MAKE PLACE FOR

Jean-François Côté, Pierre&Marie and Mathieu Valade

Whispers of the Invisible

From August 14, to September 7, 2025

in circulation SEOUL COLLECTIVE EXHIBITION

EXHIBITION

Whispers of the Invisible

In an international collaboration with curator Seungah Lee of the Urban Art Lab in Seoul, Vincent Roy, EXMURO’s Coexecutive Director and Artistic Director, is participating in the curation of the group show Whispers of the Invisible by inviting the four Quebec artists Jean-François Côté, Pierre&Marie and Mathieu Valade.

In a world dominated by the visible, what remains unnoticed? Whispers of the Invisible delves into the forgotten, the fleeting, and the intangible—memories erased, sensations overlooked, and hidden connections that quietly shape our everyday lives. Bringing together artists from Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, and Korea, the exhibition offers a multisensory encounter that spans public space and digital environments. It draws attention to the gaps, silences, and blind spots in perception, and asks how contemporary art might illuminate what lies beneath the surface of the senses.

THE ARTWORK

INVISIBLE STORIES

Invisible Stories by Jean-François côté offers an immersive, multisensory environment where each viewer is invited to compose their own narratives and navigate a layered constellation of temporalities. Situated at the intersection of video installation and soundscape, the work unfolds through a complex system of multi-channel projections and audio streams, generating trajectories that are continuously evolving and being reimagined. Rhythms overlap—slowness, acceleration, suspension—echoing the pulse of natural cycles and the breath of the world. Fragments of lives cross paths, brush against one another, and resonate, weaving a delicate poetics of place, movement, and memory.

At its core, the installation explores the notion of the border—not as a fixed boundary, but as a zone of friction, transition, and exchange. Invisible Stories questions the role of human presence within a world in flux, and evokes the ephemeral or enduring traces left by our passage through landscape and time.

BIG OTHER

Big Other by Pierre&Marie transforms urban architecture with oversized, googly eyes that animate buildings and give the eerie sense of being watched. At once playful and unsettling, these personified structures evoke George Orwell’s Big Brother and probe our uneasy complicity with digital platforms in the age of surveillance capitalism. While apps and social media appear friendly and harmless—filled with emojis, memes, and connection—they harvest our personal data to predict, influence, and monetize our behavior.

With humor and sharp critique, Big Other exposes the paradox of our digital lives: in seeking visibility, we surrender our privacy. The cartoonish eyes are funny and absurd, yet they also serve as sentinels, reflecting the fine line between wonder and control. This work urges us to remain alert to the systems we participate in, while reminding us to keep looking—with curiosity, caution, and care.

THE SKY AND WATER

The Sky and Water by Mathieu Valade is a video installation featuring a sequence of vertically mounted televisions, tilted away from the wall and overlapping like pages of a half-open book. Each screen plays the same misty tracking shot across a lake, where sky, water, and the hazy silhouette of an island gradually emerge. Together, the screens form a fragmented yet unified image, inviting viewers to navigate both illusion and perception.

Valade’s practice engages with optical phenomena, repetition, and minimalist aesthetics to explore the boundaries between material form and visual complexity. Here, the television screen—ubiquitous in contemporary life—is transformed into a sculptural element, a luminous surface that challenges our habits of seeing. Through this subtle interplay of geometry, reflection, and motion, The Sky and Water disrupts linear viewing and emphasizes slowness, ambiguity, and aesthetic contemplation. It is a poetic meditation on the image, its mediation, and our desire to decipher what lies beneath its surface.

Dates

From August 14, to September 7, 2025

Location

Seoul

ABOUT THE ARTIST

JEAN-FRANÇOIS CÔTÉ

Through immersive installations, Jean-François Côté engages in a conceptual, poetic, and critical exploration of image, sound, narrativity, and environment—examined through the lens of digital and ecological transitions. Confronting the omnipresence of mass media, he reimagines images as sensitive spaces to inhabit.

His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions across Canada, Mexico, Chile, Croatia, Greece, and China. A professor at the Université du Québec in Trois-Rivières, he is also cofounder of SYMBIOSE, an interdisciplinary laboratory dedicated to art, technology, and the environment. Côté is also active in the field of permanent public art.

PIERRE&MARIE

Pierre&Marie is the collaborative duo of Pierre Brassard and Marie-Pier Lebeau Lavoie, active since 2008 and based in Quebec City, Canada. Their work playfully reinterprets symbols of popular culture to reveal the absurdity and poetry of contemporary life.

Blending wonder and gentle resistance, their practice engages with pressing social issues.
The duo has presented over thirty exhibitions across Canada, France, and Taiwan, in museums, artist-run centres, and galleries. Their work is held in numerous public, private, and institutional collections, and they have received several awards and distinctions in recognition of their artistic contribution in Quebec.

MATHIEU VALADE

Mathieu Valade’s art practice navigates the interplay between geometry, perception, and media. He constructs sculptural video installations and optical artworks that deconstruct the screen’s influence, employing repetition, reflection, and spatial fragmentation. His work exposes artifice, creates perceptual loops, and challenges viewers to slow down, observe, and rethink visual certainty.

Mathieu Valade is a Canadian artist whose work has been presented in museums, galleries, and artist-run centres across Canada, France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Greece, the United States, and Sweden. His work is part of several institutional collections, and he has produced numerous permanent and temporary public art installations.