The program states it clearly: Momenta 2023 includes 23 exhibitions. We can also take the whole thing as a single thematic exhibition, spread over 16 locations, with the title Masquerades. Articulated around fluctuating identities, it nevertheless fades, as curator Ji-Yoon Han integrates ideas, certainly noble, but numerous. Gender demands, decolonial discourses, questions about artificial intelligence, environmental concerns… Add to this the reflections on the photographic gaze and its derivatives, since we are in the “image biennial”.
In addition to these “masquerades” and the numerous artists who use, if not disguise and extravagance, mimicry and camouflage, a thread woven from archives runs through the event. The past seems to be a guarantor of the future.
With a project linking cinema and folk-rock, Rémi Belliveau brilliantly mixes personal and collective struggles. At the Vox center (2, rue Sainte-Catherine Est, until October 21), The first.Live at Beaubassin (1970), a 35 mm film made in 2023, tells the (false) almost true story of Jean Dularge, a queer musician from Acadia. Testimonies and musical performances make up a documentary that evokes both Zachary Richard and Pink Floyd. With an added layer of ambiguity, Dularge’s archives, including correspondence with real Acadian Clarence White (The Byrds) are on display at the Artexte center, one floor below Vox.
An artist from New Brunswick, Belliveau places queer identity and Acadian affirmation on the same level. He has his musician alter ego say that accepting one’s femininity, after having repressed it during childhood, is similar to the efforts of French-speakers in Acadia to break with assimilation.
Also at Vox, two other artists draw on family archives and memories to denounce the discrimination their communities suffered. Marianne Nicolson appropriates portraits of Indigenous people and other images that ethnographic photography produced in the 20the century. Tuan Andrew Nguyen recounts, including images from Indochina, the heritage linking Senegal to Vietnam. In both cases, Belliveau’s inventive ambiguity is sorely lacking.
At the Clark center (5455, avenue de Gaspé, until October 7), it is also through fiction and choreographed movements that the Estonian Kristina Norman draws on the colonial past. The video trilogy Orchideliriumcreated for the 2022 Venice Biennale, explores the relationships of domination of the 19the century in the fields of botany, zoology or the arts. Both the simultaneous projection of the works and the photographic archives exhibited in addition contribute to the climate of strangeness established by the artist. Filmed in a Soviet military base that became a zoo, the video Shelter offers the best synthesis of this Momenta driven by metamorphosis and paradigm shifts. Who is this caged animal with a human face? Who is looking, who is the object of the gaze?
Elsewhere, other proposals integrate visual archives and current issues. The overabundance of elements or a sometimes didactic tone, however, attenuate their interest. At the McCord Museum (until February 4), on the other hand, Séamus Gallagher brings back to life, with humor and the pastiche specific to his drag queen character, the promotion of nylon stockings during the New York World’s Fair in 1939. The chemical and sexual mirage of the time is certainly no longer the norm today. However, the Halifax artist uses it to denounce current, misleading surface strategies. Let the masks fall!