In an earlier article, I briefly sketched out the birth and death of the original Biennale de Montréal, an event that ran between 1998 and 2011 before it was transformed into an NGO and then went bankrupt a few years later. The transfer from the CIAC to NGO status and affiliation with the MAC also coincided with the death of the triennial. The aim of the biennial in either instance was part of a programme of Montréalisation, a way of re-imagining the city, and of marketing it as a honey-pot for tourists.
Foregrounded consistently in the first set of biennials was a narrative of the city’s avant-garde that served both as a kind of historical relativization of the work being shown and a tool for grafting the art to a broader image of Contemporary Art history. Ironically, this also ended in a kind of ungrounding that was part of the event’s consistent advocacy for digital art.
Short, the word "momenta" - moments, in Latin - appealed as a concept that embraces a broad range. "These moments are the different temporalities of the photograph: the shooting, the making of the work, the exhibition, the visitor's perception. They are also different moments with the work, whether it's an encounter or a sharing. MOMENTA envelops all future editions. Each one is a moment when we stop to think about a question".
Rather differently, in Ciel Variable, the name was glossed as the “plural of momentum, which means “impetus, energy, force, thrust, drive, impulse” and often denotes a favourable or propitious situation.” This definition was central to discussions around the 2017 edition, which cast it primarily in terms of Lacanian desire, ambiguity, the privileging of marginality, the problematics of photographic representation, etc.
Erika Nimis deemed the event “a more-than-honourable attempt (given the budgetary and political constraints). But it was far from exciting; rather, it was like a good student, making no waves (due to wanting to do too well). It had a sense of déjà vu, a sensible compromise between some “sure values,” stars of the art market, and less-well-known artists, from worlds that are more demanding, even hermetic.”
After the 2017 edition, the executives at MOMENTA felt the need to better articulate what it was, that it was not a festival but part of an international biennial circuit, and that while its mission in the 1980s had been to assimilate photography into Contemporary Art, by this point, disciplinary boundaries had been eroded to the point that this was no longer a pivotal issue. Instead, the purpose was primarily educational and social.
Executive director Audrey Genois explained:
Following the 2017 edition of MOMENTA, we wrote a five-year strategic plan. This process of analysis and reflection, which was supervised and framed by kabana – a strategic finance and marketing consultancy – led us to update MOMENTA’s mission and mandate, which are now much more focused on the public and on the role that we want to have in society. We’ve updated the way in which we define our aspirations and actions. Our actions and choices are now guided by the objective of having a sensitive and sensible impact on the world through the image, which constitutes the essence of our mission.
The two editions that followed were quite different. 2019’s The Life of Things, co-curated by María Wills Londoño, Audrey Genois, and Maude Johnson and featuring more than 150 works by thirty-eight artists, in thirteen venues, was loosely inspired by absurdism, surrealism, and Object Oriented Ontology. In content, as with the previous edition, it was primarily “culturalist,” highlighting the safely established contents of marginality, indigeneity, peripherality, alienation, post-coloniality, etc. Notably, almost none of the critical writing on the exhibitions actually discussed the works as “things” themselves rather than just as depictions of things, or even registered much of a challenge to representation or what it means to think of a photo as a thing rather than an image. Instead, it was all very congenial to obvious, barely poetic socio-cultural interpretations of communicated content. Again, it felt like a school project in “poetic journalism” or pedagogy.
The 2021 edition, Sensing Nature, occurring during the pandemic, was an understandably different affair in terms of scale (most of the 15 exhibitions were put together without the artists or curator Stefanie Hessler present) but thematically it was more of the same, moving on from the OOO trend to the “botanical turn” fad that had been popping up for a few years. Although the curators told the press that they were adamant that they wanted to “shake up the way we see and understand the non-human world,” they were reiterating this with all the standard institutional tropes: “These reflections are part of the current context. We're talking about global warming, colonisation, the impact of capitalism and the exploitation of resources.” They went on to recycle the post-war (and nineteenth-century romantic) critique of “rationalism” that they deployed in the previous Biennale while relying upon the positivistic account of the existence of culture, power, social relationality, environmental destruction, etc. as a set of normative moral claims to back up an overtly “absurdist” crisis narrative.
