2024 Winner — naakita f.k.

naakita f.k. is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Tio'Tia:Ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. They use their installations as a means to listen, translate, and tell stories related to changing landscapes, abstract forms of inheritance and legacy, and the pliability of memory. Their current body of research uses hauntology to explore the impacts of extractive industry and the colonial project on built and natural environments, while imagining possible futures contained in a haunted place. The project developed at the Foundation will explore local geologies. Focusing on the impacts of the region's mining operations, this work tells a story about the systems of power that this country as it is known today was built from. It asks what pasts, presents, and possible futures are held within rocks’ layers? How can place be learned in a different way when we are, at all times, surrounded by histories and futures? In the process, it offers reminders that responsibility doesn’t stop at what we can touch, what we have lived, or what we will live to see. naakita f.k.’s research will lead to the conception of "portraits" depicting the mines near Drummondville. These will take a variety of forms, including audio landscapes, videos and virtual reality compositions. 

To learn more about the artistic practice of naakita f.k.:
https://naakitafk.com/selected-works

2023 Winner — Karine Bonneval

French artist Karine Bonneval has exhibited her work in France, Germany, USA, Argentina, and Sri Lanka. The recipient of many grants and international residencies, she has collaborated in particular with the Soil & Crop Sciences and Bioacoustics departments of Cornell University, USA. 

The work that she will carry out at the Grantham Foundation will seek to answer several questions related to soil ecology. What is happening beneath our feet? What does soil tell us about our relationship to the earth? How can we rebuild ties with this complete universe about which we know very little and which escapes our perception? Using the tools of bioacoustics and chromatography, a technique similar to photographic processing, Bonneval intends to paint a visual and sonic picture of the land of the Grantham Foundation and its surroundings.

To learn more about Karine Bonneval and her artistic practice: https://www.karinebonneval.com/

2022 Winners — Gisèle Trudel and Stéphane Claude

Gisèle Trudel is an artist, professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal’s École des arts visuels et médiatiques and holder of the MÉDIANE Canada Research Chair in Arts, Ecotechnologies of Practice and Climate Change. Stéphane Claude is a sound engineer, composer and researcher in charge of the audio sector at the OBORO artist-run centre.

Two main questions underlie their approach and the work they will present at the Foundation. How can research-creation give rise to collaborative endeavours between the arts, sciences and communities so as to establish an ecotechnology of practice emerging in a context of climate change? And how can scientific soil and forest realities be experienced through site-specific immersive art installations?

To learn more about Ælab:  aelab.com
To learn more about the MÉDIANE Chair: https://mediane.uqam.ca

2021 Winner — Anahita Norouzi

Anahita Norouzi is an Iranian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal. She holds a master’s degree in visual arts from Concordia University. Her work investigates the condition of displacement in relation to notions such as statelessness, in-betweenness and hybridity. Her artistic methodology relies on arts-based research, integrating her studio practice into her research process, giving equal weight to both the visual and the theoretical. Her work includes photography, video, sculpture, installation, text and archival records.

For the past two years, in collaboration with the Research Centre on Biodiversity of the Université de Montreal, Anahita Norouzi has been developing a research project on the ecological, cultural and social dimensions of migration issues from the perspective of non-native plants that have emerged in Quebec in the continuation of migratory flows of populations.