Festival Art Souterrain
Festival
Art Souterrain
Duality
18th edition
For its 18th edition, from April 25 to May 10, 2026, Art Souterrain explores the theme of duality and transforms various spaces in downtown Montreal, from the underground network to the surface, into a vast playground for artistic exploration. Opposites meet, confront each other, and reinvent themselves: shadow and light, movement and stillness, natural and artificial, analog and digital.
In partnership with Place Ville Marie
Festival
Art Souterrain
Duality
18th edition
For its 18th edition, from April 25 to May 10, 2026, Art Souterrain explores the theme of duality and transforms various spaces in downtown Montreal, from the underground network to the surface, into a vast playground for artistic exploration. Opposites meet, confront each other, and reinvent themselves: shadow and light, movement and stillness, natural and artificial, analog and digital.
In partnership with Place Ville Marie
Theme and Focus of the 18th Edition
Duality is everywhere in our daily lives: it represents tension and contrast, but also balance and complementarity.
For the 2026 edition, curator Ariane Plante invites artists to examine how duality can be expressed through materials and form.
Ariane Plante
Guest Curator
” By invitation from Art Souterrain, I have chosen to explore the theme of duality through its expression in materiality. The artworks will examine this concept through different materials that, at first glance, seem opposed: shadow and light, stillness and movement, natural and artificial, analog and digital, disorder and structure. This approach allows us to reveal antagonistic principles and offer a renewed way of understanding and perceiving the world around us, as well as the elements that compose it. “
Invited to appropriate the theme of duality to curate the exhibition of the 18th edition of Festival Art Souterrain, I chose to consider it first by its expression in the material.
In tangible mediums – sculpture, painting, installation… – as in the so-called ‘dematerialized’ practices– video, digital, sound.. – the notion of materiality remains at the very heart of visual arts. The dualities it brings into play manifest themselves in an anthology of modalities: shadow and light, real, imaginary, and virtual worlds, lightness and gravity, immobility and movement, or even organic and architectural forms oppose, intertwine or merge to shape and offer unprecedented sensory and aesthetic experiences.
The duality that the pieces of art express goes far beyond the physical games of matter. If they carry in their wake the echoes of antagonistic tensions that stir our era, they also resonate complementary forces that contribute to creating new relationships, to invent places for sharing, meeting, and engagement. The artwork highlights pacified visions where individual and collective dualities are not divisive passions, but impulses that transform our way of being in the world, nourishing our ability to imagine a common future, bursting with tenderness, joy, and solidarity.
Active in Quebec’s art scene since 2005, Ariane Plante is a writer, artist, and curator specializing in visual and media arts. She has developed and directed major exhibition projects, including for the Mois Multi festival, the Grand Théâtre de Québec, the Foire en arts actuels de Québec, and Place des Arts. She has also curated exhibitions at the Maison des arts de Laval, the Centre d’art Jacques-et-Michel-Augé, and in various other contexts.
A recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, and Première Ovation, she has also served on numerous juries. Her work has been presented at festivals and exhibition venues across Quebec and Canada, in France, as well as on online platforms and in digital publications.
✨ The 17th edition of the Festival Art Souterrain in pictures ✨
Photo credit: Guy l’Heureux
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