After studying visual arts at the University of Ottawa, Geneviève Cadieux began showing her work and teaching in Canada, then at the National Schools of Fine Arts in Paris and Grenoble. In 1990 she created La Fêlure, au choeur des corps [The Crack in the Chorus of Bodies] for the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The piece’s large scale and its imagery based on the ideas of body and wounds encapsulate the essence of her work. Another central theme in her approach is the idea of the imprint. In the same way that the human body is printed on film, scars, wounds, and stigmas are imprinted on skin. Likewise, the grain of paper can evoke the grain of the skin. Her installations are intended to heighten all the senses of the audience, in that they encourage a visual, acoustic, and even tactile experience. Her works make use of a wide variety of media: photography, cinema, slideshows, sculpture, or simple juxtapositions of images and text. Sound also plays an important part, with some of her pieces relying on listening (Broken Memory, 1995). In doing so, she seeks to bring the acoustic potential of the photographic image to the audience’s attention.

She also establishes tension between what is public and private by sharing a very intimate depiction of her family circle. Portrait de famille [Family Portrait] (1991) is an installation made up of three double-faced portraits of her parents and sister: while the front shows a simple portrait, the back features an intimate detail of the model. The viewer walks around these very large pieces, scrutinising the faces and searching out their imperfections. In this sense, Geneviève Cadieux’s work seems to play on the contradiction between what can be shown and what is supposed to remain hidden.