3 inspiring artists to watch

Born in Slovenjgradec, Slovenia, Velibor Božović moved in 1970 to Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, at age four. He remained there through the 1992 to 1995 Bosnian War, before immigrating to Montreal in 1999.

This experience impacts his award-winning photography and video work, which inspires us to reconsider fact and fiction, memory and history.

Božović’s video My Prisoner reinterprets and fictionalizes a 1994 event: a young man and an officer drive to visit the young man’s father, who is imprisoned. In real life, Božović was a soldier of the army that held his father as a prisoner of war.

The piece was screened in 2016 at Les Rencontres Internationales, New Cinema and Contemporary Art festivals in Paris and Berlin.

The Nova Scotia native’s work has been shown in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, the Czech Republic and Canada, including at the 2013 Alberta Biennale.

“Like One Year in America, they are all semi-autobiographical, braided with historical references and meditations on relationships, place and imagination,” Belliveau says. “Zines and blogs can circulate quickly and widely and invite response — this is really satisfying, as I also work in stop-motion animation and longer graphic novels which are really process-based and take so much time before they can be shared.”

In 2015, Belliveau received the CALQ (Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec) Writer and Graphic Novelist Residency at Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Belgium.

Dominic Papillon, MFA (studio art) 09

The grotesque body fascinates Montreal artist Dominic Papillon, currently working on a series of three exhibitions. Through sculpture, he explores the idea of metamorphosis.

With the first show presented in December 2015 at Montreal artist-run centre Plein Sud, the second exhibit in the series is coming up in fall 2016 at Maison de la culture de Frontenac in Montreal.

Represented by the Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert gallery, Papillon’s sculptural work explores the body through, among other qualities, “ambivalent forms” and the materials themselves.

Papillon aspires to create “figures that are both seductive and eerie,” he says.