News Releases - 2006
Chantal duPont wins Bell Canada Award in Video Art
Ottawa, February 15, 2006 – The Canada Council for the Arts and Bell Canada announced today that Chantal duPont of Montreal is the winner of the 2005 Bell Canada Award in Video Art.
Continuing its tradition of patronage of the arts, Bell Canada provides the Canada Council with an annual gift to fund the Bell Canada Award for outstanding achievement in video art. The $10,000 prize has been awarded annually since 1991 for exceptional contribution by a video artist or artists to the advancement of video art in Canada and to the development of video practices (videotapes, installations or web-based video art). Chantal duPont joins the ranks of previous winners including Serge Murphy and Charles Guilbert, Robert Morin and Lorraine Dufour, Paul Wong, Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, Sara Diamond, Luc Bourdon, Vera Frenkel, General Idea, and Nelson Henricks.
Chantal DuPont was selected by a peer assessment committee of professional video artists: Diane Dickert (Calgary), Richard Fung (Toronto) and Jan Peacock (Halifax). She was selected from a list of finalists recommended by a nominating committee consisting of Brigitte Nadeau (Montreal), Kim Tomczak (Toronto) and Elspeth Sage (Vancouver). Ms. duPont will receive the Bell Canada Award at a reception which will take place during the International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA). This event will start on Wednesday, March 15 at 5:00 pm, at the Cinémathèque québécoise located at 335 De Maisonneuve boulevard East in Montreal.
In awarding the prize to Chantal duPont, the selection committee said: “Chantal duPont creates stunningly beautiful works in single channel video and video installation, which have been honoured with screenings and prizes all over the world. With grace and elegance she interweaves technical precision with performance to create potent meditations on identity and memory. A mentor and professor at UQAM, her involvements also include Vidéographe and the Groupe de recherche en arts médiatiques (GRAM), which produced the Dictionnaire des arts médiatiques.”
Chantal duPont
Chantal duPont has taken part in many international video festivals and individual and group exhibitions in Quebec and abroad. Her work is internationally recognized and has received awards in several festivals, including events in Belgium, Colombia, France, Portugal and in Montreal, where she won the Prix à la Création artistique from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for her video Du front tout le tour de la tête. Her work has been the subject of retrospectives in Montreal and abroad, including at the Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil, Optica Gallery and the Ed Video Media Arts Centre in Guelph.
In addition to her commitment to her students at the École des Arts Visuels et Médiatiques at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where she has taught since 1985, Ms. duPont heads up an inter-university project (UQAM-Concordia) in research and creation on new narrative forms and audio-video creation, funded by the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture. In association with Monique Langlois, she was responsible for the video section of the Dictionnaire des arts médiatiques published in 1996 under the direction of Louise Poissant. Six of her 27 videographic works were produced in collaboration with Nicole Benoit and Élisabeth Wörle. She is also a member of Hexagram and the Centre interuniversitaire des arts médiatiques (CIAM). She has always been actively involved in various artist-run centres, board and committees in video art in Quebec (Vidéographe and Les Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois). She was artist-in-residence at PRIM (2003-04), and is currently artist-in-residence at Studio XX (2006).
Chantal duPont’s work is mainly concerned with issues of the identity of territory and its boundaries, particularly the territorial boundaries between different fields in the arts, between nature and culture, between countries or between public and private realms. Since 1996, her videos have focused on family and cultural identity, self-representation, the vulnerability of the body, memory, and writing as the subject and process of creation. In recent work she explores new approaches to collaborative audio and video writing in cyberspace. She is interested in the diverse narrative forms that are made possible by digital approaches to the transition between reality and fiction.
General information
The Canada Council for the Arts, in addition to its principal role of promoting and fostering the arts in Canada, administers and awards prizes and fellowships to over 100 artists and scholars annually in the arts, humanities, social sciences, natural and health sciences, and engineering. Among these are the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, the Killam Prizes, the Killam Research Fellowships, the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Awards and the Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts.
For more information about these awards, including nomination procedures, contact Janet Riedel Pigott, Acting Director of Endowments and Prizes, at (613) 566-4414, or 1 800 263-5588, ext. 5041, or Alexis Andrew, Acting Endowments and Prizes Officer, at (613) 566 4414, or 1 800 263-5588, ext. 4116.
Bell Canada
Bell Canada is Canada’s national leader in communications with 28 million customer connections across the country. The company provides consumers with simple solutions to all their communications needs, including telephone services, wireless communications, high-speed Internet, digital television and voice over IP. Bell also offers integrated information and communications technology (ICT) services to businesses and governments, and is the Virtual Chief Information Officer (VCIO) to small and medium businesses (SMBs). Bell is proud to be a Premier National Partner and the exclusive Communications Partner to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. Bell is wholly-owned by BCE Inc. For information on Bell’s products and services, please visit www.bell.ca, and for corporate information on BCE, please visit www.bce.ca.
Bell Canada
Jacqueline Michelis, APR
Associate Director Media Relations
(613) 785-1427
jacqueline.michelis@bell.ca