Tag Archives: Bradley Ertaskiran

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The Problem of Pain

Viktor, dir. Olivier Sarbil, Cinémathèque Québécoise, 17 March 2026

The Wall Street Journal on 7 March reported that Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence had threatened social media users with harsh penalties under the country’s anti-espionage laws for making and sharing images or video documenting U.S. and Israeli strikes and their aftermath in the Republic. The Ministry characterized such prospective posters as a “fifth column,” or the enemy within. War photography, once universally understood as a reliable method of unshrouding the true faces and victims of conflict, has become suspect in its ubiquity, its susceptibility to disinformation, and its vulnerability to A.I. and deep-fake manipulation.

Images have the power to produce consensus and encourage something resembling collective memory. Especially single images that proliferate widely shape our impressions and recollection of events, particularly when we did not witness them ourselves. Think of the depiction of Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing a napalm attack in South Vietnam, or more recently, Thomas E. Franklin’s photograph “Firemen Raising the Flag at Ground Zero.” Like a tuning fork, seeing the second plane strike the World Trade Center’s South Tower on live television resonated with everyone in unison. These images immediately implant a sense of recognition in viewers.

“There is no such thing as collective memory,” writes Susan Sontag in her 2003 book, Regarding the Pain of Others. “But there is collective instruction.”

Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore with Myriam Gendron, Le Gesù, 18 March 2026

There are generally two types of pain: physical and emotional. It is impossible to feel another person’s pain, and so we are condemned to describe our pains using the best communication tools in our toolkits. We might tell the dentist that our toothache is a throbbing or a stabbing pain. Or we could draw lightning bolts shooting into aching shoulders on a diagram of the human body in advance of a massage.

Images might be the proper medium for conveying physical pain. Everyone visually recognizes an injury, a wound, or a scar, and empathizes using their own familiarities to conjure the memories of past distress. Sound, though, and music, specifically, is arguably the vehicle best suited to communicate emotional pain — the pain of mourning, of love lost, of failure, of separation from self and from God.

A singing voice invokes the universal truth of emotional pain and exorcises it.

Jean Cocteau, dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Cinéma du Musée, 15 March 2026

“Hunger and force can never be conditions of productive activity. On the contrary, freedom, economic security, and an organization of society in which work can be the meaningful expression of man’s faculties are the factors conducive to the expression of man’s natural tendency to make productive use of his powers.”
—Erich Fromm, Man for Himself

Pain is a productive energy.

Physical pain prompts the body to identify its source and repair it. Emotional pain spurs action, too, to ameliorate the conditions which initiated the anguish. Analgesics can effectively blunt physical pain, but numbness is antithetical to the productivity that emotional pain potentially stimulates. Rather, it is necessary to feel emotional pain in its entirety — not to induce it, but neither to detach oneself from it — in order to make it useful.

The greatest artists didn’t thrive under conditions in which their basic needs went unmet. The notion of the “starving artist” is unproductive and anti-romantic. Art is unavoidably work and workers work best when they are fed and clothed, sheltered and rested. But a claim can be made for microdosing emotional pain in pursuit of creative productivity. Enduring emotional pain produces faith, and humanity cannot survive without faith.

Not an irrational faith in ideology, or technology, or capital, but a radical faith in the prevalence of goodness, beauty, and truth.

Champs de fracture, Bradley Ertaskiran, 19 March 2026

An industrial wall with a textured surface features four rectangular panels that resemble light-colored stone, arranged horizontally. Above them is a large blank area framed by the wall.
Gallery view, Dawit L. Petros, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Is the absence of a meaningful Self traumatic only when we expect its presence?”
—Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times

“…there is a destructive force that is in love or attaches itself to love—one that moves human creatures toward destruction and self-destruction, including the destruction of that which they most love.”
—Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence

Among life’s inexplicable paradoxes is that love is a source of pain. That emotion which should provide the utmost pleasure, that virtue which Jesus commanded of his disciples, contains within it the seed for immense suffering.

This is why love is a commandment and not just a suggestion — because none of us would do it willingly. And this is why true love is selfless — because the persistence of love’s subjective experience discourages it.

The Designer is Dead, dir. Gonzalo Hergueta, Cinémathèque Québécoise, 19 March 2026

“Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God’s, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it.”
—C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

One of the defining characteristics that sets us apart from beasts is the human search for meaning. We comfort ourselves with sayings like “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” and “everything happens for a reason.” And yet, reason in terms of rational thought cannot possibly justify or defend violence. Reasons are not inherently morally sound. The reasons for international wars, or for interpersonal conflict, are most frequently amoral and unethical — ego, greed, avarice, hatred, ignorance, shame.

Some things are fundamentally meaningless, and it is a fool’s errand to search for meaning in them. Moral deformity cannot be explained spiritually or scientifically. There is no lesson in birth, life, and death. These things exist independent of our inclinations to interpret them. Man’s search for meaning is entirely contextual and relative and contingent.

