Agricultural Output Index (1848-1957) (detail), 2018.
Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens
Stacking Crates to Reach a Banana
March 27—August 16, 2026
How are our bodies measured and valued?
How do we perform within systems that observe, record, and assign meaning to behaviour?
Stacking Crates to Reach a Banana brings together works by Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens that examine the body—human and nonhuman—as a site of measurement, performance, and value. The artists draw on the visual language of modern science—diagrams, charts, graphs, and schematics that translate lived experience and bodily labour into data, units, and archetypes.
Across the exhibition, embodied movements are rendered into abstract models within systems that quantify and compare behaviour, even as the artists’ reworking of these forms unsettles claims of human exceptionalism. By working with models of non-productivity and by granting material and animal bodies agency on the same plane as human bodies, the artists reveal the limits and flaws of these systems. The handmade sculptures, built from simple materials such as bamboo sticks and acetate sheets, emphasize the provisional nature of these regimes of epistemological control.
In making visible how instruction operates as a pattern that scripts action, the exhibition traces the ethical stakes of such systems: the hierarchies they embed, the behaviours they normalize, and the ways bodies are instrumentalized as resources to be optimized. Together, the works offer a critical and timely reflection on processes of reduction, interrogating how systems of knowledge abstract bodies into data, variables, and units of labour, while opening a space to consider bodies as irreducible to the metrics used to measure and manage them.
Curated by Kanika Anand.
Upcoming Programs
Program Archive
Photo by: Jean-Sébastien Veilleux
About the Artists
Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens
The Canadian artist duo, Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, have been working together for over fifteen years. Their practice combines rigorous research with project-specific material exploration to examine issues at the intersection of ecology, economics, epistemology, and history. Their works take various forms, including installations, sculptures, videos, actions, artist's books, and public artworks.
They use documentary research, archives, and the act of going to see for themselves what is happening to create works that present themselves as historically and culturally situated studies of vocabularies, practices, and forms of thought. Their work then proceeds to conceptual shifts, inventing formal and performative devices that bring these abstract systems to concretion by confronting them with materials and the body.
Exploring epistemological questions related to quantification, classification, and representation procedures has led them to pay particular attention to the history and power of science and knowledge, including the language of economics, the aesthetics of data visualization, and the design of laboratory experiments. Their recent projects question the relationships humans have with nature and expand the concepts of hospitality, care, and communication between species.
Their work has been featured in solo exhibitions, group exhibitions, and international events, including at Movíl (Argentina); Jane Lombard Gallery (USA); the Ludwig Museum (Hungary); Fiskars Biennale (Finland); OFF-Biennale Budapest (Hungary); Columbus Museum of Art (USA); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Canada); Visningsrommet (Norway); Bienal de Cuenca (Ecuador); Istanbul Biennial (Turkey); Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (Canada); La Biennale de Montréal (Canada); Kunsthalle Mulhouse (France); Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Norway), and Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates).
They live in Durham-Sud (QC, Canada).
