T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss
With the help of Silverbear (Kanien’kehá:ka) and Joce TwoCrows Mashkikii Bimosewin Tremblay (Great Lakes métis, onon:wat/nizh manidook)
TEIONHENKWEN Supporters of Life is a land-based urban ecology, a gathering place that follows pathways of generative reciprocity. It includes local native plant varieties with medicinal properties and utilitarian and ceremonial values. The shapes in which these plants are bedded in are inspired by local Indigenous cultural symbols. All of these elements combine to create visibility for Indigenous plants, peoples, and animals that are present but have few safe places to gather and coexist in urban spaces.
New Red Order’s exhibition The Last of the Lemurians tackles by New Age Lemurian beliefs and critically and humorously punctures their racist theories and romanticized conceptions. NRO metamorphizes the moving, sometimes toxic, dimension of historical narratives and their crystallization in the collective imagination. A hybridization of the native and the alien, The Last of the Lemurians makes light out of colonial desires, proposing an alternative to the romanticization of Indigeneity.
In the group exhibition Worldmaking Tentacles, technological, ecological, and spiritual wisdoms meet to conjure an array of possible futures. The artists summon phoenix-like moments in which nature emerges outside of colonial-patriarchal destructive relations; bodies transcend race, gender, and sexuality; and ancestral knowledge is wedded with technology. Each in their own way, the artists are concerned with a reconditioning of historical, linguistic, and scientific imaginaries. In this postnatural, posthuman universe, the past gains multiple tentacles that shapeshift toward a myriad of speculative, caring futures.
Artist Léuli Eshrāghi’s exhibition The end is where we start from is articulated around a ceremony in which humans, animals, and nature come together to celebrate Indigenous kinships, along with the multiple genders, sexualities, and pleasures that they bear. The destructiveness of exploitative relations with land, water, and other entities is replaced by touch and affect, going beyond taboos imposed by Western cultures. Eshrāghi proposes new, sensitive avenues for addressing the future of fa’afafine, fa’atama, queer, trans, nonbinary, and other people, whose key roles in the intellectual and cultural life of a multiplicity of Indigenous kinship systems have been violently crushed.
In the exhibition Crushed Butterflies Dream Too, artists Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau feature a sung and danced correspondence between an anonymous contemporary interlocutor and the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (1920–77). Attending to the themes of language, nature, urban-ness, and illness—which the protagonist and the author have in common—the exhibition probes the porous boundaries between humans and the material world. The artists explore the gestural, aural, and narrative potential of bodies and objects by highlighting the alienation experienced when the former become carapaces and the latter come to life. In this musical taking place between the worlds of the living and the dead, bodies and objects take on an inebriating sensuality, both tender and dark, like the stifling heat of a tropical city.
The group exhibition Of the Land considers human connections to land. The artists address destructive human relationships with our surroundings and the way that colonial seizing of territory has disrupted relations with the land. They attend to the history and effervescent presence of smell of a tiny plant on the verge of disappearance. And they problematize notions of the garden as a universal secular retreat. Considering ecology beyond the natural, Of the Land proposes fond and caring ways of relating. It emphasizes that we—a “we” encompassing both a human and a fox—are not in the world, but are of the world.
In the exhibition Poetic Disorder, artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz challenges Western views of Puerto Rico, Haiti, and other locales whose histories are steeped in colonization, military occupation, and resistance. She brings together four film works that, each in their own way, address and embody the complexities underlying the notion of care. These four works develop a narrative of coexistence carried by imagination, emotions, and discrepancies. The cinematographic constellation created by Santiago Muñoz proposes a nonlinear, prismatic way of seeing the world, a plural reading that takes over from the single, disembodied vision promulgated by colonialism and Western thought.
In the exhibition Intimacy of Strangers, artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan evocatively teases out a few of the planetary connections among Monarch butterflies, amphibians, bacteria, mushrooms, crabs, and a myriad of other creatures. She imagines a world where anthropomorphic relations between objects and subjects are disrupted, weaving sensual and symbiotic reciprocities into a narrative by exploring the idea of a lasting partnership and commitment among different entities. The exhibition addresses the diversity and fluidity of existence through community and inter-species equity. By debunking established notions of nature, culture, and technology, Jordan envisages possible paths for a living-together, a “becoming-with,” on a damaged planet.
