A still from New York–based Canadian artist Moyra Davey’s work Hemlock Forest (2016).
The 2016 edition of the Biennale de Montréal, which opened this week, brings together 55 artists and collectives with artworks and programming at 22 venues, and aims to be “one of the most influential contemporary art biennials on the planet.” Here are eight things we’d like to see there.
Moyra Davey’s Hemlock Forest at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from October 20, 2016, to January 15, 2017
“What are we ‘doing’ when we do nothing but think?” asked Hannah Arendt in her 1973 Gifford Lecture, later published as The Life of the Mind. “Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow-men, are together with no one but ourselves?” Such questions define the (enchanted, thorny, sickly, salubrious, poignant) art of Moyra Davey, a self-described “flâneuse who never leaves [her] apartment.” At this year’s Biennale de Montréal—themed Le Grand Balcon, after the play Le Balcon by Jean Genet, an author Davey reveres—Davey presents a new video Hemlock Forest. It’s a promised revisiting of her masterful 2011 video Les Goddesses, in which she meditates on love, family and the feminine by drawing intuitive connections between her own past and the British Romantic movement.—David Balzer, editor-in-chief
Haig Aivazian’s artist talk at the Society for Arts and Technology on October 20, 2016
This year’s Biennale de Montréal marks the return of New York-based artist Haig Aivazian, an established curator himself, to Montreal for the first time since his 2012 solo exhibition “Collapsing Foundations” at Parisian Laundry. Aivazian’s fragmented structures, often produced in series, are both strange and familiar—bound to, yet somehow briefly lifted from the weight of their histories like a balloon fighting against it’s string. Presented at the Society for Arts and Technology and in partnership with his alma mater Concordia University, the talk may just reveal the string tying the artist to his own.—Evan Pavka, editorial intern
Valérie Blass’s new sculptures at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from October 20, 2016, to January 15, 2017
There are a whack of strong female sculptors showing work I want to see in the Biennale de Montréal—the still-rising Alberta-bred, New York–based art star Elaine Cameron-Weir, Berlin-based Korean luminary Haegue Yang and the senior German ubertalent Isa Genzken among them. But if I could check out just one thing at the Biennale, it would be the series of eight new sculptures promised by Montreal’s own Valérie Blass. In recent years, Blass’s practice has delved even further, in its witty, sleight-of-hand way, into junctures between the visual and the corporeal, the fashionable and the fragmentary. What’s her latest hot take? Likely needs to be seen to be believed.—Leah Sandals, managing editor, online
Kerry James Marshall’s Rythm Mastr at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from October 20, 2016, to January 29, 2017
When Kerry James Marshall was growing up, there weren’t any black superheroes in the comic-book pantheon—not until 1966, when the Black Panther first appeared in Fantastic Four #52 (author and MacArthur Fellow Ta-Nehisi Coates is now writing the character). Many more followed, including those that Marshall dreamed up himself back in the ’90s, when he first created Rythm Mastr, a story populated by futurist heroes drawn to resemble traditional Yoruba deities. For more than 35 years, Marshall’s been engaged with the idea of African-American identity and representation in art history, and his first career retrospective is currently touring major US museums. His project for the Biennale de Montréal enlarges panels from his comic into lightboxes. Talking to Theaster Gates, Marshall said, “If you really want to be free, you have to take charge of your capacity to shape the world.” It’s a directive for all artists to follow, and if they’re feeling heroic, fight to expand.—Rosie Prata, managing editor
Tanya Lukin Linklater’s He was a poet and he taught us how to react and to become this poetry, Part 1, and Part 2 at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from October 20, 2016, to January 15, 2017
Seek, in K.M. Hunter Artist Award–winner Tanya Lukin Linklater’s work in “Le Grand Balcon,” a semiotic haunting; consider, beforehand, her meditation on speech and physique from her minimalist Event Scores for Afognak Alutiit (abridged) (2016): “Suk – A human being. Afognak dialect: the S is pronounced SH. It sounds like shook but with a shorter o. Perhaps we shake. Or past tense, we shook. When are we shaken?” Bodies in motion will startle, spilling words that trudge land in the North Bay-based artist’s He was a poet and he taught us how to react and to become this poetry, Part 1, and Part 2, an intertextual performative project of dance, verse and video. Tiptoeing the periphery of ballet as discipline, the Alutiiq performer and writer will pay homage to Maria Tallchief (of Osage Nation), the first Native American prima ballerina, employing figures in performance as well as self-authored text to flirt with questions of transmission, the ongoing colonial surveillance of Indigenous women’s bodies, their possible gazes, dispersals and demarcations.—Aaditya Aggarwal, editorial intern, online
Celia Perrin Sidarous’s Notte coralli at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from October 20, 2016, to January 15, 2017
When I first met Celia Perrin Sidarous, she was in the midst of a torrid affair with ceramics. She was partway through a residency at the Banff Centre, and her studio was stocked with odd bits of clay—round bits, long bits, funny shelves that couldn’t support anything and cups that, while beautiful, would never hold water. She had never made ceramics before, but mountain air inspires bravery, and the results were wonderful. Biennale de Montréal visitors have a chance to see photographs of these ceramic experimentations, among other things, in Notte coralli, an installation that combines Perrin Sidarous’s images with architectural supports and a 16-mm film. Looking at Notte coralli must feel a little bit like stepping into a collage—shifting, fractured, but, above all, beautiful.—Caoimhe Morgan-Feir, associate editor
Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Portrait of a Lady at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from October 20, 2016, to January 15, 2017
There are some surprises in this edition of the Biennale de Montréal. One, according to many reports from the opening this week, is a rarely seen set of early satirical drawings by Brian Jungen, which offers an important opportunity to reevaluate the sustained social critique and sharp-edged (in this case, ribald) humour that lies at the core of his practice. Another work that immediately stands out among the otherwise familiar cast of national and international artists in the biennial’s roll call is iconic German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Portrait of a Lady (ca. 1540). Mysteries surround the history of Cranach’s portrait, on loan from the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Legend has it that the original image—assumed to be a depiction of either Salome or Judith holding the severed head of Holofernes or John the Baptist—was re-painted in the early 20th century, replacing the severed head with an arrangement of flowers to make the work more palatable to potential buyers. The flowers were later removed, and when the painting was examined by conservationists in the late 1970s, it was revealed that only the right arm had been over-painted. The riddle of Cranach’s original image remains. For curator Philippe Pirotte, the work’s imagery prompts fundamental questions of subjectivity and artistic agency, but also suggests a kind of latent perversity, which he aims to draw out in the works by contemporary artists that surround it. Whatever the context, in the end, Cranach adds a rogue element to the exhibition, a disruptive counterforce that puts fresh perspective on dominant canonical narratives, past and present.—Bryne McLaughlin, senior editor
