PIERRE&MARIE
FREE
BIG OTHERJuly 5 to August 31, 2024
Big Other is a work by the collective Pierre&Marie. Installed in Quebec City for PASSAGES INSOLITES 2023, it has now taken up residence in the Treasure Hill Artist Village in Taipei (Taiwan) for a project organized by Amnesty International Taiwan. This ostensibly benign yet oppressive form refers to George Orwell’s Big Brother and evokes our ambiguous relationship with social networks in the era of surveillance capitalism. While entertaining content and endless emoji give such digital platforms a veneer of harmlessness, they capture our personal data to feed industries bent on controlling our behaviour.
CIRCULATION
Treasure Hill Artist Village in Taipei, Taiwan
Pierre Brassard and Marie-Pier Lebeau Lavoie have worked together as Pierre&Marie since 2008. They use symbols of popular culture to highlight the strangeness of contemporary society and its underlying lightness. Their body of work, grounded in the need to reclaim our sense of wonder, has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Musée Régional de Rimouski and Espace 400e.
This work was originally created for the public art circuit PASSAGES INSOLITES, designed by EXMURO art public and presented by Ville de Québec.
The artists were supported by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for their trip to Taipei.