70 CANADIAN A RT • SPRING 2016was slated for redevelopment, leaving the museum holed up in temporary
office space until its new home, at the Tower Automotive building, a derelict
but sturdy—and potentially spectacular— early-20th-century skyscraper just
down the road on Sterling, is ready in 2 017.
It provides time to think and grow—something Pontbriand has been
doing a lot already. In March, the museum announced it was expanding
its initial footprint in the tower, from three to five floors, and that it would
occupy a secondary building in the surrounding commercial development
for more ambitious projects. If you’re wondering what might fill all that
space, Pontbriand cites a model: Istanbul’s SALT Galata, a devoutly public
art centre and library, where visitors are creators in their own right. “Socially,
contemporary art institutions need to be seen as knowledge-production
centres,” she says. “I see it, really, as a factory or a laboratory. And, being
Ottoman culture, there are a lot of couches,” she smiles. “That’s the concept
I want to bring here.”
Arriving there isn’t so much an if as a how. Pontbriand is the rare cultural
executive who realizes her goals by equal parts grace and sheer force of will.It accounts for her long list of successes—founding and running
Parachute and Montreal’s Festival international de nouvelle danse
from 1983 to 2003 , stints at Tate Modern and the Sorbonne, a long
list of curated projects, lectures and publications that would be the
envy of any in her field.
But it’s not been without some tumult. Parachute’s abrupt suspen-
sion in 2007 , which Pontbriand felt was necessary amid dwindling
public funding and the lack of a private benefactor, was met with
an emotional outcry in Montreal, where it had evolved as an emblem
of the city’s worldly cultural scene. “The board decided we should
close while we were still able to pay people,” Pontbriand said. “So
I tried to close it in an orderly fashion.”
Some stepped up to save it, but were rebuffed; Marie-Josée
Lafortune, director of Optica, an artist-run centre in Montreal, seemed
to encapsulate the community’s disappointment. “Normally,” she
wrote in an op ed in Le Devoir at the time, “large cultural institutions
bequeath their assets and liabilities to subsequent generations.”
Even now, those close to it are loathe to address it. Thérèse
St-Gelais, Parachute’s assistant editor from 1987 to 2003 , declined to
comment; Eduardo Ralickas, assistant editor of the English edition,
also recused himself, saying only that he didn’t have “very positive
things to say, given the way the organization was shut down.”
Pontbriand’s enthusiasm is an infectious thing, but her
passions don’t necessarily produce politesse. A week before we
met, Pontbriand buttonholed me after I spoke on stage with
Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi—who runs the Sharjah Biennial—at the
Royal Ontario Museum.
She declared that I hadn’t given enough coverage in the Toronto
Star to Demo-Graphics, the diversity-based biennial project she is
developing here for 2 0 17, and that I was biased toward another biennial
project supported by the mayor.
A heated discussion ensued—I disagreed; she was unrelenting—setting
up what I imagined would be a fraught encounter. But quite the contrary.
At the cafe, she’s affable and open, and generous with her time. Our
conversation ranges: from our mutual belief in the social potential of art
to her father’s career as an opera singer to her love of dance, which
seeded her belief early on that art is less about the object than it is liquid,
amorphous and ever-changing.
For Pontbriand, straight talk, even conflict, is the short route through
a barrier to the other side.
For Toronto institutions, some barrier-breaking should be a welcome
thing. The short definition of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto-
Canada, Pontbriand version? “It will be a live place,” she laughs, “with
live bodies. I want this to be everyone’s living room.” ■The Tower Automotive building, home
of the new Museum of Contemporary Art,
Toronto-Canada, December 2 015
PHOTO GEORGE WHITESIDEFaces MOCCA_Sp16_16TS_LR.indd 70 02/04/16 4:10 PM