I Won’t Do It Alone, 2024-2025.
For I Won’t Do It Alone, the artist implements a durational structure wherein every hour from 9 to 5, for 5 days, she speaks to the camera for two and a half minutes in what she calls “briefings”. Unscripted and unedited, each briefing was then sent to different participants from past projects, inviting them to respond in a video of their own. The accumulated videos meander through personal, artistic, and social issues including precarity, privilege, authenticity, worth, ethics, form, and many more. Over the course of the diligently executed task, the moniker “briefing” is switched out for “confession,” “testimony,” “address,” and “experiment.” The open-endedness of dialogue as a form, when applied to the artist and her participants in novel solitude, collapses into a kind of void as they stumble into a labyrinth of ideas — or perhaps more accurately, a labyrinth of thinking. They try to identify the strands of meaning that underwrite life and art at large, at times constructing false oppositions and at others finding truth in utter simplicity.
— France Choinière, Curator, Dazibao Contemporary Art
The artist would like to thank the participants: SafiaB, Sa’naa T’Yanna Bishop-Méus, Serena Beaulieu, Tahar Behlouli, Ahmed Benkhalifa, Line Bonneau, Kevin Callahan, Anna Maria Camino, Paul Anthony Clarke, Lucille Garant, Charles-Antoine Gosselin, Amanda Gutierrez, Banafsheh Hassani, Hunnayna Hemed, Susana Hennesey Lavery, Dorothy Hunter, Eugénie Jobin, Leslie Kapo, Modibo Keita, Gabriel Lajournade, Kendra McDonald, Robin Price, Richard Quirion, Florencia Sosa Rey, Troy Tailfeathers, Andrew Woods.
© Veronica Mockler. Installation view of the exhibition I Won’t Do It Alone, Dazibao, 2024. Photo: Matthieu Brouillard.
The Extended Environmental Record in Shimoichi, Japan, 2023.
The Extended Environmental Record (EER) upholds and develops difference within working, artistic and scientific forms of knowledge and decenters them from market and institutional authority. EER is a recurring and collective listening practice. It understands the environmental as including the nonhuman and human, alongside their relationships and intersections. The Record shares its content based on the situated needs and dialogical decision-making of its members.
With Taisuke Eida (Forester, Japan), Yoshifumi Mizuguchi (Local resident, Japan), Makiko Mori (Local resident, Japan), Toshihiko Mukai (Farmer, Japan), Mana Nakatsuji (Local resident, Japan), Yuri Nishiyama (Creative team, MIND TRAIL, Japan), Takashi Noguchi (Forester, Japan), Kaori Takano (Local resident, Japan), with Veronica Mockler (Artist, researcher, Canada), and Marcus Maeder (Artist, researcher, Switzerland).
Embassy of Switzerland in Japan
Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council
UNESCO Co-Chair on the Prevention of Radicalization and Violent Extremism
Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance, Concordia University, Canada
TreeNet measuring devices - Decentlab AG; NATKON, Roman Zweifel
Sakae Stünzi Foundation
Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Landscape and Snow Research WSL
Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology ICST, Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK
Seiichi Saito - Research support and producer of MIND TRAIL, Japan
Masaki Matsubara: Local collaborator, Japan
© Extended Environmental Record. Performance documentation of EER, Mind Trail Festival, 2023. Photo: Yuri Nishiyama.
The Third Screen, 2023.
Viewers are immersed in the life-story interviews of Azzouz, Joanna, Kevin, and Sheida—research participants who become directly involved in interpreting what it feels like to listen to a stranger as this very encounter unfolds. Across a three-channel video installation, conventional understanding of how we communicate and make sense of things with someone we don’t know undergoes an ontological rupture.
Bearing Witness, UnionDocs, NYC USA
Listening Pasts/Listening Futures - Atlantic Centre for the Arts
World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, Florida USA
Acts of Listening Lab
Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling
© Veronica Mockler. The Third Screen (excerpt), three-channel video installation, 2022.
À l’image : Takeover. Series 1 to 8. 2022-2024.
Takeover in which, over two years, a group of young women (ages 13 to 21) are invited by the artist to get paid to be in the gallery and respond to Dazibao Contemporary Art’s exhibition programming. Exploring various embodied and digital art practices, the youth develop a critical dialogue around our exhibitions, which among other things manifests online on our website over the course of the series. Conceived and led by Mockler, this work aims to invite the situated perspective of youth on a range of topics related to each exhibition such as futurity, mobility, labor, environmental crisis, anticolonialism, and posthumanism. Secondly, it aims to give youth professional agency in the arts, in the realization, representation and communication of their ideas. 11 young women between the ages of 13 and 21 answered to the invitation posed by À l'image — Takeover thanks to the support and promotion of the project by Black community mobilizers in Montreal’s Little Burgundy neighborhood.
