Lara Oundjian – the overflow
10 ⇾ Aug. 22 2026 (Monday – Saturday)
© Emile Pineault
Biography
Lara Oundjian is an interdisciplinary, experimental artist creating at an intersection between dance, performance and sound. Her work composes intimate or unusual encounters between bodies, or between the body, a sonic environment, and various materials (objects, text, video, or photographs). Through these movement-based dialogues, Lara aims to create openings for sensation, meaning, connection, and surprise.
Lara has presented her work at Tangente, Theatre La Chapelle, l’OFFTA, the FTA headquarters, and Summerworks. Lara has had creation residencies in Brussels, Belgium at La Bellone, and Studio 303, Usine C Third Floor Projects, La Serre, and the CCOV. Lara also has a Bachelors of Arts in Cinema Studies from McGill University, where she focused on the poetics of the body in contemporary film and photography. Her dance-based film work has been presented at the FIFA, & Christie Pitts, Insomniac and Breakthroughs Film Festivals.
Lara is of mixed Armenian diasporic, Swiss and English descent, a second generation settler on Turtle Island and currently based in Tiotake/Montreal.
Project Details
The Overflow is a solo work about the erotic charge of the body’s impermanence.
Printed photographs of limbs in overflowing seascapes combine with visceral, improvised dances to evoke a body that spills outside the frame of a photograph. This transient body links sexuality and death by holding promises of both aliveness and absence.
The work unfolds in an ambulatory space through a transforming ecology of collective witnessing. Intimate, ambivalent, performative encounters with the spectators evoke the fleeting nature of the body’s presence and of our togetherness. Relational charge, dynamic movement, sensorial photographic details and the space outside of the frame come together to rejuvenate our relationship to death.