Nadège Grebmeier Forget

« Grebmeier Forget has worked previously with performances mediated through mirrors, Skype, projections, Photobooth images, or in the positioning of her body in relation to the audience. On screen and off, she often uses embellishments like makeup, glitter, children’s decorations, clothing, and packaged food products. She adorns, prepares, and presents her body as something to be consumed (visually, literally, metaphorically), but also as something that is never fully accessible or that performs an excess of adornment to a point where desirability begins to erode. […] While she is clearly drawing upon histories of feminist performance art and its emphasis on the presence of the active, embodied female subject who resists or troubles the fetishizing gaze, Grebmeier Forget’s performances also build upon this history to address the ways that gendered subjectivities have more recently been performed by/for/with new technologies. With her ongoing use of Photobooth screen grabs in this (SUITE) and other performances, Grebmeier Forget references the selfie, the YouTube celebrity, or the “camgirl,”and connects to broader conversations around how we perform our selves online. »

BURISCH, Nicole, « Never Enough / Jamais Assez: on documentation, proximity, and Nadège Grebmeier Forget’s SUITE from the series One on one’s for so-called fans », CORE Program catalog, published by the Glassell School of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts – Huston, 2015, p. 11-21.


Nadège Grebmeier Forget’s interdisciplinary practice unfolds via durational, live, live-streamed and private performances, which sometimes result in drawingphotography or installation works. In these performances, she models and hybridizes herself to defuse expectations of beauty and explore the effects (and affects) of the concerned gaze on the unfolding identity as it is observed and analyzed by others, including oneself. Seeking to confront desires and ideals (aesthetic, commercial, sexual, etc.) through an empowered and performative manipulation of her own image, she intrinsically questions the labour of making and becoming; including the ways in which performance (of self or art) can be documented, shown, disseminated or exhibited.

Engaged within both of Montreal’s visual and live arts communities – as an artist, freelance project coordinatorcreative consultant or artistic director – She has participated in numerous events, festivals, panels, residencies, and exhibitions across Canada, the US, and Europe, and is the first performance artist to receive the City of Montreal’s Prix Pierre-Ayot (2019), awarded in partnership with the Contemporary Art Galleries Association (AGAC).

Born in 1985, the first daughter of a 1950's runner up California Beauty Queen, she lives and works in Tio'tia:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal.