested in what's going on in your life in general, she understands that it's not unrelated to what you're making in your work.

We can talk about work. But we can also talk about our mother, we can say we have a toothache. And then we come back to the work.

Over time, Nicole has always stayed there, always available. There’s no judgment. When she takes an interest in someone, it’s as though she takes an interest in the person as a whole.

What I've noticed with Nicole is that she has this real sensitivity, a kindness. As an artist, this made me feel a little bit more comfortable sharing parts of my process that I probably wouldn't have otherwise. 

I feel that her profession is being Nicole. I feel that she has a very, very, very curious mind. Nicole is always on the move. She travels to meet artists. She goes into studios, she sparks meetings in cafés. It’s very fluid, she isn’t fixed in place. She’s part of life. It’s very human, really. So very human.

« What are you working on? »

She cares immensely for others. I know she works with files on each of the artists whose work she has followed and others she doesn’t know. Then she takes notes during visits to exhibitions or festivals. Little by little, she’ll undertake research on the artists. It’s the true work of a curator, always on the lookout for what’s being made, both emerging and already established.

As a young artist, it was one of the first times someone was really interested in talking to me about what I was doing. There was a real exchange that I had not experienced before. It really fed me to understand that I could be in conversation through my work. For a number of years, Nicole was really the only person interested in that way.

I don't think that I would have shown my work very much without Nicole, because she was the one who always asked for it: What are you working on? Do you have anything new?

Over the years, we have done many projects together that were really important for me. She made lots of opportunities for me that I would not have had otherwise.

She has always been there, looking and seeing what's going on. This encouraged me to continue making videos, which is something that I never really imagined I would do.

It speaks to artists having a practice, more than just making isolated works. It is as if Nicole is drawing our attention to the fact that artists have an ongoing practice. I think for all of us right now, that's absolutely essential, and under threat.

A profound impact on the way that video art has evolved here.

I think there are some curators who are just going after the top tier artists. Nicole is still really invested in what local artists are doing. There's an integrity to that. Validating work that is interesting and needs to be shown. It is not about this big name, that big name, and the next big name.

There has been this really interesting scene revolving around Nicole's writing and programming. I think it’s really interesting that, by opening and maintaining this space for experimental video, one person can have so much impact on so many local artists, and also on a kind of cultural situation.

I think it brought a lot of us together. We know each other because Nicole showed our work. You go to these great screenings together and you come out of it inspired and excited.

The event The Absence of Photography, organized by Nicole Gingras in 1994, had a great influence on me, and without a doubt on the whole milieu of experimental film and video, and even the visual art milieu. Had it not occurred, I might have taken a different path. That event infused our small history of experimental film and video with true momentum.

Nicole's practice generates a larger, more diverse community, with these kinds of lively interactions. Sometimes I think she's deliberately programming French and English language works together, as well as lesser-known artists with more established artists, as a way of making conversation and community. I hope that she knows how valuable she has been to this community and to all of us artists.

When you know there’s someone who truly appreciates your work

Knowing that she’s so invested in her work with artists is a source of motivation for me. I want to honour her commitment.

I'm very grateful to Nicole for her curiosity and interest in my work, for being at my side like that, looking on. It is very rare.

Don’t forget that an artist never works alone. True, they’re alone with their biases, their decisions, and the materials they favour. But as soon as they enter their process and move toward intermediate stages, they seek the opinion of people they trust — close friends, artists, historians, or curators in the field. In this way the artist builds a network of connections that accompanies them throughout their creative process. In this spirit, Nicole is something of that ideal figure who has an artist’s sensibility, a keen knowledge of artistic practices, and also a certain remove from the work.