Montréal artist and researcher Karine Savard earns her living making film posters, and in her artistic practice she reflects on her own status as a self-employed worker in the cultural industry, subverting the use of traditional advertising mediums, such as billboards, windows, and construction site fences, for artistic means. In addition to her surreptitious interventions over recent years, she has exhibited at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery in Montréal. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Études et pratiques des arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal and has been awarded a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

The residency at Centre SAGAMIE will allow her to produce the printed material of her installation Afficher le travail that will be exhibited at Diagonale in the spring 2021 and at the Musée d’art de Joliette in the fall 2021. As part of this project, she designed posters for video works selected from the collection of the art center Vidéographe during a curatorial and research residency. These video-pamphlets from 1970-80 address themes relating to work (the beginnings of union organization, self-governing initiatives, workers’ protests, etc.). The posters, hijacked from their usual promotional function by the anachronism, explore how these videos resonate with today’s new modes of working, for example freelancing or the digital economy. This project is supported by the Canada Art Council.