Image: Contemporary Calgary, Calgary
Contemporary Calgary is showing ‘Stacking Crates to Reach a Banana’, a solo exhibition by Quebec-based artist duo Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, through August 16, 2026. The presentation is centred on the pair’s long-running investigation into how bodies are observed, measured, and assigned value, bringing together installations, sculptures, and videos that question the systems used to quantify labour, behaviour, and experience.
The exhibition takes its title from a phrase that suggests effort, improvisation, and the awkward logic of reaching toward a goal. According to Contemporary Calgary, Ibghy and Lemmens examine the body—human and nonhuman—as a site of measurement, performance, and value, using the visual language of modern science. Diagrams, charts, graphs, and schematics appear throughout their practice, translating lived experience and bodily labour into data, units, and archetypes while also unsettling claims of human exceptionalism.
Among the works identified by the gallery is ‘Taming Chance’ (2012), a two-channel video piece that combines playfulness with a serious inquiry into attempts to impose order on chaos. The artists’ series ‘Anthology of Performance Pieces for Animals’ (2018–present) presents 30 architectural recreations that cast animals as active performers within laboratory-based cognitive experiments. Another body of work, ‘Each Number Equals One Inhalation and One Exhalation’ (2016–present), includes graphical representations of studies drawn from work science, scientific management, economics, and psychology, linking bodily rhythms to the language of productivity.
The exhibition also includes five videos from ‘Is there anything left to be done at all?’ (2014), which the gallery says subtly evoke the presence of a tangible body through explorations of non-productive action. That project was staged during a residency at Trinity Square Video in Toronto, where the artists invited four artists to workshop improvisation and creative outflow. In the gallery’s framing, the installation places those videos in direct dialogue with the sculptural works, creating a pictorial architecture that parallels the models the artists reference.
Material choices are part of the critique. Contemporary Calgary notes that the handmade sculptures are built from simple materials such as bamboo sticks and acetate sheets, emphasizing the provisional nature of systems of epistemological control. The exhibition, curated by Kanika Anand, also uses this material modesty to question how instruction can script action, normalize hierarchy, and turn bodies into resources to be optimized.
Ibghy and Lemmens have worked together for more than fifteen years, and their practice combines research with project-specific material exploration across installations, sculptures, videos, actions, artist’s books, and public artworks. Their work has appeared in venues and events including Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, La Biennale de Montréal, the Istanbul Biennial, and Sharjah Biennial, among others. At Contemporary Calgary, ‘Stacking Crates to Reach a Banana’ is shown in the Flanagan Family Gallery from March 27 to August 16, 2026.
