Emerging out of Klintberg and Nemer’s ongoing research into the life and work of potter Rosalie Namer (1925–2006), She Arranges is a multichannel video work in which the artists handle, arrange, and rearrange a collection of Namer’s pottery. The movement research was led by dancer Stephen Thompson, resulting in a series of improvisations that were filmed at the Atelier Eiffel in Paris in 2023.  
      The focus of the movement score and film project is the haptic and sculptural qualities of Namer’s pottery, as well as the bonds of kinship forged between the artists and Rosalie Namer herself. The goal was for the pottery to be the protagonist, for Namer to be the one guiding the arranging of the pottery and the artists’ bodies. She Arranges premièred at Ceramic Friends: Façonner l’Amitié, the 5^e Virginia McClure Ceramics Biennale hosted by the McClure Gallery in Westmount, Canada. She Arranges was financially supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

As a contribution to the 5^e Virginia McClure Ceramics Biennale in Montreal, a vase created by Rosalie Namer in the late 1960s is displayed and activated each week Marc Sardi, a Montreal-based florist. Sardi, who works exclusively with local, seasonal materials, referred to the Archives page of this website to learn about Namer, composing five weekly arrangements inspired by and for her. Photograph by Gabrielle Montpetit

Wide angle documentation of the movement score for She Arranges, in which the artists handle, arrange, and rearrange a collection of Namer’s pottery. The movement research was led by dancer Stephen Thompson, resulting in a series of improvisations that were filmed at the Atelier Eiffel in Paris in 2023.  

Instagram     Food

The August Plate is an artistic research project and social media account profiling photos of a single plate by Rosalie Namer featuring meals created by August Klintberg. Each photograph includes a short text naming the ingredients in the dish (for example: violets, fleur de sel, asparagus, furikake). Over the span of many months, this collection of images and recipes expanded, with each meal documented from the same vantage point. This project intersects with Musée Rosalie Namer through its mobilization of Namer's legacy through research creation. Instagram: @theaugustplate

Exhibition    Curatorial    Epistolary

A small tenmokku soupière by Rosalie Namer — what the potter referred to as a “bachelor’s pot” — was included in Paris gallery hors-séries’ 2022 Arts de la Table exhibition dedicated to ceramic tureens. hors-séries curators Karim Rahman and Frederic Duarte extended an artistic and curatorial invitation to Benny Nemer to “set the table” around Rosalie’s soupière, selecting other pieces from their collection to dialogue with hers. Nemer selected bowls, dishes, and vases by ceramicists Maria Enaes, Karim Rahman, Lea Guetta, Marc Uzan, Céline Angelini, Zineb Zirari, and Julie Descamps, and accompanied the arrangement with a personal letter addressed to Namer. The letter was written on a series of postcards featuring still lifes by Wolfgang Tillmans, Alice Neel, Clara Peeters, Nicolaes Maes, Pieter Claesz, Floris van Dijck, Jan Brueghel, and Gustave van de Woestyne, along with pressed carnation petals strung from threads.

Photographed arrangements of flowers and postcards made and sent by Rosalie Namer to Benny Nemer during the 1990s, as well as shards of Namer’s broken pottery. The photographs are accompanied by short narrated audio pieces which offer didactic and interpretive information about the arrangements, along with readings of Namer’s epistolary writing on the selected postcards. The audio tracks joined the images on a specially designed webplatform as part of Critical Proximity: Something about Human Connections that Can Happen When There Is a Fissure, curated by Erandy Vergara for Oboro, Montreal. Each audio track is narrated in English and French versions.