The exhibition Exquisite Score present the result of a correspondence between artist Caroline Monnet and musician Laura Ortman, maintained for months from their respective homes in Montreal and New York. Through exchanges of letters, which also included images, audio recordings, and musical excerpts, they explore, metaphorically and materially, the topography of the land that stretched out between them. Like an echo reverberating on mountainsides, the resulting score both reflects their separation and brings them together. Between Montreal and New York, the exhibition traces a shortcut path, transcending borders—symbolic and physical—a trail for us to walk along outside of time and space.
The exhibition Rivers Flowing Through Bodies navigates ideas of pollution and toxicity in the filmic and photographic work of Thao Nguyen Phan and an installation by Candice Lin and P. Staff. The artists trace fates shared by humans and nonhumans, material and spiritual, the living and the nonliving. Different and yet related, Phan’s and Lin and Staff’s works expose contamination in varying forms, as agents affecting human bodies, land, and water in connected ways, both material and immaterial.
In the exhibition Diffracting. Of Light and of Land, BUSH Gallery presents works partly produced in summer 2021 during a residency in Secwepemcúl̓ecw and examines alternative photographic processes and the political implications of site-specific creation. Emerging from their activation within the territory, the works bear witness to the influence of light on organic materials, undoubtedly altered as it passes—here, allowing a plant to nourish itself through photosynthesis; there becoming an archive of time spent on the land together. Together, the artists highlight land as a living entity and the many cultural inflections it engenders.
In collaboration with the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
spill is an installation that frames various elements within a chroma-key green stage. A cut-out of a shallow pond with trickling waterfalls, this place could be anywhere or any moment in time. It is an image becoming—a screensaver, a wallpaper, a projection of nature. A perfect ruin, it is a distraction, a folly of sorts.
In the exhibition The Mountain Sings Underwater, artist Jamilah Sabur takes inspiration from a mysterious sound that rises from the Caribbean Sea every 120 days—the Rossby whistle, a natural phenomenon caused by the oscillations of the water level and pressure exerted on the sea floor, measurable only from space. In a dispersed arrangement on the floor and walls of the gallery space, five screens play out a sprawling narrative that reflects a panoply of human experiences. Zigzagging between fiction and archive, dream and material worlds, Sabur’s work reveals an introspective choreography that reframes, from within, aural, geological, and memory-related landscapes.
The group exhibition Wet Futures is dedicated to the connective spaces between land and ocean. The artists propose embodied forms of being with nature. Here, they attend to human relations with microscopic algae and with enormous marine mammals; there, they behold water and ice as material witnesses to climate change. They consider the atrocities of the Atlantic slave trade and contemporary migrations unfurling across the surface of the oceans, while saluting the concealing obscurity granted by water. Like the multiple bodies of a coral, this exhibition highlights our relationality with others. It suggests that our futures are wet; they are oceanic.
Liquid Crystals is an interactive route through Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal. Wander around the city and experience 11 augmented reality artworks that you can access as filters using your mobile device.
From September 8 to October 24, visit momentabiennale.com/liquidcrystals on your mobile device to experience the augmented reality artworks.
MOMENTA’s first augmented reality project features visions of the land, Indigenous sovereignty in digital space and issues related to climate change. Appearing in different locations, the artworks provide chance encounters, from a roaring lion to a smiling daisy. Ancestral wisdom meets new technologies and leads to the gathering of natural, urban and digital worlds.
This special project was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, Ville de Montréal and the RBC Foundation. MOMENTA Biennale de l’image is proud to join forces with the RBC Foundation, through the RBC Emerging Artists Project, to help promote emerging artists in Canada.
Three artists and an art critic present performances responding to the theme of this edition, Sensing Nature, and explore speculative futures, ancestral memories, nondual realities, and healing practices.