We have all experienced a child’s game of repeatedly asking “why?” Eventually, every adult on the receiving end of this perpetual question arrives at the ultimate answer: “just because.”

The painful truth is that there is no meaning; there is only understanding. Most of life passes us by misunderstood. Understanding this is the first step towards a state of grace.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore perform at Le Gesù 18 March 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Trick Rider

Sonya Derviz, Hover, Bradley Ertaskiran, 22 January – 7 March 2026

Sonia Derviz, Near, 2025. Oil and Charcoal on Linen, 200 x 240 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
—I Peter 5:8

Ghosts don’t have to be dead to haunt us.

The OED’s earliest definitions of the verb “to haunt” have nothing to do with unseen or immaterial forces. The first listed Middle English meanings, dating from around 1230 to 1588, simply denote: “To practice habitually, familiarly, or frequently; to use or employ habitually or frequently.”

Consequently, our habits haunt us. The things we use, consume, ingest, imbibe, and inhale haunt us. Haunting is a variation of recognition and frequency that helps us navigate the world.

Especially breath is associated with ghosts. One of ghost’s many synonyms, the word “Spirit,” is defined primarily as, “the animating or vital principle in humans and animals; that which gives life to the body, in contrast to its purely material being; the life force, the breath of life.”

Ghosts are merely traces, either material or immaterial, that evoke some living presence. Any persevering impression can be ghostly. A hair in the sink. The smell lingering on a pillowcase. A shadow. An echo. A tendril of smoke hovering in thin air. That which is irresolute and unresolved; that which is sensed but cannot be grasped; that which is stubbornly persistent; that which is more than nothing, but barely; that which is discerned and cannot be ignored.

Ghosts frequent and use and practice haunting in order to cheat death and endure.

Betty Pomerleau, Half Hitch, Pangée, 29 January – 7 March 2026

Betty Pomerleau, gallery view, Pangée. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Haunting, then, can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or — and this can sometimes amount to the same thing — the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will not allow us to settle into/ for the mediocre satisfactions one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism.”
—Mark Fisher, “Not Giving Up the Ghost”

A possible future sliding out of view is an example of a living ghost. A broken promise. A missed opportunity. Unused potential. Unrealized immanence. We mourn some and celebrate others.

Because there are infinite lost futures, we live constantly amongst their ghosts. Frayed strands and knotted threads, they accumulate like clusters of dust and periodically must be swept away.

But still, some traces remain.

Totem Électrique XIX, Salle Bleue | Edifice Wilder, 29 January 2026

Jean-François Laporte performs at Totem Électrique, Espace Bleue | Edifice Wilder, 29 January 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“This rhythm is your world. It is the world as you contract it, almost in the sense in which you contract a condition, and exactly in the sense you contract a habit.”
—Brian Massumi, “Tell Me Where Your Pain Is”

The oscillations of resemblance and change that our world undergo constitute our experience of time. Think of the alternating periods of power of opposing political parties in the United States.

The modern neoliberal era began with Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the White House, followed by George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and the first Trump tenure. Democrats Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden provided a contrapuntal sense of forward momentum otherwise known as progress to these Republicans’ periodic backward-facing impulses.

Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again, is the most explicit appeal to a regressive cultural impetus, promising amelioration through reversal, better living through resurrection, the ultimate haunting. The problem is that the past cannot be reintroduced into the future without fundamentally rupturing both past and future.

Similarly in Quebec, the spectre of sovereignty in 2026 summons a noxious rhythmic nostalgia to 1980 and 1995, punctuated by gestures to Réné Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau, and Lucien Bouchard. I claim that Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s suggestions of a third referendum are less about making Quebec independent and more about resuscitating a mythic history that never came to pass, moving into the future by rewriting the past.

That these oscillations are decreasing in frequency in Quebec and increasing in the United States suggests an arrythmia in the heart of global progress.

Matthew Feyld, Blouin | Division, 30 January – 21 March 2026

Matthew Feyld, Untitled, CP-04-26, 2025/2026, Acrylic and pigment on linen over panel, 20.3 x 20.3 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Yet here’s a spot.”
—Lady Macbeth, The Tragedy of Macbeth

I once lived in a hundred-year-old house whose interior must have been repainted every ten or so years. In various places on the stairs, cracks and layers in the paint became visible. For instance, a pale pink gave way to whitewashed teal, and on top, a chocolate brown. Every decade was represented by a radically different choice in colour. My experience of time swelled whilst living in this house because I was constantly made aware of its history.

The house is gone now, demolished during Covid. And yet, I recall the thickness and specific order of these layers of coloured paint.

