Born in 2012 as a simple but large exhibition by the Art Mûr gallery, the Biennale of Contemporary Indigenous Art (BACA) has grown in scale. It is no longer solely Montreal-based and, more than ever this year, it is driven by a concept of national scope. The 7e edition covers a wide range, with curators and around sixty artists coming from coast to coast, from the Far North to the southern limits of Canadian territory.
This is what the variation of the four-headed police team reveals, each representing a cardinal point. Emma Hassencahl-Perley, from the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, carries the voice of the East, Jake Kimble, Chipewyan artist based in Vancouver, that of the West, Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé, of the White River Nation , that of the North, and the Anishinaabe Lori Beavis, that of the South and Center.
” South ? I don’t know what that means. I’m more Center, says Lori Beavis, with humor. I kept myself busy [d’artistes] of Ontario and Quebec. » In his opinion, the 7e BACA and its title Stories of the Creation of the World concern less a territorial division than an exchange of experiences.
“The whole thing is about how we get to know ourselves. We seek to say who we are, where we come from, continues the adopted Montrealer. The Earth is a concept that varies a lot. »
Divided between seven Quebec broadcasters (four on the island of Montreal, three elsewhere), the 2024 biennial brings together a diversity of realities. It takes on the air of a large gathering; what the Innu call Mamuhitunanu.
Lori Beavis imagined a biennial around Turtle Island, the name by which natives designate North America. However, the concept that the territory rests on the back of a turtle is not unanimous. “According to Teresa [Vander Meer-Chassé], this story is not circulating in the Yukon. We had to change direction,” confides the director of Daphne, the Mile End art center.
It was therefore decided to expand the program and present not one, but stories that tell the world. “There are so many stories and ideas that we designed seven sub-themes,” comments the Montreal curator.
Premiere in Drummondville
Seven themes, seven places. If, already in 2022, you had to leave the island to see the BACA in its entirety, Sherbrooke and Saint-Hyacinthe are hosting, again this year, one of the exhibitions and, for the first time, Drummondville. It is there, at the DRAC, a contemporary art center, that the first exhibition of the event is held in April. The BACA also extends over time: the seventh exhibition, at Expression, in Saint-Hyacinthe, begins in June.
The stories ofStories of the territory, the exhibition at the DRAC, are very personal, linking the artists to their places of origin. Orality and materiality intertwine, literally, in the bird’s eye landscapes of Heather Shillinglaw, Cree-Métis from Alberta. Her paintings made from fabrics and beads describe the forests and lakes as she imagines them frequented by her ancestors. Hand-stitched words from Métis poet Marilyn Dumont help to multiply the provenance of Shillinglaw’s stories.
In wood, steel and copper, the abstract landscape of Anishinaabe Michael Belmore speaks of his relationship to land and water, a matter of resistance and adaptation. With video animation, Nicolas Renaud interprets a text by Jean Sioui, a poet from his Wendat family, to evoke the power relations between Whites and Indigenous people. Krystle Silverfox, from the Selkirk First Nation (British Columbia), paints odes to nature in acrylic where colorful symbols, geometric plans and realistic landscapes harmonize. And so on.
For Catherine Lafranchise, director of DRAC, welcoming the BACA allows us to kill two birds with one stone: “put more emphasis on indigenous artists” and “broaden the horizons” of the public. “Our reality from center to region means that we often limit ourselves to the presentation of Quebec artists for financial reasons,” she wrote by email.
The other themes of the biennial include the supernatural (Expression), the four axes, not geographical, but of well-being which are the mind, the heart, the thought and the body (Maison de la culture Verdun) or, in ultimately, Turtle Island (The Guild). This is where the work at the origin of Lori Beavis’s reflections was placed, the immense painting Sky Woman, by Shelley Niro. “The celestial woman arrives below, begins to dance and the Earth takes shape. The start of something,” summarizes the curator, enthusiastic to finally see this work from 2001 in real life.