Geneviève Cadieux was born in 1955 in Montreal where she lives and works. Her work explores the ambiguous locus between photographic and filmic modes of representation. The manner in which her work is presented in museums or public places takes its inspiration from theatrical or cinematographic staging, from advertising strategies and their effects on the individual. She is devoted to producing large-scale photographic images and installations whose subjects are representations of the human body, the landscape, defined as points where the mind and the body meet. She is interested in transcribing photographic images and integrating works of art into urban settings, in their visibility, the effect they have on urbanites and the manner in which they mark and identify a place.
Since the early eighties, Geneviève Cadieux has taken part in numerous group exhibitions in Canada, the United States, Europe, Australia and Japan, notably at the National Gallery of Canada, the Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), the Setagaya Art Museum (Tokyo), the Sao Paolo Biennial, the Australia Biennial and the Venice Biennial in 1990, where she represented Canada. Since then, her work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions worldwide, namely at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (Geneva), the I.C.A. (Amsterdam), the I.C.A. (London), the Sagacho Exhibit Space (Tokyo), the Musée Départmental de Rochechouart, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Nouveau Musée (Villeurbanne), the MUKA (Antwerp), the Bonner Kunstverein (Bonn), the Kent Gallery (New York), the Tate Gallery (London), the Angle Gallery (Santa Monica), the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Arts, the Pittsburgh Centre for the Arts, the Kunstforeningen (Copenhagen), the Stephan Friedman Gallery (London), the Miami Art Museum, the Galleria S.A.L.E.S (Rome), the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (Vancouver), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Americas Society (New York), the Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Fredericton), the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris), the Frac (Normandy) and the Musée d’art de Joliette. She also took part in 59th Minute: Video Art in Times Square (New York).
Since 2002, Geneviève Cadieux has been an Associate Professor of Photography in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. She has taught as a Visiting Artist at the College of Architecture of the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain, the École d’art de Grenoble and the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris.
In 1993, she received the prestigious Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Award (Berlin), and in 2011 she was given a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts for the excellence of her artistic work. She became a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2014.