The Orchestra According to Duke Ellington and Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 22 January 2026

Hankyeol Yoon conducts the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 22 January 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“And if you’re on a horse trick riding in the mud and rain,
Can’t expect me to watch or ask me to explain.”
—Gord Downie, “Trick Rider”

It is no secret that I was once an unrepentant drinker of alcohol and drug user. These habits I imagined constituted fundamental facets of my personality. I used alcohol and drugs to assert my selfhood in opposition to the status quo. Normal, I thought, was boring. My experience of reality unfolded parallel to the experiences and realities of sober people. These substances were undoubtedly spirits that haunted me, although it is debatable whether I was the ghost or its nightly host.

Whenever I contemplated giving up drugs and drink, I feared that I would at once lose my singular sense of character, that I would suddenly become less interesting, more uniform, less unique. ‘How will I ever be able to socialize / be creative / stand out from the crowd without intoxicants?’ I wondered to myself.

Now that some distance exists between me and those habits, I ask myself the opposite question: How was I ever able to socialize / be creative / stand out with them?◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: From left: Megan Bradley, Tiffany Le, and Jean-Michael Seminaro documenting Sonya Derviz’s Hover at Bradley Ertaskiran, 23 January 2026.

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Gratitude

Suzy Lake, Distilling Resistance, Bradley Ertaskiran, 11 September – 1 November 2025

Suzy Lake, Distilling Resistance, Gallery View, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Wise words from the departing
Eat your greens, especially broccoli
Wear sensible shoes
And always say “thank you”
Especially for the things
You never had
—Coil, “Broccoli”

We often conceive of gifts as those things we receive in a state of gratitude, like presents we are given or give to others on special occasions, or special qualities or skills acquired through practice or bestowed upon us by some benevolent force. The words ‘talented’ and ‘gifted’ are used interchangeably to denote an abundance of capability, as in a talented artist or a gifted musician. Universally, we think of gifts as desirable.

But the truly valuable gifts are the ones we received and never asked for, or asked for and never received, or received and never desired. The experiences in life that teach us the most are those we would have never chosen for ourselves.

Josèfa Ntjam, swell of spæc(i)es, Centre PHI, 9 September 2025 – 11 January 2026

Josèfa Ntjam at Centre PHI. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I’m not a beggar… I’m just a man passing through.”
—The Way of the Pilgrim

Some things we do over and over again in life and seldom have any memory of the individual events. Try to remember what you had for lunch two Sundays ago and it will likely be difficult because you have lunch every day.

Other things, we do only once and remember forever. Traumatic events, for instance, tend to stick with us, to mark us deeply, embedded in memory. Some things we spend a lifetime trying but failing to ever forget.

And some traumas, like bondage or genocide, live on in ancestral recollection, persisting across continents and generations. One lifetime isn’t long enough to heal these wounds.

Marlon Kroll, Travailler ensemble, Galerie Eli Kerr, 13 September – 25 October 2025

Marlon Kroll, Hard Drive, 2025. Pine, manilla paper, rabbit skin glue, nylon, motor, electronics, hardware. 80″ x 74″ x 330″ Photographed for NicheMTL.

And the Lorg God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
—Genesis 3:18

“I’ll be what I am
A solitary man”
—Neil Diamond, “Solitary Man”

In 2007, Sean Penn attended the Telluride Film Festival with his directorial feature, Into the Wild, a rather silly picture based upon the 1996 true story of the same name by Jon Krakauer.

In it, main character Chris McCandless, also known as Alexander Supertramp, abandons his family and relinquishes his worldly possessions to travel to Alaska to live an ascetic life. Because he is woefully ill-equipped, Supertramp promptly dies from starvation, but not before arriving at the profound realization that happiness in life is only meaningful when it is shared with others.

The joke amongst the staff that year was that Into the Wild and Soylent Green had the same moral: it’s people.

Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, La damnation de Faust, Maison Symphonique, 17 September 2025

Rafael Payare conducts Andrew Staples, left, and Sir Willard White, right, at Maison Symphonique. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

What’s gonna’ set you free
Look inside and you’ll see
When you’ve got so much to say
It’s called gratitude, and that’s right
—Beastie Boys, “Gratitude”

Everybody spread love (gimme some more)
If you want it, let me hear you say it (gimme some more)
—Busta Rhymes, “Gimme Some More”

Goodness is usually measured by two criteria.

The first is the ability to achieve another desirable outcome. For instance, it is good to work hard because you will in turn make money and in turn be able to afford a comfortable lifestyle, which is good. The goodness of the first action is determined by the functional goodness of the result. We might describe this as pragmatic goodness.

The second type of goodness is goodness for its own sake, goodness for no discernible purpose other than to be good. This type of goodness is often defined in absence of an action — not necessarily doing something good but rather not doing something that might not be good.

When someone cuts you off in traffic, for example, you have the capability and maybe even the right to honk your horn and give the other driver the middle finger. But there is an inherent goodness to not doing those things, a goodness that does not achieve the desirable outcome, such as retribution or revenge, a goodness in absentia, goodness for goodness’ sake. We might describe this as gracious goodness.

