21.01.2026

Prix Librairie CLARK — Tristan Sasseville-Langelier

Developed in collaboration with ESPACE art actuel magazine, the Librairie CLARK Prize supports and promotes practices of critical and theoretical writing rooted in contemporary art, research, and experimentation. In 2024-2025, this prize was aimed towards the publication of an article engaging with CLARK’s programming.

The selected text, Restituer l’archive de l’éphémère: la performance et ses traces mémorielles, offers a critical reflection on the transmission, remembrance, and archiving of performance art. Drawing from the traumatic forgetting of a performance by Danny Gaudreault presented during the Centre CLARK x RiAP program (Ateliers Belleville, September 11, 2024), the author develops a methodology based on a conversation with a spectator and friend to examine the collective, relational, and affective nature of memory.

Read the text here

Tristan Sasseville-Langelier is a PhD candidate in art history (UQAM / Université de Montréal / Concordia University) and a member of the Centre de recherches Cultures – Arts – Sociétés (CÉLAT). Under the supervision of Ève Lamoureux, his research focuses on the affective overflows of revolt, politically resistant acts that have been psychiatrized, and contemporary practices in writing and performance art.

Supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), his master’s thesis examines the practices of three performance art artists in Quebec—Alegría Gobeil, Danny Gaudreault, and Adriana Disman—whose works address issues related to emotional suffering and psychiatrization. Drawing on Mad Studies and queer political theory, the researcher assesses how these artistic practices generate alternative forms of knowledge and constitute strategies of resistance to the normative discourses of psychiatry. With Lamoureux, he is the co-author of the chapter “Art, Mental Health, and the Professional Arts Milieu in Quebec: Decades of Diverse Practices” in the book À visage humain (2024), edited by Francine Saillant.