By its title, this biennial already seemed to embody a large and exciting program… “Masquerades. The attraction of metamorphosis gave hope for an event where the established order would be overturned in order to no longer be oneself. A bit in the spirit of the last edition of the Montreal Biennale, in 2016, which was inspired by the concept of a brothel, but which had totally screwed up… We hoped that the idea of criticism and even social satire would win out. . But it is far from being the case. Some works go in this direction, of course. You will be affected by Moko Is Future by Jeannette Ehlers (Play Mas, Darling Foundry, until October 22), a video showing an African character – the “god of destiny in several West African cultures” – in the form of his zombie bursting into a very neoclassical Copenhagen…
But the problem goes beyond the question of the title. Momenta 2023 also wanted to embrace the question of gender identity and feminism, cultural identities and racism, colonialism, environmentalism, digital technologies… And we may be forgetting some. This gives the feeling of an overview which often does not address these questions in depth.
The digital question alone would have required complex reflection. Some works skim over the problem. Let us note Logic paralyzes the heart by Lynn Hershman Leeson (at the Museum of Fine Arts, until December 10), a video worthy of a short YouTube clip on the risks inherent in the virtual world and artificial intelligence… And even the question of identities seems rather suitable for an audience in the art world who will not be very troubled by lesbian, fluid identities or even by drag kings.
We expected a more queer exhibition, more freak, more perverse. But can we still talk about BDSM or is it too much? wild ? We could also have included artists dealing with prostitution, like Orlan or Andrea Fraser… The works are ultimately of a very acceptable “strangeness”, of a rather wise queer genre, presented in an echo chamber, in a closed circuit. We are far from the disturbing tensions like with Omer Fast or Rainer Fassbinder. If we had really wanted to destabilize, we would perhaps have already had to expose these works and these subjects to a public outside the walls of the institutions convened here, which are not at their first oddity.
Several relevant works will remain from all this. Note in particular, at the UQAM gallery (until October 21), The novel of Remort, or the inhuman and villainous fabliaux of the Ultimate Carnival, satirical work, worthy of philosophical tales, from the Marion Lessard collective. The specter of ancestors in the making by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, at Vox (until October 21), is also fascinating, even if we do not clearly see the links with the masquerade.
Super-explanatory brochures…
For each exhibition, you will find a booklet explaining the works with a long text and a simplified text! Despite the good intention – to make the point clear for a population who has difficulty reading – this is a rather surprising and even contemptuous initiative towards the public. In the post-war period, hadn’t the proliferation of explanatory panels in museums already been designed to make art accessible to all? Will we one day be entitled to a super-simplified text? All things considered, this attitude only reiterates a clichéd vision of a hermetic contemporary art world whose issues should be translated and reduced rather than affirming the richness of current art accessible to all those who are willing. take the time to think. Why not create shorter and clarified versions of the videos presented (the most important corpus of this event)? When will there be an edition of Proust with the original text on the right and the brief text on the left?
In short, this is an exhibition that proves to be a comforting statement of principle on tolerance and inclusiveness.