As the omnipotent force in the universe, God, or whatever you want to call the law of nature, has the power to strike us down at any moment. But it is good that it usually doesn’t. We might cultivate and practice gracious goodness in our own lives, beginning with ourselves and moving outward into the world at large, doing good by simply not doing.

Elisabeth Perrault & Marion Wagschal, Constantly Shedding, Perpetually Becoming, Pangée, 18 September – 1 November 2025

Marion Wagschal, Colossus, 2016, Oil on canvas, 81″ x 65″ Pangée. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The real world is not this world of light and colour; it is not the fleshy spectacle which passes before my eyes.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

O Give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good: for his mercy endureth forever.
—Psalm 107:1

What is natural might also be described as what is familiar.

Mark Fisher devoted a book-length study to differentiating the weird from the eerie. Neither of these phenomena seem natural to us, and thus they appear unfamiliar. The uncanny, however, is that which is either weird or eerie but also familiar and therefore comparatively natural.

We fill our time with attempts to perceive and interpret space and the things that occupy it, and ourselves in relation to these variables. We judge ourselves and each other upon arbitrary standards that are constructed socially and culturally and are subject to historical change.

One is known by the company one keeps, an age-old adage espouses. So, too, one is identified by their surroundings, the space that they occupy, the things that share that space, and the activities that transpire therein.

This is why gratitude and grace are of utmost importance. Whom or whatever is our company is that which reflects and shapes and constitutes us, that by which we recognize ourselves. And there is no greater gift than self-knowledge.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Suzy Lake, Distilling Resistance, Gallery View, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Meet Every Situation Head On

Confrontation, Toninato & Lecours, Homeostasis (Self-Released)

“It’s useless to wait — for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.”
—The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

Canadians have long enjoyed an international reputation for being nice. Niceness can encompass a variety of favourable characteristics: kindness, positivity, honesty, fairness, good faith. These are admirable traits to attribute to our sense of national identity.

But niceness can also manifest as toxic avoidance — submission in response to violent aggression, deference in the face of unreasonable conflict. We would rather be agreeable than confrontational, even when it means acceptance of, or even complicity in, injustice.

A recent Leger poll found that Quebec is Canada’s happiest province and Montreal the country’s second happiest city. That so many local residents would examine the state of the world — ongoing genocide, economic disparity, environmental collapse — and the plight of our own metropolis — crumbling public infrastructure, astonishing cost of living, linguistic and cultural hegemony — with such relentless positivity is a testament to our congenial cognitive dissonance.

On old adage espouses that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. But the best time to sow the seeds of discontent amongst a comfortable Quebec citizenry is right about now.

Place Publique with Alex Tatarsky and Gui B.B., Fonderie Darling, 18 July 2025

Alex Tatarsky performs at Fonderie Darling, 18 July 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“If the guy was running Dairy Queen, he’d be gone. This guy couldn’t work at The Gap.”
—David Letterman on Donald Trump

The biggest threat to Donald Trump in the 2015 U.S. election was not the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, nor Jeb Bush, nor any of the other potential Republican nominees running against him. Trump’s most worthy adversary was the late-night talk show host David Letterman, the man who in the 1980s made Trump a media personality in the first place. It seems like a lifetime ago and a million miles away, but until 2015, late-night talk show hosts held more sway with American popular opinion than did Trump.

On October 1st, 1986, Donald Trump appeared for the first time on NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman in an on-the-street-style segment in which Letterman visited Trump’s offices in midtown Manhattan, joking about how he must have had nothing better to do. Dozens of subsequent appearances across the next three decades and two networks prepared Trump for his ascent from cutthroat blowhard New York City real-estate tycoon to international celebrity.

Donald Trump on Late Night With David Letterman, 1 October 1986. Video courtesy of Don Giller.

Letterman was the only talk show host on equal footing with Trump, at times giving him the edge and at others eviscerating him, as in their year-long feud after Letterman accused Trump on-air of racism for demanding that Barack Obama produce his birth certificate. Trump subsequently refused to appear on Letterman, denying him his favourite guest. Recall, the best that Jimmy Fallon could muster was tussling Trump’s hair to determine if it was really attached.

David Letterman frequently remarked that the path to the White House went straight through The Ed Sullivan Theatre. Trump must have felt that a righteous kicking from Dave would surely have revealed any political aspirations Trump might have held for exactly what there were: first as tragedy, then as farce.

When David Letterman signed off as host of CBS’s Late Show in May 2015, it cleared the last remaining hurdle for Trump to announce without a hint of irony his bid for the Republican party nomination — which he did precisely one month later — and ultimately, to win the United States presidency that November. In effect, David Letterman ushered Donald Trump into the public eye and then vaulted him in absentia into the world’s highest office.

Sikutsajaq, Mary Paningajak, Centre Sanaaq, 15 May – 23 August 2025

Mary Paningajak, There is a pandemic around the world Masks must be worn to avoid getting COVID-19, (2021) Drawing on Paper. Atautsikut. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The Building Canada Act was passed on 26 June 2025 to fast-track the approval of major infrastructural projects deemed to be in the national interest. While the government has not produced a list of prospective projects, it is likely that it will include pipelines for fossil fuels to traverse the country. It seems improbable, however, that a wall along the 49th parallel is in the works.

