Margaret Haines is a Montreal born and educated multiform conceptual artist working in film, painting, photography, publication, fashion, archive-studies and installation. Margaret received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, has held numerous fellowships, and has exhibited her work internationally; in 2015-2016 she attended the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Margaret Haines latest films and works are multifaceted meandering narratives riddled with philosophical investigation. Her shooting and editing style merges points of view, mixes staged scenes with improvised encounters. Haines’s frame oscillates between a myriad of traditional cinema styles, from hollywood fiction film to cinéma vérité, in the creation of a unique form. The films are rife with colliding references to the works of Jean Genet, Kate Millet, Adorno, and include allusions to ancient Greek mythology, celebrity culture, Astrology, and even Thrasher magazine. The result is an examination of culture and aesthetics that stretches the definitions of what is poetically and politically possible within the moving image art category of the short film.
Recent solo and duo exhibitions include MAC musée d’art contemporain in Montreal, KRIEG in Brussels, Auto Italia South East in London, 1646 in The Hague and Rozenstraat in Amsterdam. Her writing and film works have been presented at The East End Film Festival, Carroll Fletcher and The ICA in London, Today's Art in The Hague, VISIO lo schermo dell'arte in Florence, Anthology Film Archives in New York, Western Front Exhibitions in Vancouver, and le Centre Culturel Canadien and FIAC Les Jardins Tuileries, Cinephemère in Paris. Reviews, mentions of, and interviews about her work have appeared in University of the Arts of Vienna Journal, Artforum, Metropolis M, Mousse Magazine, La Presse, The Financial Times, Canadian Art, AQNB, and X-TRA. Haines’s forthcoming book On Air: Purity, Corruption and Pollution is a narrative biography of artist Cameron and pairs Haines’s formal archival work with a wider analysis of the contemporary moment and an alignment with the tangential and apophenic. Haines is the author of Love with Stranger X Coco (New Byzantium, 2012), which includes a discussion of Cameron and her work. She has been a board member of the Cameron Parsons Foundation since 2014. She lives and works in Paris, and is currently a lecturer at Sciences Po.