As in years past, this year the Biennale was cast in the frame of a kind of existential panic, appeals to the fragility of art and the cultural sector, and to its self-evident role in the education and economic benefit of the city. A few articles in Le Devoir have highlighted this as part of the event’s long-scale publicity campaign. The Biennale joined with other tourist festivals to cast itself in the role of continuous innovator, re-inventor, and bio-spiritual force:
An exemplary player during the pandemic, culture reinvented itself many times over, as well as going to half-mast whenever necessary. It is still paying dearly for this effort made in the name of the collective. As inflationary pressures take their toll, labour shortages deepen and government subsidies come to an end, the sector is reeling, its jewel in the crown. [p] With one voice, 16 Montreal festivals are anticipating a 2023-2024 season fraught with danger. From Mutek to Festival TransAmériques, from Festival du nouveau cinéma to the biennial Momenta, these experienced leaders are simultaneously up against the same wall. This alignment of the planets should alarm Ottawa, Québec City and Montréal. Aren't these giants an essential part of the city's DNA, with more than its fair share of poorly healed pandemic wounds?
The medical metaphors also served as a way of vitalizing the imperilled careers of those in the bureaucratized art world. “Between 2019 and 2021, 19,000 people left the cultural sector” and most of these positions have not been filled, even by volunteers. There is a general dwindling of stable paid employment in the cultural sector in the province. The various arts groups claim that allowing this to weaken further “would be catastrophic” given that the “cultural sector's workforce of 180,000 artists and workers in Québec contributes nearly 3% of GDP and generates more than $11 billion in direct economic spinoffs.”
Recognizing that the culture industry will not return to what it was prior to the pandemic, it will have to move beyond its perennial reliance on government subsidy and “diversify its revenues,” largely through appeals to philanthropy. This was following on the recommendations of the Bourgie report from ten years ago.
According to the report
The Task Force's work is based on one conviction: culture is one of the foundations of Québec and its identity. It plays an essential role in Québec society. It contributes directly to Québec's influence and development. An element of social integration, culture is a factor in the openness of Québec society to the world. At the same time, it is a major driver of economic activity, making a significant contribution to job to the creation of jobs and wealth in Québec. For those who give, cultural philanthropy is the mark of a civic commitment, a concrete confirmation of their attachment to Québec culture and to those who create it.
Notably, this government document defines Québec and its ostensible culture in primarily socio-economic terms within which “culture” (art is mentioned less often) has an entirely functional role as a mark and tool of wealth and HR management. Executive director Audrey Genois’ definition of the “mission” of MOMENTA cited above is entirely in line with this conception of art as a tool for civic commitment.
This is the official press statement describing this year’s iteration of the biennial (which notably does not recognize Québec as a nation):
MOMENTA Biennale de l’image is delighted to announce the complete list of artists and exhibition venues participating in its 18th edition, from September 7 to October 22, 2023. Designed by curator Ji-Yoon Han, Masquerades: Drawn to Metamorphosis aims to explore the dynamics of visibility and invisibility that shape representations of the self and the other from the metamorphic potentials of mimicry. [p] Deployed in fifteen locations across the city, the biennial program will bring together 23 artists from abroad, representing 15 countries, and from 4 provinces and 4 Indigenous nations of Canada. From one exhibition to the next, processes of transformation, mimicry, and mutation will be activated, questioning the functions of the image, between representation and metamorphosis.
A more extensive statement of intent about the theme was released on the MOMENTA website and merits a few notes before we address the exhibitions themselves in subsequent reviews. Although it repeats some of the standard fare for the PR around this sort of event, it also introduces a lot of things that could readily undermine the viability of the ways in which imagery has tended to be curatorially interpreted in past iterations. It will be interesting to see if this gets teased out more.
Here is the full statement with my parenthetical notes:
We’ve all experienced that gap between who we think we are and how others perceive us. [Have we? This seems presumptuous and from the outset insists on a normative intersubjective register defined in dogmatic phenomenological terms.] We’ve all felt the friction between the identity assigned to us and the one we construct for ourselves. [Is this what the introductory sentence is supposed to dramatize?] We: that is, you and me—as well as others, human or not. [“We” has become extremely vague. Has the lemon tart on my table experienced this identity friction or the lemon that was used to make it?] Starting from this premise, MOMENTA 2023 will explore the dynamics of visibility and invisibility that shape representations of the self and the other. [It will be interesting to see what an invisible representation is.] Individuals are constantly recorded, formatted, fixed as same and identical, so here’s the urgent question: how do we (re)set in motion our understanding of identities and differences in the social space and in intimate experiences of otherness? [Are same and identical the same? By this point, she has both interpolated a fictitious subject into an imaginary community, and set up a set of completely unclear (but rhetorically generic) bifurcations: identity/difference, social/intimate, self/other. Why is a “(re)set” at play here when the setting itself is already so dubious? And why is this urgent and what kind of urgency is this (moral, political, epistemic, etc.)?]
