Lux Æterna: 8 Floors of Light in a Montréal Hotel
For the 8th ELEKTRA biennial, curator Alain Thibault spreads Lux Æterna through every floor of the SonoLux hotel in Old Montréal, with light based video, generative and sound works by Sabrina Ratté, Matthew Biederman, Baron Lanteigne and Inhwa Yeom.
"Light is a fundamental condition of existence," opens the statement for Lux Æterna, a satellite exhibition of the 8th ELEKTRA International Digital Art Biennial. Curated by Alain Thibault, founder and artistic director of ELEKTRA, it takes over SonoLux, a hotel at 225 Saint Jacques Street in Old Montréal that bills itself as Québec's first contemporary art hotel. The works start in the lobby and climb floor by floor, and anyone can visit for free on weekdays from noon to 4 PM by checking in at the front desk.
The thread is light treated as something that makes forms, not just reveals them. In the lobby, Matthew Biederman's Serial Mutations (z axis) is a generative wall drawing driven by custom software and a projector, running since 2014 and never looping. On the ground floor, Sabrina Ratté's Floralia (2021), 4 single channel videos with a soundscape lasting 16 minutes, sets clusters of flowers inside glowing, translucent virtual architecture; her 5 minute video Archipels (2025) sits on the 6th floor.
In between, Baron Lanteigne's Soft Bodies, on the 3rd floor, documents a live performance inside a virtual environment, as does Hard Data on the 2nd. Inhwa Yeom's Water on Fire, in a version made for SonoLux, is on the 5th, and Solarsonic Band, also made for the hotel, is on the 4th. In the stairwells plays STS 41B, a 20 minute stereo sound work from 2026, so even the trip between floors is part of the show.
The ELEKTRA statement frames the whole show through "generative systems, mathematical models, and processes inspired by living organisms," with nature, science, technology and perception as "complementary expressions of the same transformative process." A hotel is an odd white cube, but it suits the idea: a building where people live for a night or 2, with screens of synthetic light glowing quietly on every landing.
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