Guest Artist

Espace Perreault offers a space for creation and reflection to an artist who offers a wide-ranging, sensitive and critical perspective on our activities

Kama La Mackerel

Kama La Mackerel is an award-winning Mauritian-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, educator, writer, curator and literary translator who works within and across performance, photography, installations, textiles, digital art and literature. Kama’s work is grounded in the exploration of justice, love, healing, decoloniality, hybridity, cosmopolitanism, ancestral healing and self- and collective-empowerment. They believe that aesthetic practices have the power to build resilience and act as resistance to the status quo, thereby enacting an anticolonial praxis through cultural production.

They are the author ZOM-FAM (Metonymy Press) which was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, a Globe and Mail Best Debut, and was a finalist for the QWF Concordia University First Book Award and the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize. World Literature Today called ZOM-FAM “a milestone in Mauritian literature.”

Kama has exhibited, performed and lectured internationally and has published in English, French and Mauritian Kreol. In 2021, Kama was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Joseph S. Stauffer Prize for emerging and mid-career artists in Visual Arts. In Fall 2021, they premiered their new multimedia exhibition Queering the Is/land Body as part of MOMENTA, Biennale de l’image, and their new performance Le Morne: Sekinn ekrir pann efase was presented at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts as part of Af-flux: Biennale Transnationale Noire.

As the guest artist working with The Foundation Jean-Pierre Perreault in 2021-22, they plan to develop an interdisciplinary engagement around decoloniality that puts in conversation the body of the organisation, the performance body, the body of texts and the body of the territories that we live on.