MOMENTA 2021
Curator: Stefanie Hessler
With the collaboration of Camille Georgeson-Usher, Maude Johnson, and Himali Singh Soin
Sensing Nature, the title for the 17th edition of MOMENTA, can be read in multiple ways. On the one hand, it assumes a human who is sensing nature, perhaps holding a blueberry picked in a forest, exposed to various modes of perception: sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch. None of us sense in the same way, and our diverse and differently abled bodies perceive and feel differently. On the other hand, the title assumes nature sensing back. Our doings register like sunlight bleaching the colour of driftwood over time or imprinting itself on the retina of an exposed eye. In acknowledging this reciprocity, the biennale works toward decentring the often- foregrounded European-Enlightenment human creator of knowl- edge concerning the natural world. It makes room for stories that dwell in the blurred boundaries between culture and nature, weaving in both human and nonhuman modes of knowing. Sensing Nature recognizes that we are in relation with nature, that we are of nature.
Curators
Stefanie Hessler
Stefanie Hessler (Germany / Norway) is a curator, writer, and editor. Her work focuses on ecologies, technology, and expanded definitions of life and nonlife from an intersectional feminist perspective. Hessler is the director of Kunsthall Trondheim in South Sápmi, Norway. Her recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions Down to Earth at the Gropius Bau in Berlin (2020); Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land at the Ocean Space in Venice (2019); the 6th Athens Biennale (2018); and the symposium Practices of Attention at the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo (2018). From 2020 to 2022, Hessler is a visiting research scholar at Westminster University in London. Her book Prospecting Ocean was published by MIT Press and TBA21– Academy in 2019.
Camille Georgeson-Usher
Camille Georgeson-Usher (Coast Salish / Sahtu Dene / Scottish) is a scholar, artist, and arts administrator from Galiano Island, British Columbia, which is the land of the Pune’laxutth’ (Penelakut) Nation. She is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies department at Queen’s University, where she is writing on ontologies of gathering and how protocols from different nations intersect in urban centres. She is interested in looking at the many ways in which peoples move together in urban space, relationalities, and intimacies with the everyday, and acts of mark-making through the example of public art practices as types of gathering from an Indigenous perspective.
Maude Johnson
Maude Johnson (Canada) is a curator and writer who lives and works in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal. She is the executive and curatorial assistant for MOMENTA Biennale de l’image. She holds an MA in art history from Concordia University. In her explorations of performative and curatorial practices, she probes methodologies, mechanisms, and languages in interdisciplinary works. Her recent curating projects have been presented in the SIGHTINGS space of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Montreal, 2016), at Artexte (Montreal, 2018), at Critical Distance Centre for Curators (Toronto, 2018), at the Cooper Gallery at the University of Dundee in Scotland (Dundee, 2020), and at REGART, centre d’artistes en art actuel (Lévis, 2020). For both the 2019 and 2021 editions of MOMENTA, she has been part of the curatorial team. She is a regular contributorto esse arts + opinions.
Himali Singh Soin
Himali Singh Soin (India / India + United Kingdom) is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, leakages, alienation, distance, and intimacy. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss, and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the healing power of performance and the radicality of love. Her speculations are performed in audio-visual, immersive environments. Soin’s art has been shown at Khoj (Delhi); Somerset House, Mimosa House, and Serpentine Gallery (London); Gropius Bau and the HKW (Berlin); Migros Museum of Contemporary Art (Zurich); Anchorage Museum (Alaska); and the Shanghai Biennale. Soin is currently writer-in-residence at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and was the recipient of the Frieze Artist Award in 2019.