The notion of mimicry serves as the main driving force for developing the biennale. [It’s notable that it’s a “notion” rather than a concept or idea, since notion “suggests an idea not much resolved by analysis or reflection and may suggest the capricious or accidental” but could imply “an individual's conception or impression of something known, experienced, or imagined” or “an inclusive general concept” or just a “whim.”] Mimicry designates the aptitude to “do as if”: to imitate (do the same), which involves first and foremost the capacity to transform (unmake) oneself by blurring the borders that define the edges of beings and things. [This is already a split idea. Doing as if and doing the same suggest radically different things are occurring.] Transversally, mimicry concerns human behaviour, the experience of all living things (animal and plant mimicry), and technological modelling (machine- learning mimicry). It situates us in the interstice between the self and the other, linking them and leading them to melt into one another. ["We" has now become us, the self/other bifurcation has been reified in order to be melodramatically turned into a situation of collapse.] It is precisely the potential for metamorphoses inscribed in this interstice that MOMENTA 2023 wishes to embrace with the title Masquerades. [Is it inscribed in the interstice? If something can transverse or melt, is there an interstitial relation? These suggest something close to the inexistence of a gap or space of intervention. A “masquerade” does not really suggest a melting of categories, but their rigorous retention and appropriation.]
The image has a decisive role to play in these operations of mutation, of exposure and concealment, of separation and fusion. [It will be interesting to see how any of these aspects are defined or deployed in the works themselves.] It is an ideal tool for seeing, experiencing, and testing perceptions of the self. [How and why is the image any better at this than anything else?] The theme of mimicry thus calls for an exploration of the theatricality and virtuality of the mask, whose performance is facilitated and stimulated by technical images. [Does it? Can’t this apply to any kind of representation? Why does this need to be theatrical rather than journalistic, etc.? Isn’t this giving too much credence to the stability of “illusion” as a category when all the distinctions already made call its status as a possibility into question?] In this sense, the biennale will pay particular attention to the moving lines that today are redefining gestures of appropriation and disguise: how are identities played and outwitted? [I have no idea what “moving lines” is supposed to mean in this sentence.] And who can make light of the spectacle of identity? [This sentence seems to suggest two divergent things: “making light of” can mean illuminating or dissolving the illusion of identity (because it is only spectacle); “making light” can suggest mockery of meaningful distinctions about “authentic” identity and seems to imply there is some moral significance to this.]
Beyond its function of representation, the image is also an agent of mimetic metamorphosis. [Do images really function as “representation”? Is this a necessary function or even a functional one? That the image is then accorded agency status should cause further problems in trying to crib out the relations supposedly represented.] Doing like the other, taking oneself for another, or seeing oneself as another is to “become image.” [How is the agency of the image complicating this? It seems to have slipped back into a more generically humanist register which surely the agency of images undermines.] In a reality that seems to be precisely devoured by images, mimicry takes on a unique importance, as borne out in camouflage strategies that have emerged to cope with generalized institutional and corporate surveillance. [It is entirely unclear where the agency in this sentence is.] As a consequence of the demand for the right to invisibility and anonymity, the face—a fundamental aspect of identity—is erased, replaced, or even disfigured. [Presumably this is pointing back to the mask aspect of masquerade, which seems a bit literal all things considered. Is the demand for the right to a “face” or “identity” any less of a masquerade? Where do these rights come from?] Might this not also be the expression of a more ambiguous desire to “blend into the background”? [Blending into the background may be the least ambiguous thing that’s been introduced so far.]
The disruption of perception, especially visual, is at the core of mimetic scenarios. [Is it? Or is it a smoothing and making imperceptible?] Who is looking at whom in my encounter with a chameleon, a stranger, an artificial intelligence? [Why has it been that this kind of quasi-animistic approach, even to “things” has been so acceptable to institutional discourse when asubjectivism or anti-agential theory is equally plausible?] What about the feelings of incongruity, immersion, sinking, and vertigo, or even intoxication, produced by mimicry? [And what of the feelings of continuity, surfacing, tranquillity and sobriety they also produce?] The biennale will create a dialogue among artists whose works seize on these operators of ambiguity and of entangled gazes. [“Dialogue” seems to be a curious term to use since it is precisely the undermining of intersubjective encounter as a credible model of the world that seems to be central to all of this, even if it is rhetorically dancing around this logical outcome.] The exhibitions will provide a fresh look [hopefully] at the issues involved with mimicry and the alteration of identities by exploring the functions of the image, between representation and metamorphosis. [So we are looking for functionalist analysis. We shall have to see what “context” means here.] Beyond the instability of identity that is thus brought to light, might these intersubjective experiences lead us to reimagine our commonalities and what creates a sense of community? [Given how much all of these aspects undermine the normative model of belonging, this could be interesting.]