Nicole Gingras - Robert-Forget Award 2026

I enter an office as empty as a blank page. A new chapter for me, but one of countless chapters for this house built by many hands. Into the collective story begun half a century ago, I am invited to join for a time; I will add what amounts to a word, perhaps two. And then this polyphonic narrative will go on being written without me, long after me. That is what we hope for.

I discover a new sensation: the vertigo of the blank office. After the exhilarating sense of giving myself over to a meaningful mission comes the anxiety of standing before such a substantial body of work. To quiet the doubt, best to begin by getting to know the history that precedes me. But where to begin? A muffled panic, before the vastness of the archive.

But then, sitting there in the office’s abyssal whiteness, I catch a glimmer.

A red envelope. An unhoped-for missive.

The scarlet, diaphanous envelope faintly veils what appears to be a photograph. I press the silky paper against it, and the contours of a body emerge. I gently pull on the adhesive circle and draw out a booklet. The photograph is of a man lying on the grass. The serene expression on his face and the light caressing the skin of his open arms put me at ease.

I open the soft cardboard accordion and feel a genuine shock. Printed across the central pages of the small volume is a still capturing the overall view of a video installation. État guerrier. A woman gives herself over to the will of a pink sea. On one side, she floats, face and palm turned toward the sky. On the other, a wave carries her away. She offers no resistance. Les témoins. Dessins, vidéos, sculptures de Manon Labrecque. I have just opened a chapter that leads straight to the heart of the centre’s historical collection. The curator of the exhibition, the one nudging me toward this portal, is Nicole Gingras. She points me to a path that I follow, crawling through an interstice, and suddenly the white office is flooded with the pink of the sea, the green of the grass, shadow-like blue. What was an anxious agitation gives way to a fertile one: the experience of finding oneself before a powerful work, the kind that inspires and sets things in motion.
 

Unbeknownst to her at first, Nicole Gingras became my first ally in this dizzying adventure. She is the one who, one June morning, called me back to joy, to the gratitude I now feel before the abundance of the centre’s archives, before the protean possibilities of its collection. The red dispatch, like the happiest of accidents, marks the first of many meetings between Nicole and me. Her thinking, after all, runs through every chapter of this story, and always will.

Produced as part of the 2026 edition of the Prix Robert-Forget, awarded to Nicole Gingras, this digital publication brings together texts by Michèle Thériault, Maude Trottier, Denis Vaillancourt and Rachel Echenberg, in collaboration with Mario Côté, Nayla Dabaji, Nik Forrest, Alexandre Larose, Monique Moumblow, Diane Obomsawin and Karen Trask. Its modest aim is to celebrate Nicole Gingras’s unique contribution to the history of video art, while offering the collaborators’ distinctive perspectives on her major body of work.