PHI occupies a meticulously restored historic building in Old Montreal, and it buzzes with a kind of artistic activity that resists easy classification. It is a multifunctional site — art gallery, cinema, theatre, performance space and production facilities under one roof — spread across addresses on Saint-Jean and Saint-Pierre Streets, and it functions above all as a hub of creation for art in every form it takes. For twenty years the organisation has committed itself to engaging with the most relevant questions of the moment, bringing artists and publics together through exhibitions, events, residencies and educational programming to share ideas about the world as it is now. The programme is innovative and consistently of the highest quality, running to major exhibitions that push at boundaries and plunge visitors into sensorial universes, virtual reality among them, alongside a curated array of performances, screenings, lectures and installations that come to life in the building's various spaces. Those venues are also available to rent, for presentations, cocktails, business meetings or fundraising evenings.
The Education Department is not an afterthought here but a laboratory in its own right. Its pedagogical approach is rooted in a pedagogy of movement and reflexive analysis drawing on diverse perspectives, with accessibility to contemporary art at its core — and "movement" is understood broadly, as somatic, affective, emotional and intellectual at once. Each year the team works with thousands of participants from schools, academic institutions, community groups, language schools and the general public, offering group visits, creative activities designed by local artists, events, special projects and collaborations, along with an activity kit for families and elementary schools and the Movements resource of articles, exploration questions and video clips keyed to what is currently on the walls.
Behind the public programme runs a set of long-term initiatives that reveal how the institution thinks. The Aura, launched in 2020, is a podcast in which PHI Director and Chief Curator Cheryl Sim sits down one-on-one with internationally celebrated artists and personalities — Manuel Mathieu, Michaëlle Sergile, Moridja Kitenge Banza, Shanie Tomassini, Helena Martin Franco and others — to take the listener inside and outside the work of art, treating artistic practice as an expression of the questions and preoccupations that inhabit a mind. Platform, created in 2018 by Victoria Carrasco and led jointly by the education, curatorial and mediation teams, fosters exchange and recognises the varied expertise of mediators, who are invited to explore their own voices and interests. Contemporary Signing: The Language of Art, initiated by educator Amanda Beattie in 2021, is aimed at D/deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences and works on three fronts — training the team in deaf culture and the basics of ASL and LSQ, offering guided tours interpreted in sign language, and collaborating with a deaf artist to design a creative workshop — in partnership with the individuals, organisations and community groups who celebrate deaf communities. Research projects such as Experimenting Interpretation: Gestures, Movements, Dialogue, co-led with artist and educator Pohanna Pyne Feinberg and head of education Marie-Hélène Lemaire, have tested how sensory learning, gesture and movement might multiply the ways a group can read an artwork; Incandescences invited artists working in mediation and education to reactivate the PHI archives and imagine other deployments of past activity.
That same instinct extends outward into the city. A collaboration begun in 2020 with the Paul Gérin-Lajoie High School in Outremont has offered a long-term arts project to recently arrived students in preparatory classes, through exhibition visits, virtual animations and work in theatre and in French, building a relationship of shared culture and widening what an arts education can mean for young people learning the language. The School at the Museum project, run with the GREM, brought classes from the alternative school le Vitrail back to the galleries again and again to explore an exhibition's themes in depth and to test the museum as a site of creative pedagogical potential. Ambitious, experimental and unusually serious about who gets to be in the room, PHI is where contemporary art in Montreal asks its most searching questions — and invites everyone to help answer them.