Holding Space brings together moving images, sculpture, and drawing to explore how embodied memory, intergenerational trauma, and processes of collective repair shape the ways we relate to ourselves and to one another.

Film still: Connecting from the Inside Out, 2024
Performers: Aurélie Ann Figaro, Nicole Jacobs, Jeimy Oviedo Quesada and Miranda Chan (left to right)
Costume: Rad Hourani. Direction photo : Nadia Louis-Desmarchais.
© My-Van Dam

In the film Connecting from the Inside Out, My-Van Dam explores somatic voice and movement through a collaboration with four performers. Breath, contact, and deep listening become pathways toward individual and collective repair, revealing how bodies co-regulate through relationships of interdependence.

Echoing these shared experiences, drawings unfold as visual and choreographic scores that trace embodied memory and map the emotional landscape between self and other.

Sculptural works extend this dialogue into space, translating internal states into material form. Through knots, braided textiles, and layers of resin and plaster, they hold the tension between movement and stillness, rigidity and flexibility, allowing memory to take on a physical presence.

Holding Space invites visitors to slow down and inhabit a space of presence, where embodied memory, vulnerability, and interdependence open possibilities for transformation.

Artist Bio

Credit: Hamza Abouelouafaa

My-Van Dam is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tiohtiá: ke / Mooniyang / Montreal. She holds a BFA from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Her artistic practice focuses on the transmission of intergenerational trauma and its multiple physical and psychological impacts. She also explores body memory and the healing processes that foster personal and collective emancipation from oppressive systems. Her current research is rooted in the exploration of somatic theories and practices to propose a vision of care that is interdependent and collaborative.

Dam has exhibited her work at the Rimouski Museum (2025), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022) as part of the MAADI project, Place des Arts (2021), Projet Casa (2022), Art Souterrain (2022), and La Centrale Galerie (2024). Recent solo exhibitions include Diagonale (2026), PHI (2025), and Montréal, arts interculturels (MAI) (2024). She has participated in residencies at SBC galerie d’art contemporain (2023) and Pocoapoco in Oaxaca, Mexico (2026). Her work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts de Montréal.