Mathieu Beauséjour

Mathieu Beauséjour’s “semiotic terrorism,” in the tradition of Dada and Situationism, proceeds from a scholarly and subversive reading of the century’s religious movements and extreme ideals. It is in this sense a history lesson. Images put to unintended uses, adulterated sounds and found objects—whatever the materials used—always carry within them a historical tension and symbolic charge, as well as violence. Here a slow-motion sequence from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange meets a remixed version of the Internationale.

Mathieu Beauséjour
Born in 1970 in Montreal, Quebec, where he still lives and works.

A self-taught artist, Mathieu Beauséjour has been exhibiting his installations regularly since the mid-1990s. His projects Survival Virus de Survie (1991-1999) and Internationale Virologie Numismatique (ongoing from 1999) have been shown in various places in Canada and France. Beauséjour also does “interventions” and “manoeuvres,” and recently published a visual essay in Parachute (“Empire,” no. 110, 2003). He has received grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and from the Canada Council for the Arts. He is also a cultural worker with the Clark Gallery and the Regroupement des centres d’artistes autogérés du Québec, in addition to being a utopian anarchist and a zoo keeper. He is represented by the Galerie Joyce Yahouda in Montreal.

Optica, un centre d’art contemporain
5445 avenue de Gaspé, #106
(514) 874-1666
Exhibition hours: Tuesday to Saturday from 12pm to 5pm
From September 6 to October 11, 2003
Opening: September 6, 2003 at 4pm