In addition to insulating ourselves from an increasingly threatening southern neighbour, it would be advantageous if some of those major projects benefitted Indigenous communities, and not just financially. Building with an eye to the seventh generation will assuredly serve us all.

Fall and Spin, Bradley Ertaskiran, 17 July – 20 August 2025

Gallery view of work by Ben Gould at Fall and Spin, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I don’t want knowledge, I want certainty.”
—David Bowie, “Law (Earthlings on Fire)”

We reap what we sow.

In my experience, I have found this to be one of the most dependable truths. The only thing separating the seeding and the harvest is time.

There is seasonal time and there is epochal time. In many instances, the fruits of our labour don’t grow immediately or discernibly. Or they can grow overnight when we’re neither prepared nor in need of their bounty. Wisdom like fruit seems to arrive frustratingly in abundance or not at all.

Faith is more than the power of positive thinking. It is the authority of indifferent inevitability.

“The Lord is good unto those that wait for Him,” says Lamentations 3:25, “to the soul that seeketh Him.” Waiting is challenging in our artificially accelerated and instant-on age. “The world would not be moving so fast,” write The Invisible Committee, “if it didn’t have to constantly outrun its own collapse.”

Organ Intermezzi with Áron Sipos, The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, 17 July 2025

Organist Áron Sipos shows onlookers the organ console at the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, 17 July 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life.
—Job 33:4

It occurred to me this week as I was offered a tour of the largest organ on the island of Montreal, an instrument with more than 7,000 pipes, that the biological body is composed of organs, and the mechanical organ comprises a living body.

More than any other element, air is the most divine. It is what binds and completes the Holy trinity. It is at once invisible and material, immediate and eternal.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Mary Paningajak, Untitled (2013), Linocut Print, Avataq Cultural Institute Collection. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Time & Free Will

Harik, SANAM, Sametou Sawtan (Constellation Records)

“Right now you’re reading about free will. You’re free to go on reading, or stop now. You’ve started on this sentence, but you don’t have to………finish it.”
—Galen Strawson, “Luck Swallows Everything” in Things That Bother Me

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about deliberation.

There are subtle pronunciation differences and yet no change in spelling in the two most common uses of the term ‘deliberate.’

First is the verb: to deliberate. This word is pronounced ‘deliber-8’ and means to arrive at some form of conclusion about a problem or question. For instance, to deliberate is what a jury does after hearing legal arguments and examining evidence before establishing a judgment.

Second is the adjective: deliberate. This word is pronounced ‘deliber-@’ and simply denotes an act performed with intention. For instance, a premeditated murder is deliberate homicide. Its connotation is often negative, differentiating the action from something unconscious or accidental.

The verb ‘deliberate’ implies the passage of time. Juries are usually sequestered and allowed a determined period to reach a verdict. However, the adjective ‘deliberate’ does not imply any time at all. A murderer can deliberately kill someone in a split second, no deliberation required.

The word ‘deliberate’ is derived from the Latin language. At its heart is Liber, meaning the god of male fertility, wine, and freedom. The suffix ‘-ate’ means ‘an abundance.’ Passion-ate denotes an abundance of passion; consider-ate implies an excess of consideration. Thus, liberate suggests a wealth of freedom.

But the prefix ‘de-’ in Latin means ‘apart from’ or ‘away.’ So, deliberate literally means far from an abundance of freedom. Consequently, deliberation seems to suggest the paradoxical absence of free will in the nonetheless conscious performance of an act.

When the Orange Cheeto, with reference to America’s involvement in military action in support of Israel against Iran, says, “I like to make the final decision one second before it’s due,” this implies the rarest and most dangerous case of deliberation — a deliberate act that is de facto void of temporal contemplation, intentional carnage in absence of any meaningful forethought.

No Bystanders, Frantz Patrick Henry, Fonderie Darling, 19 June – 17 August 2025

Gallery view of No Bystanders by Frantz Patrick Henry at Fonderie Darling. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“There are no innocent bystanders … what are they doing there in the first place?”
—William S. Burroughs, Exterminator!

Some people believe that we see what we’re looking for. This suggests that the world always meets our expectations. If you trust that people are generally inherently good, you will generally see the inherent goodness in people. If you think that people are generally inherently bad, generally, you won’t be disappointed.

