After artist Emmanuelle Duret passed away in February, her friends were determined to stage her show

In 2019, the visual artist Emmanuelle Duret travelled to Germany intending to research how the living memory of the Holocaust is embedded in architecture, landscape, and archives. Photographing barrack #5 at Allach, a subcamp of Dachau, just north of Munich with her father's analog camera and a roll of black and white film, the young Québécoise artist could not have known how her images would turn out.

Duret was at the end of one journey and the beginning of another, standing at the location of her grandfather Raoul Duret's internment 75 years before. Duret's grandfather, who lived in Haute-Savoie in France, was taken prisoner following a denunciation on April 23, 1944, for helping Jews cross into Switzerland. Only time, space, and a certain distance from this moment could give her the perspective to tell this intergenerational story.

The artist returned to her home in Montreal and from this material created a series of photographic and installation works that garnered attention for their aesthetic sobriety and poignant treatment of the Holocaust's material archives. This included the 2020 exhibition Boîte noire at AXENÉO7 in Gatineau, as well as Die KZ und die Gedenkstätte: Replica (2021) in the SIGHTINGS display space organized by the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University.

The first exhibition at AXENÉO7 presented a series of written documents from the Bad Arolsen archives of the Dachau concentration camp. Altering her grandfather's original intake forms from 1944, the artist reprinted them as negatives on matte black paper with white writing. Presented in a cardboard folio box, the object resembled a black monolith. Boîte noire's sleekness betrayed its emotional depth, as Duret reflected on the affective reaches of a simple set of handwritten documents.

The second project, situated in Concordia's busy Hall Building, presented four black-and-white images of visitors touring the Dachau camp. Casually photographing barracks, iron fences, and other landmarks with their smartphones, or being herded towards different memorials by signage, the scenes Duret captured were disturbing in their nonchalant everydayness. With Die KZ und die Gedenkstätte: Replica, Duret prodded at the museumification of the Holocaust, specifically how certain spaces have been repurposed for commemoration, education, and tourism, attracting hundreds of thousands of annual visitors.

In February 2022, Duret unexpectedly passed away in an accident at the age of 31. The tragedy came as a shock. Not only was her emergence as a visual artist cut short, but her presence working in an artist-run-centre and as an active member of the local art community left an indelible emptiness. 

In the wake of Duret's disappearance, a group of the artist's friends — Christophe Barbeau, Vincent Bonin, Sarah Chouinard-Poirier, and Pavel Pavlov — decided to take up the mantle and complete Views from Above, a project she had proposed to the Galerie de l'UQAM the previous year. The exhibition, which is on view until January 21, 2023, is a combination of the artist's initial proposal with some added context by the collective of friends. It is both a celebration of life and a testament to Duret's short but bright career, a moving reflection on living, losing, and memorializing.

The first image on view in Views from Above is iconic. It is posted just outside of the intimate gallery, where a didactic text might have otherwise been placed. In the photograph, Duret captures an unassuming empty concrete lot amidst trees in a residential neighbourhood. The scene is almost mundane, yet the grain of the film and the glowing greyscale of the setting convey a sense of unease.

"Emmanuel created photographic gestures that were quite performative," says Chouinard-Poirier over a conference call with the rest of the collective. This is what Duret saw on that fateful day in Germany in 2019: feet planted across from the remains of barrack #5 at the Allach subcamp. 

Intended as a site-specific installation, Duret used the layout of the Galerie de l'UQAM's smaller second gallery as a parallel to the area of her grandfather's imprisonment. With its cold, grey concrete rectangular flooring, the room recreates some of the architectural qualities of the barrack's footprint. Transporting the viewer from the subcamp's setting to the gallery, from the past to the present, all through her firsthand experience and storytelling, the stage is set for a powerful installation.

Inside the gallery, the audience is greeted by four postcard-size images on each of the four walls of the space and two MDF plywood tables. Each image was taken from within the imprint of barrack #5, directly from Duret's own central viewpoint. It is as though the artist rotated on her own axis, to give us a sense of being in her shoes.

