Centaur Theatre, Montréal – May 13 to June 15, 2025

Vernissage: May 30, 2025

 

What Holds Us Here is a three-part photography exhibition that traces the shifting contours of memory, belonging, and urban transformation in Montreal. Presented at Centaur Theatre from May 13 to June 15, 2025, it ran alongside the theatre’s production of Michel Tremblay’s For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, a play that reflects on grief, love, and the lasting presence of family. Installed in the gallery room of the theatre, the photographs invited audience members to reflect on the emotional atmosphere of the play, extending its themes into the lived world. Together, the images pose a question: what ties us to the places we inhabit, and what happens when those places begin to slip from our grasp?

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The exhibition is grounded in personal experience. Montreal is where I learned to speak, walk, and see. It is also the place I returned to at eighteen after nearly a decade away, drawn by a sense of belonging I had not felt elsewhere. Here, I completed a photography diploma, met and married my husband, and began to shape the life I had imagined for myself. Here, too, I pursued studies in anthropology and art history. Despite all this, the future remains uncertain. Changes to immigration policy have made it more difficult for us to stay in the city we now call home. These photographs began as a way of holding onto the everyday traces of a life that may not be permitted to continue as planned.

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The exhibition unfolds across three parts. The first features monumental urban landscapes: wide, shifting scenes marked by cranes, scaffolding, and construction cones. These structures evoke a city in constant motion, a future always under construction and increasingly inaccessible to those without secure footing.

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The second part is quieter. A sequence of sky views, taken from our apartment window over time, offers a visual refrain. Though the sky is always changing—light shifting, weather passing, time moving forward—the act of looking out from the same place creates a sense of steadiness. These images evoke the quiet comfort of home, the feeling of being held by a familiar space while the world outside continues to transform.

 

The third part gathers smaller, scattered images of quotidian moments: the view from my first apartment, a plastic bag caught in a tree, the house I grew up in, a coffee cup lid on the sidewalk, the lunchroom at my first internship. These are the kinds of encounters that root us in place, even when permanence is not guaranteed.

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While people are largely absent from the frame, the photographs are not empty. They carry traces of presence—mine, my husband Tienn’s, and perhaps the viewer’s too. Tienn, who curated the exhibition, was also my collaborator throughout its making. Neither of us is originally from Canada, but we have tried to build a life here, and this body of work reflects that effort.

 

What Holds Us Here is both a love letter to Montreal and an open question about what it means to belong. Like Tremblay’s play, it lingers in the space between presence and absence, asking what remains when a place has shaped you but may not be able to keep you. It is a meditation on fragility, attachment, and the strange beauty of a city that feels like home even as it slips out of reach.