Black Ox Orkestar, Matana Roberts, Erika Angell, and Sam Shalabi Septet, Théâtre de Verdure, 14 June 2025

Erika Angell performs at Théâtre de Verdure, 14 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Detonating the bomb is like pushing the button that takes the selfie. At that moment, the imaginary world is in charge, for the real world, with all its discrimination and hopelessness, is no longer worth living in.”
—Byung-Chul Han, “Torturous Emptiness,” in Capitalism and the Death Drive

War is the most perverse form of self-harm — the injury of the Other in order to encourage the Other to injure us in retaliation. Narcissism is the flipside of the self-harm coin and provides the impetus for national conflict. We love our identity to such a degree that we fear annihilation and therefor attack the Other to inspire vengeance, thus self-harming. By this logic, the aggressor is able to claim victimhood as a justification to attack.

In the 21st century, the U.S. rebooted this franchise with its pre-emptive strike on Iraq because of a supposed cache of weapons of mass-destruction that turned out not to exist. Israel’s insistence that Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities will inevitably lead to a nuclear weapon is a subtler rationale and requires circuitous reasoning.

It is not logical to say that if Iran enriches uranium, it will use it to manufacture nuclear weapons. It is, however, logical to say that destroying Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities will prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons.

Rick Leong, The Night Blooms, Bradley Ertaskiran, 15 May – 5 July 2025

Gallery view of The Night Blooms by Rick Leong at Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“This democracy thing is easy—you just vote for the guy who promises you the most stuff. An idiot could do it. Actually it likes idiots, treats them with apparent kindness, and does everything it can to manufacture more of them.”
—Nick Land, “Cross-Coded History,” in The Dark Enlightenment

The technical invention of cinematography in the late 19th century enabled the mass dissemination of images. It also revolutionized acting.

Prior to cinema, theatre set the standard for drama. And the conventions of theatre were to play to the back of the room, i.e. to overemphasize and enunciate and dramatize every movement, every line.

The motion picture camera, though, was able to capture and magnify the minutia of behaviour, recording every detail, every gesture. It took some time to figure this out, and consequently, the majority of early cinema by today’s criteria looks stagey.

I claim that the trajectory started to reverse with the introduction of television. The shrinking of the screenic image meant that actors once again had to overact to convey cinematic sentiment on a diminutive scale. There was a momentary détente during the so-called golden age of TV with productions like The Sopranos and other prestige fare. But the process redoubled in speed as screens shrunk to laptop and then to smartphone size.

The sitting U.S. president arose as an outsize television personality, achieving celebrity status on late-night talk shows and his own reality series. Today, he has honed his overblown persona for TikTok, going bigly-er than ever before.

Quinton Barnes, Black Noise album launch, Casa del Popolo, 19 June 2025

Quinton Barnes and friends perform at Casa del Popolo, 19 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”
― Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will

‘Knowledge is power’ is a common adage. This axiom presupposes that the acquisition of knowledge — through higher education and life experience — will bestow upon the learner increasing measures of agency in the world.

But what if power is antecedent, not knowledge? That would suggest, rather, that information is produced by systems and networks that exert power in culture and society.

And what exerts power?

In today’s world? Money and violence are likely the most powerful observable culprits. But still, we have not quite located the precise root source of power. There is only one force capable of manufacturing ex nihilo money and violence and therefore knowledge, and that power is time.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Rick Leong, Spell of the Sensuous, 2025, Oil on canvas 182.9 x 182.9 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Being Boring

I’d bolted through a closing door, I would never find myself feeling bored. —Pet Shop Boys, “Being Boring”

“Boredom is immanence in its purest form.” —Lars Svendsen

Good Sine, Group Drone, Cyber Love Garden, 26 January 2025

Luke Loseth and friends perform a group drone at Cyber Love Garden. Video captured for NicheMTL.

We express all ideology oppositionally.

We can either be progressive or conservative, right- or left-wing, for or against this or that.

Ideology is universally understood and yet difficult to define. However, its easiest explanation is itself in opposition — against violence.

Violence is the tool of the repressive state, whereas ideology is the apparatus of the apparently rational. We follow a rules-based order because of ideas rather than existential fear. And yet, when ideas fail, we still resort to violence.

Obedience at its limit is enforced with brutality. Wars, whether physical or economic, erupt at the margins of ideological control.

Horizons, Bradley Ertaskiran, 23 January – 1 March 2025

Gallery views of “Le Grand Corail,” the solo exhibition by Bony Ramirez. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In the 1991 novel American Psycho, the author Bret Easton Ellis represents postmodern ennui with matters of subtle distinction. The variance between brands of mineral water, for instance, or Huey Lewis’s albums, preoccupy Patrick Bateman’s fascination and stand in for legitimate concerns in an atmosphere that defies any sense of depth or retrospection.

Of course, when the difference that makes a difference no longer necessitates discernment, Bateman resorts to the most horrendous violence to rectify his dissatisfaction, oscillating wildly between granular control and broad viciousness.

Rash decision making is a key symptom of disorder. The inability to think through the possible consequences of one’s actions is characteristic of both stupidity and evil, which are the same, as the author Margaret Atwood points out, if one judges by the results.