Direct and effective, the diminutive dimensions of the images encourage the viewer to move through the gallery, contemplating each photograph from up close. "She insisted on the control of bodies at the memorials, how tourists are directed through a set parkour," recalls Bonin.

What is striking in these images is how they encapsulate the ordinariness of the site: apartment buildings, a mailbox, a swing set for children, balconies with potted plants, a person carrying their groceries. Today, the area is verdant and lush, and the only remaining traces of the subcamp are a bare, near-featureless patch of concrete.

The first of the two MDF tables has a large black and white aerial view printed atop it. This present-day Google Maps rendition of the Allach subcamp gives an impressive bird's-eye view perspective, shifting our view from Duret's gaze through the camera viewfinder to a different form of satellite surveillance.

Playing with proximity and distance, the artist aptly draws on the photographic archives of concentration camps. The juxtaposition reminds us that we owe many of the horrifying, historical images to the lens of Allied soldiers liberating camps or the flight of aerial photo-analysts working for intelligence services. This is echoed in the exhibition title, Views from Above, evoking the many perspectives of barrack #5 Duret builds upon. It gestures to a shift in our way of looking at things, a tilting of the prism to see a particular place, situation, or historical event anew.

The second MDF table, which is covered in a monochromatic light grey paper, initially posed an issue for the collective who saw to the completion of Views from Above. While Duret's exhibition proposal contained clear instructions for the photographic installation, it lacked detail for the construction of the two sculptural elements. This is where the interpretation of the collective intervened and where the exhibition takes on another dimension.

An important part of this intervention includes a series of decisions made outside of the small gallery, next to the first photograph Duret placed as an introduction to the exhibition. The most critical of these is a small grey takeaway booklet containing an explanation of Views from Above written by the collective, as well as excerpts from Duret's thesis from her master's in fine arts. While this is most likely not the way the artist would have envisioned the exhibition, the experience of walking through the installation while reading her writing is insightful and beautiful.

"I was apparently letting the work of my thesis rest on two devices: that of the camera and my own body," she says in the booklet, drawing attention to the fallibility of both mechanical device and her own being. "The images taken at Allach allow us to see what is absent by engaging the viewpoint of the observer. They allow us to imagine a space, a presence, a spectre of the past through the position of the photographer vis-à-vis her subject."

Added background information for the exhibition comes from an intuitive choice the collective made to include Duret's own books on a shelf usually reserved for Galerie de l'UQAM catalogs. The audience is invited to consult these as another part of the artist's archive — an extension of the Views from Above research project. Picking up one of these used books and finding, one assumes, Duret's scribbled reflections on a particular passage generates another embodied response.

"Emmanuelle's photos held a lot of secrets," says Chouinard-Poirier. The different points of access provided by the collective, like the booklet and personal library, disclose some of these enigmas to an uninitiated audience while maintaining a respectful and appropriate distance.

When asked about the reception of the exhibition, Léa Lanthier-Lapierre, Cultural Mediation and Communications Coordinator, and Lisa Tronca, Assistant Curator at the Galerie de l'UQAM, both note the important presence of the local Montreal arts scene. "A lot of close friends of the artist have visited, but also the broader community and those discovering the work for the first time. There have also been a lot of students," says Lanthier-Lapierre.

Despite her passing and the unfinished nature of Views from Above, Duret's visual and spatial reflections on loss and destruction continue to resonate. Her concise and disarmingly forthright approach to accessing material archives strikes an delicate balance between sincerity, autobiography, and the devastating historical truths of the Holocaust. Still, after walking away from the exhibition, Emmanuel's words and viewpoints linger.

Not only from above or below, but from everywhere all at once, Duret lives on through her friends, family, and an arts community who recognize her brilliance, promise, and eye for confronting difficult memories of the past with an unwavering sense of visual and conceptual clarity.

"When we finished installing the exhibition, I read a passage of the booklet and it was a real revelation," says Barbeau. 

"It's through the excerpts from her thesis that I tell people to experience the show. When you find yourself with her voice, her experience, with her writing, that is the most striking. It has the most value. We tried to do all this mediation, but in the end … her voice does it all. It does it best."