Drawing Conversations, UQAM Design Centre, Montreal: Invited Exhibition Curated by Carole Lévesque and Thomas-Bernard Kenniff

Drawing Conversations Drawing Conversations is an invitation to talk about drawing, through drawing. Presented at UQAM’s Design Centre, this exhibition brings together the work of 16 architects and academics in an exchange on contemporary drawing practices in architecture. The exhibition leads us to consider drawing beyond its qualities as a graphic object to glimpse the open conversation it sets up, a dialogue that is as much individual, with oneself as a practitioner, as it is collective, with other drawings, people and practices.

Both grounded in the real world and in a world-in-making, each drawing and each conversation is an opportunity to explore different techniques, to trace possible worlds, to play with words, to give way to fantastical fabulations, to engage in poetic exchanges about the world, about the practice of drawing, about architecture, about those who draw.

The exhibition originates from the meeting between the curators, Carole Lévesque and Thomas-Bernard Kenniff, and the Drawing Architecture research project initiated by Riet Eeckhout and Arnaud Hendrickx of KU Leuven university in Belgium. The project convened biannual meetings between a group of renowned international practitioners, offering them the opportunity to discuss their drawing practice. In a world premiere, Drawing Conversations offers a pause on these encounters by foregrounding their collective interrogation through drawings put in conversation. The exhibition expands on these encounters by focusing on the capacity of drawing to engage reflection on modes of representation, design practices and research fields, and the role of this reflection in the construction of a common world. It focuses on the collective exercise of interrogation and develops around drawing as a mechanism of interaction.