In a recent New York Times op-ed entitled “The Six Principles of Stupidity,” the columnist David Brooks observes the current prevalence in the United States of the “Dunning-Kruger” effect, noting that “incompetent people don’t have the skills to recognize their own incompetence.”

The modulation of oscillations between hyper-rationality and violence, however, is not the metric of American psychosis so much as is its speed.

You don’t need a psychiatrist to know which way the wind blows. You only need an anemometer to measure its velocity.

Sarah Pagé & Patrick Graham, Littoral States, Envision Records (2025)

Sarah Pagé and Patrick Graham perform with No Hay Banda at La Sala Rossa. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Information and its significance are two separate things. There exists an overabundance of information today, in practically infinite forms — linguistic, numeric, subconscious. But most information doesn’t necessarily result in anything meaningful.

We can distinguish information and meaning in part by their rate of transmission and interpretation. Information nowadays moves at the speed of light. That is to say, binary code travels practically instantaneously around the world. Speed itself is speeding up.

Meaning, though, takes time, deliberation, and intelligence to decode. Interpretation may even define time anew in an era of informational instantaneity. When novelty is refreshed at ever-accelerating rates, and virtual mobility diminishes distance, what’s surplus is time.

Jaeyoung Chong & Anita Pari, In Darkness and Light, Banjaxed Records, 26 January 2025

Anita Pari and Jaeyoung Chong perform at Banjaxed Records. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“All greatness is in assault!—an inaccurate translation of Plato or a paraphrasing of American forcing?” —Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics

Perhaps Norman McLaren’s most famous short film, Neighbours, as its name suggests, caricatures the devolving relationship between two next-door neighbours as they fight, mortally, over the rightful ownership of a flower.

At first, a fence is erected. Eventually, families are murdered — this is played for laughs — and ultimately, the pair die, killing the flower over which they fought in the process.

The moral of the story isn’t too deep or difficult to detect. The title card at the end of the typically Canadian vignette suggests, in multiple languages, to “love thy neighbour.”

Maybe McLaren’s film is overly optimistic, though. Because in addition to reiterating Christ’s empty commandment, which few have abided by in more than two millennia, the suggestion is that loving one’s neighbour will elicit reciprocation. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean they’ll love you back.

At the moment, we have a neighbour impervious to love, who demands fear, who provokes rage. And so, we might do well to observe Jesus’s other Golden Rule: do unto others as they do unto you.

Christian Gerhaher & Gerold Huber, Schumann Recital, Bourgie Hall, 28 January 2025

Christian Gerhaher (left) and Gerold Huber (right). Nikolaj Lund for Bourgie Hall.

There is an apt scene for this moment in the otherwise abhorrent 1993 McCauley Culkin film The Good Son.

The movie portrays Culkin as a psychotic child who behaves cruelly towards his cousin, played in the picture by a cherubic young Elijah Wood.

Early on in the story, Culkin and Wood’s characters are seated for family dinner when Culkin kicks Wood’s foot under the table. At first, Wood attempts to ignore Culkin’s sick little game. But he quickly becomes antagonized and finally kicks Culkin back. This provokes a masochistic grin on Culkin’s face, a smirk that speaks volumes about the nature and desire of violence.

Doing nothing is a luxury that most of us can no longer afford. And I’m not talking now about taking a day off or even powering the screen down and zoning out for a few hours. We haven’t been able to pry ourselves away from productivity for a long time already, with work increasingly colonizing our free time, disguising drudgery as fun, insidiously transforming leisure into labour.

I’m talking about doing nothing in the face of methodical provocation. When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, doing nothing simply wasn’t an option. There was no scenario in which inaction would generate the desired result.

Forcing a reaction is a textbook tactic of narcissistic personalities — whether in individual people or entire nations. Narcissists strike out primarily to be struck in return.

But another strategy has emerged in contemporary psychology to counteract narcissistic escalation. I first read about it in another New York Times piece with the intriguing title, “How to ‘Gray Rock’ Conversations with Difficult People.” What is ‘Gray Rocking?’ I wondered.

Incidentally, it’s just what it says on the tin: becoming as dull and unresponsive as a gray rock.

Sometimes, the best reaction is no reaction.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Nicolas Grenier, Flag Study (Sun), 2024-2025. Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 73.7 cm.

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Objets Trouvés

Opéra de Montréal, The Barber of Seville rehearsal, 18 September 2024

The cast of The Barber of Seville rehearse at Place des Arts Salle E, 18 September 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Voices achieve a new level of authority when they combine together in harmony.

I become consciously aware of this whenever I am witness to people singing together — in a choir, or as I was for a spirited rehearsal of The Opéra de Montréal’s forthcoming season opener, The Barber of Seville, staged for members of the press earlier this week.

Of course, operatic roles require powerful individual singers. But operas reach a whole nother plateau when they combine those dynamic individuals into an ensemble cast.

“The challenge,” explains OdeM’s artistic director Michel Beaulac, “is to find all the right pieces in the vocal puzzle. Once you have that puzzle together, you know you have the right production that will be pleasing to your audience.”