Dazibao Contemporary Art
Canada Council for the Arts
Ville de Montréal - City of Montréal - Gouvernement du Québec - Québec Government
Entente sur le développement culturel de Montréal
Innovative Social Pedagogy - Project Someone
Desta Black Community Network
Tyndale St-Georges Community Cente
© Veronica Mockler. À l’image : Takeover. Photo documentation of Takeover 1 (behind the scene) Emma-Kate Guimond.
The Address, 2019.
Performance series on the right to housing. Documentation featuring one of eight residents, political refugee Ismael Kabré, during his live address on life as a tenant in an illegal rooming house.
Three hundred Montrealers made their way to “Le Triangle,” a highway-isolated neighbourhood that has become a site of “urban transformation efforts” by the City of Montreal. Staged on a newly constructed college campus, the audience moved from room to room to encounter residents and hear accounts of homemaking, displacement, gentrification, urban planning, landlordism, and tenancy. The artist drew on Emmanuel Lévinas’ ethics of the face alongside excerpts from residents’ audio interviews as a performative and scenographic devices. Based on a two-year oral history survey of the borough, the project shifts residents from research subjects to ambassadors of a municipal forum.
Ethnographie Amplifier 360° Ethnography
McConnell Foundation
Conseil des arts de Montréal - Montréal Arts Council
Premier Prix des Mécènes des arts investi.e.s - Patrons of the Arts First Prize
Engaging Communities National Theatre School of Canada
CISM
© Veronica Mockler & Sofia Blondin. Performance documentation of L’adresse / The Address. Video documentation: Dominic Morissette.
Canvassers, 2017.
The artist invites Kìzis and Marshal to take part in a one-shot storytelling experiment. Part confession, part game, this exercise in listening within a single, uninterrupted take was created in response to scientific findings that demonstrate that a 10-minute active one-on-one conversation between two strangers can durably reduce longstanding ingrained prejudice.
Source: Broockman, David, and Joshua Kalla. Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassing, SCIENCE, 8 Apr 2016, Vol 352, Issue 6282, pp. 220-224.
Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity Independent Fellowship, Connecticut College, USA
Arts & Technology Biennial Ammerman Center
Redd\Flagg Gallery, Toronto Canada, curated by Christophe Barbeau
Future Perfect, New London USA, curated by Nadav Assor
Third Space Gallery
Vithèque Distribution and Collection
Vidéographe Montréal
© Veronica Mockler. Installation view of video performance Canvassers, Redd\Flagg Gallery, 2017. Photo: Christophe Barbeau.
Found In Translation, 2020-2022.
Women Walk the Walk is a collective founded by Amanda Gutierrez, Joanna Guillaume, Florencia Sosa Rey, and Veronica Mockler.
The effort of listening is at the core of the collective’s investigations. Through public programs and commissions, the collective has developed workshops for different community groups of women, including with Long Hall Art Studios, La Centrale galerie Powerhouse, HTMelles Festival, ATSA at Place des Arts, Feminist Spatial Stories Symposium and the Marche30Poly Commemoration (UdeM, UQaM, McGill and Concordia Universities).
Scottish Oral History Centre, Glasgow, Scotland
SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art
Feminist Futures Project
Filipino Heritage Society
Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling
© Veronica Mockler. Documentation of performance exercise as part of Women Walk the Walk workshop. Filipino Heritage Society, 2020. Video documentation: Veronica Mockler.
Hard Listening: An Ethics of Extremity, 2017-2026.
Spanning California, Québec, and Ireland, this work initially began as an oral history interview with Belfast-based working-class activists Bobby Lavery and Susana Hennessey Lavery. Now including the voices and experiences of 14 Irish Republican prisoners of war, this polyphonic investigation explores the ethics of extremity and representation and encompasses a sound installation (Listening, Performance and Conflict Symposium, 2019), several video installations (Felon’s Club, Belfast; St. Comgalls, Ionad Eileen Howell), and a chapter in The Ethics of Extremity: On Seeing, Hearing and Feeling Each Other (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026).
Digital Arts Studios, Belfast
Roddy McCorley Museum
Listening, Performance and Conflict II
Acts of Listening Lab - Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling
UNESCO Chair in the Prevention of Radicalization and Violent Extremism
Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance
Intermedia Cyber Arts Department - Concordia University
© Veronica Mockler. Still from The Burning of Long Kesh video essay. Interview with Gerry Adams. Falls Road Sinn Féin Office, 2022. Still: Veronica Mockler.