Stacking Crates to Reach a Banana
Solo Exhibition
Curated by Kanika Anand
Contemporary Calgary
Calgary, Cananda
March 26, 2026 - August 16, 2026
Stacking Crates to Reach a Banana brings together works by Quebec based artist duo Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens that examine the body-human and nonhuman-as a site of measurement, performance, and value. The artists draw on the visual language of modern science-diagrams, charts, graphs, and schematics that translate lived experience and bodily labour into data, units, and archetypes.
Across the exhibition, embodied movements are rendered into abstract models within systems that quantify and compare behaviour, even as the artists’ reworking of these forms unsettles claims of human exceptionalism. By working with models of non-productivity and by granting material and animal bodies agency on the same plane as human bodies, the artists reveal the limits and flaws of these systems. The handmade sculptures, built from simple materials such as bamboo sticks and acetate sheets, emphasize the provisional nature of these regimes of epistemological control.
In making visible how instruction operates as a pattern that scripts action, the exhibition traces the ethical stakes of such systems: the hierarchies they embed, the behaviours they normalize, and the ways bodies are instrumentalized as resources to be optimized. Together, the works offer a critical and timely reflection on processes of reduction, interrogating how systems of knowledge abstract bodies into data, variables, and units of labour, while opening a space to consider bodies as irreducible to the metrics used to measure and manage them.
Kanika Anand
Photos: Blaine Campbell
Stacking crates to reach a banana (2026)
