The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts will present the first large-scale museum exhibition devoted to Marie Chouinard, the renowned Quebec choreographer, opening on February 20, 2027, and running to May 9. Titled Becoming Breath, the show is the first time a Canadian art institution has organised an exhibition around an artist whose practice is rooted in dance.

Chouinard, born in 1955 and approaching fifty years of artistic creation, has built an international reputation for work that treats the body as its primary material. The Montreal exhibition is designed as an immersive, multisensory experience: dancers will perform daily in the galleries, a video installation is viewed while lying down, and an interactive work invites visitors to handle foam objects.

At the centre of the show is Chouinard's reinterpretation of L'apres-midi d'un faune, the solo she first created in 1987 after Vaslav Nijinsky's 1912 ballet. It appears alongside Jardin de sculptures ephemeres, a work from 2020 that was shared by videoconference during the pandemic and will now be presented before a live audience for the first time. Greek vases and an Egyptian bas-relief from the museum's own collection are set in dialogue with a new video installation, Fauness, en aplat, and a performance of the same name, both made in 2026.

The exhibition is curated by Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre, the museum's curator of Quebec and Canadian contemporary art. For the MMFA, the show extends a recent run of firsts in its programming, placing a living choreographer at the centre of a museum exhibition and asking what a gallery can hold when the artwork is breath, voice, movement and emotion.