D ELI GHT S| THE ART WORLD
Long knives and a silent symphony
C Peter Simpson
Editor’s note: All dates and times are tentative, as pandemic public health rules evolve. Please contact galleries before visiting to learn of any changes.
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oncurrent exhibitions at AXENÉO7 may challenge a viewer’s sense of how Canada looks, and how it is governed. The exhibitions, which run Nov. 3 to Dec. 11 at the artist-run centre in Gatineau, include Laure Bourgault’s canadas, and Simon Belleau’s Pour Quelques Arpents de Neige (For a Few Acres of Snow). Belleau’s exhibition revisits, 40 years later, a notorious moment in Canada’s political history, when prime minister Pierre Trudeau, behind Quebec’s back, turned the provincial premiers toward support for the new and bitterly contested Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Almost all premiers had been opposed to the Charter as an incursion on provincial jurisdictions, and none more than Quebec’s René Lévesque. Overnight on Nov. 4, 1981, after Lévesque and his delegation had returned to Gatineau, Trudeau’s team doggedly won support for the Charter from the other premiers. The next morning Lévesque, outraged at what he saw as backstabbing by other premiers, decried it as “the night of the long knives” — a provocative label, given its origin in a night of extreme violence by the Nazi party in Germany in 1934. Outside of Quebec, the event and its FALL 2021 | OCT-NOV-DEC
AURE BOURGAULT
A dry, federal compendium is the launching point for Laure Bourgault’s “canadas” at AXENÉO7 in Gatineau.
