Michaëlle Sergile, (b. 1995, Chicago, IL ; lives and works in Montreal, CA) holds a BFA from UQÀM (2018) and an MFA from Concordia University (2023). Her work has been exhibited at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art de Joliette and the Off Biennale de Dakar. Her name was also on the long list of the prestigious Sobey Award for the Arts in 2022. In 2023, she won Visual Artist of the Year at the Gala Dynastie and began a residency at the Darling Foundry. In 2024 she exhibited her work at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Gallery 44 (Toronto), the McCord Stewart Museum (Montreal) and was a finalist for the Pierre-Ayot Award. In 2025 she will be starting a residency at the Lottozero Centre (Italy), the Icelandic Textile Centre (Iceland) and exhibit at the Centre Culturel Canadien de Paris (Paris).

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Art Practice​

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Interested in rewriting history through weaving, Michaëlle Sergile mainly reworks texts and books on postcolonial theories. Frantz Fanon, often cited as one of the most important authors of postcolonial theories, addressed in 1952, in Black skin, white masks, not only the power relations between colonized and colonizers, but also the relations between the person of colour and their "community". It is through this major work that the codification system took shape allowing the artist to weave books and passages thus questioning cultural identity.

 

The lexicon of weaving is closely linked to questions of identity. When we weave threads that intersect and form intersections, these are, in a way, discourses that take place. They reflect at times, a cultural mix where the fabric becomes a cross between different cultures. While by others, these threads reflect the intersections of an intersectional thought.

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She also examines the relationship between the writings of authors such as Frantz Fanon, Mayotte Capécia and Félix Mnthali, the place of black women in these postcolonial narratives and cultural identity, and the notion of the “foreigner” through media such as photography, sculpture, the moving image and sound.

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