Pascale Girardin, Presence and Digressions, Projet Casa, 18 September – 8 October 2024

Gallery view, Pascale Girardin, Presence and Digressions, Projet Casa, 18 September 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The ceramicist Pascale Girardin says that the physical gestures of maneuvering the large-scale terra cotta objects she created for her latest exhibition at Projet Casa bestowed upon her a feeling of belonging, “the sensation of embracing a comforting figure.”

Mankind is made of muscle, blood, and mud.

Jeremy Shaw, Localize Affect, 19 September – 2 November 2024, Bradley Ertaskiran

Jeremy Shaw, Untitled (There in Spirit) (2024), Bradley Ertaskiran, 19 September 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. —Matthew 5:14-16.

The affective outcome of online interactions is no less affective than meatspace interactions. If someone “likes” you online, it sends the same pleasure chemicals to your brain as if they gave you a compliment in the real world; if someone insults you in the comments section, it makes your blood boil just as much as it would if they were to do it to your face.

It stands to reason that this would change our real-world interactions, too, beginning to act toward one another as if screens separated us. The screen is the most effective affective tool of communication, and affective manipulation is the most effective method of social control.

Simon Petepiece, Clearing Corridor Chamber Cave, Galerie Nicolas Robert, 13 September – 26 October 2024

Simon Petepiece at the Clearing Corridor Chamber Cave vernissage, Galerie Nicolas Robert, 13 September 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“How do you know who your daddy is? Because your mama told you so.” –Bill Broussard, JFK (1991)

David Cronenberg’s 1999 film eXistenZ centers on Allegra Geller, a renowned designer of virtual reality video games who becomes the target of a group of terrorists seeking to destroy her latest creation, an immersive game called “eXistenZ.” In it, players slip seamlessly between the real and virtual worlds to such a degree that the borders between truth and simulation blur.

The terrorists who pursue Geller charge that her games and others like them are the root cause for a dangerous societal turn against reality.

The film is science fiction, to be sure. But it is an increasingly accurate metaphor for the state of media today: from behind a screen, it is almost impossible to tell whether or not we are “in the game.”

André Turpin & Léa-Valérie Létourneau, Clusters, Centre PHI, 20 September – 20 October 2024

André Turpin & Léa-Valérie Létourneau at the Clusters vernissage, Centre PHI, 20 September 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

We love to think, as human beings, that we are in total control. Of our situations, of our environment, of ourselves, and even of one another.

In classical cinema studies, there are two general approaches that have historically shaped film analysis.

One is auteur theory, which presupposes that directors possess some kind of rarefied genius and produce works of singular vision.

Consequently, filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, or Martin Scorsese made movies that were manifestations of their own unique perspectives on reality.

It is true that these examples suggest some measure of authorial control. Hitchcock no doubt made Hitchcockian films. And there are certain aesthetic and thematic hallmarks of a Kubrick or a Scorsese production.

Bureau de Stephan Skoda (Cluster 1, 2020), André Turpin & Léa-Valérie Létourneau, Centre PHI. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Another less popular approach, but which I believe is closer to the truth, is what the critic Thomas Schatz in his book The Genius of the System called “the whole equation of pictures.”

Schatz argued that movies were made efficiently and effectively by the well-oiled machinery of an entire studio system, especially in the early days of Hollywood. Everyone — from the director on down to the script supervisor, the costumer, even the electrician — played an integral role in the look and feel of every picture.

In philosophy, these collections of people, objects, and ideas are called assemblages. Assemblages exert their own sort of agency. They manifest situations and bring events into being.

Assemblage theory ascribes power to complexity, favouring collectivity over individual agency, recognizing the limitations of a purely anthropocentric worldview. Focussing upon assemblages also complicates the notion of temporality, making it impossible to circumscribe events within time.

Phoebe Greenberg, André Turpin, and Denis Villeneuve at the Clusters vernissage, Centre PHI, 20 September 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A film may be finished in a manner of speaking when it reaches the end of its production schedule, when it leaves the editing room and is presented onscreen. But a film embarks upon another life when it enters into various discursive assemblages. A film changes with its historical context, for instance, or in relation to audiences, in relation to other films, other works of art, other things that are not art.

In this way, there is no such thing as pure completion. An auteur may have a singular vision, but that vision is never fully realized, because visions themselves continue evolving within novel agentic assemblages.

The team of filmmaker André Turpin and art director Léa-Valérie Létourneau invoke the assemblage’s inherent agency in Clusters, their collaborative photographic exhibition on view at Centre PHI. By examining and calling attention to multiplicity, they also acknowledge the potentially infinite possibility in creating works of art.

“It’s really like a film you’re editing,” Turpin says.

“In teamwork, there’s always one person who is more convinced than the other. We’re never totally sure when a picture is finished.”◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider subscribing.

Cover image: Jeremy Shaw

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