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Réveiller L’Androgyne. Reviving the Bookstore.
Collective exhibition
January 29 to April 11, 2026
This group exhibition brings together nine queer artists who each revisit L’Androgyne, Québec’s first gay, lesbian, and feminist bookstore, active from 1973 to 2002. Serving simultaneously as a site for the circulation of ideas, a space for encounters, and a hub of political engagement, the bookstore played a central role in shaping queer communities at a time when visible spaces of sociability were rare and often precarious.
Drawing on this legacy, the artists–who never experienced L’Androgyne as an active space–set in motion intergenerational transmission, offering traces in which erased narratives resurface. The exhibition thus examines the persistence of queer memory and considers how a place that no longer exists continues to generate meaning, connection, and collective forms of gathering.
ARTISTS
fernando belote
naakita f.k.
Lou Fozin
Em Laferrière
Lucas LaRochelle
kimura byol lemoine
Flora Nwakobi
Joshua Schwebel
Lou Sheppard
VERNISSAGE
Thursday, January 29, 2026
6pm until late
Program :
- Performance by fernando belote
- Launching of Librairie SKOL, renamed L’Androgyne for the duration of the exhibition
- Launching of café space, with barista-in-residence Wenhui Zhang, fondatrice du projet Thé Jinjin
Warmest thanks to our programming committee : Magali Babin, Théo Bignon, Aglaë Brown, Victoria Carrasco, Claudia Chan Tak, Vincent Fortier, Steve Giasson, Yasmeen Kanaan, Gauthier Kriaâ, Kama La Mackerel, kimura byol lemoine, Fabien Marcil, Helena Martin Franco, VK Preston, Jean-François Prost, Alexandra Riesbri, Michèle St-Amand, Florent To Lay, Sarah Toung ondo
Press releasefernando belote (Fern) is a bicha/queer multidisciplinary artist and Brazilian immigrant based in Montréal. Their practice emerges from lived experiences of dissidence in Brazil—shaped by disability, domestic violence, and class struggle—and from the ethical tensions of translating these memories within a migratory context.
naakita f.k. is an interdisciplinary artist based between Zhegagoynak/Chicago and Tio’Tia:Ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Through place-based and site-specific relations, they consider extractivism, including both resource extraction and extractive ideologies that show up in the wake of violence to land.
Lou Fozin by day, LaFHomme by night, they continuously contribute to the hybridization of afro descendent cultures and digital technologies as a way to document the realities of diasporic people. Fozin is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist & DJ of Cameroonian descent based in Montreal and New York.
Em Laferrière (she/they) is a queer photographer of mixed Canadian and South Asian heritage living and working in Tio’Tia:Ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Through photography and installation, their practice explores themes of cultural, sexual and gender identity.
Lucas LaRochelle is a designer, technologist and researcher whose work is concerned with queer and trans digital cultures, community-based archiving, and artificial intelligence. They are the founder of Queering The Map, a community generated mapping platform for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space.
kimura byol lemoine (키무라 별 르무완 * キムラ ビョル レモワン) is a multi-disciplinary artist, activist and archivist. Busan, South Korea, and adopted in Belgium, kimura-lemoine returned to South Korea as an adult in 1993 where ze lived until 2006. kimura is a conceptual multimedia feminist artist whose work focuses on identities (diaspora, ethnicity, colorism, post-colonialism, immigration, gender).
Flora Nwakobi (they/them) is an audacious multi-hyphenate who shapeshifts between being a writer, director, painter, death doula, yoga teacher, & abolitionist. Dancing between these practices informs their filmmaking, which engages the absurd realities of existence through the lens of a Queer Nigerian-Indian person in the West.
Joshua Schwebel is a Canadian conceptual artist whose work critically examines art’s financial dependencies and the compromises that these entail. Schwebel’s practice employs institutional critique, direct action, and performative interventions that uncomfortably implicate and re-implicate us as administrators, entrepreneurs, creative practitioners, spectators and performers struggling within an ethically compromised cultural field.
Lou Sheppard works in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation based practices. His work focuses on climate crisis, disrupting settler-colonial relationships to land, on queer bodies and queer ecologies, and imagining queer futurities, by responding to the social and material histories of sites, bodies and environments.
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