PHI’s upcoming season explores art through scent, touch, and gaming

This fall, PHI is pushing deeper into territory where art becomes experience. Three exhibitions (one on September 10 and two others on October 23) will transform the cultural hub’s trio of Old Montreal galleries on Saint-Pierre and Saint-Jean into spaces where visitors become active members in the work via gameplay, olfactory experiences, and collaborative rituals that blur the line between art and transformation.

Together, they form entry points into the big questions each artist is grappling with: What does it mean to be human? How do we connect across species, across time, across trauma? And what happens when technology becomes a tool for empathy instead of alienation?

Into the deep with Josèfa Ntjam

The journey begins on September 10 at 407 Saint-Pierre with Josèfa Ntjam’s swell of spæc(i)es, an installation akin to stepping into a creation myth. Ntjam, a French-born artist who pulls from everything from Dogon cosmology to Detroit techno, has built what she calls an “alchemical process”—part cosmic ocean, part technological fever dream.

At the heart of the piece, jellyfish-like sculptures pulse with voices while a cyclical film plays out stories where plankton becomes the connective tissue between deep space and deeper water. It’s rooted in serious research, as Ntjam draws from Indigenous creation stories and the mythology of Drexciya, the electronic duo that imagined an underwater civilization born from the Atlantic slave trade. But the experience is more intuitive than academic, as users are meant to feel their way through it.

Gaming as compassion with Keiken

A few blocks over at 465 Saint-Jean on October 23, the British collective Keiken is making their North American debut with Sensory Oversoul. Two major installations work together to explore what they call “the nature and future of consciousness.”

In Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing, visitors lie on seed-pod shaped beds while wearing what Keiken calls “haptic wearable wombs”, essentially a piece of technology that translates sound into touch, connecting you to underwater mammals, sandstorms, and space in a six-minute experience designed to help us transcend verbal communication.

The adjacent room houses Morphogenic Angels: Chapter 1, an immersive video game where players navigate a snowy mountain landscape as Yaxu, a newly evolved being learning compassion through mystical gameplay. You can play, watch others play, or just let it unfold like a film. Either way, the point is more about connection than winning.

Manuel Mathieu’s collaborative fire

Also on October 23, Manuel Mathieu’s Unity in Darkness at 451 Saint-Jean takes over the entire building for what's being described as the Montreal-based Haitian artist’s most comprehensive exhibition to date. Mathieu has spent years developing a practice that functions somewhere between art and ritual, and this show pushes that approach to its logical conclusion.

The centerpiece is a video installation filmed in a single shot: a match flares, nearly dies, then gets lit by another match, which lights another, and so on. It’s simple, hypnotic, and speaks strongly to solidarity and survival. Surrounding the video are hundreds of ceramic spheres made collaboratively with the PHI team, a process that underscores the exhibition’s themes of community and collective action. The show also includes his first major foray into scent-based work, with a large-scale olfactory installation that expands how visitors experience the space. 

The PHI+ Proposition

All of this comes at a moment when PHI is betting bigger on the transformative power of art: The new PHI+ membership, which launched August 18 for $40, gives unlimited access to all three exhibitions through March 2026, along with discounts on merchandise and events.

This offer is perfectly timed: the Josèfa Ntjam exhibition opens first, giving PHI+ members the chance to experience it while it’s fresh, and then return later to explore the Manuel Mathieu and Keiken exhibitions at leisure. Each exhibition can take 30 to 45 minutes, making multiple visits ideal. These are experiences designed to reward repeat visits, revealing new layers the more time you spend with them—art that truly benefits from the luxury of coming back, again and again.

From Ntjam’s mythological deep-dives to Keiken’s technological empathy experiments and Mathieu’s collaborative rituals, these winter-long exhibitions invite you to lose yourself in worlds that feel genuinely otherworldly, offering a welcome escape from the city’s cold, dark months.

In a season that often demands endurance, PHI is offering something very rare: transformation.