It would not occur to us to demand a prescription for nostalgia. Yet in the seventeenth century, nostalgia was considered to be a curable disease, akin to the common cold. Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches and a journey to the Swiss Alps would take care of nostalgic symptoms. By the twenty-first century, the passing ailment turned into the incurable modern condition. The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia. Optimistic belief in the future was discarded like an outmoded spaceship sometime in the 1960s. Nostalgia itself has a utopian dimension, only it is no longer directed toward the future. Sometimes nostalgia is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways. -- Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (2001)
I will preface this with an obvious statement. When reviewing a biennial, one is not reviewing the works as they exist autonomously, but how they exist as part of a collective curation. Even with the demarcation by authors and their limited spatial segregation (almost every artist gets a room of their own) and the textual enframings that greet the viewer entering their brand domains, it all remains part of a serial structure that fundamentally alters and sets the hermeneutic dimensions of the collected works. Much of the way things have been curated highlights the matter of setting.
The viewer is invited to step into her footsteps and take a tour of her kingdom to see what the princess saw. This mostly consists of entering a simulated park with a monument to the princess. It is not particularly monumental. In scale, it is much closer to a mannequin from a department store, slightly abstracted with no head, just a plume.
Spanning across two walls are a set of AI-generated videos that have been knit together. They provide a panoramic view of the park, its royal residence, its green grounds, and people picnicking on them. In the anteroom, there are various relics from the kingdom, including a sword and medical sacks. You can listen to stories by way of earphones, much as you might when visiting a museum. Banza’s exhibition is directed at “youth,” although its visual logic and strategies are largely interchangeable with what are presumably the “adult” shows. On the other side of the wall at Vox is a show that flirts with fantasies of child abuse. We will get to that later.
According to its press release, the 18th edition of Momenta is
[p]resented in 11 exhibition spaces across the city, the Biennale’s programming will form a dialogue among the work of 23 Canadian and international artists, representing 14 countries, 4 provinces, and 5 Indigenous communities. From one exhibition to the next, artists will explore hybridization, fluidity, and fugitivity to create emancipatory images that reveal marginalized or erased narratives.
This edition of the biennale is curated by Marie-Ann Yemsi, a political science grad, curator, and “art consultant,” who focuses “on collaborative art practices and experimental forms, highlighting themes such as memory, history, gender, and identity in relation to contemporary political, social, and ecological issues.” The biennial is disseminated by almost the entirety of the provincial arts media, and is the client of municipal, provincial, federal, and international patronage.
According to the official booklet, this iteration of the biennial is also supposed to inaugurate the previously photo-centric biennial’s role as a biennial of Contemporary Art. Previous iterations of the biennale also made this claim. It is unclear what this persistent claim of transformed identity is supposed to imply or why it needs to be reclaimed. This seems to simply normalize what previous editions of Momenta had already experimented with, namely scattered instances in which photo or video work is extended or framed by various sorts of sculptural installation. In general, this is formulated in treating the exhibition space explicitly as such, whether that is as a more or less kitschy viewing room or bleacher seating on fake grass. Symbolically, at least, it affirms that Momenta is no longer medium-specific. Instead, it is genre-specific. Certainly, nothing within its exhibition strategies challenges any of the standard expectations of anyone familiar with Contemporary Art. If anything, being re-branded as such has made it much less intellectually and artistically challenging. This goes hand-in-glove with the fact that while Contemporary Art is a clear genre (even if it has its set of distinct sub-genres), it also has a clear medium, which, in the case of the genre’s historical existence in Montréal, is the state.
As is standard, exhibitions include texts nailed to the wall. One contains a curatorial interpretation of the work that keeps it within the confines of official discourse. The other, ironically, is slightly more complicated. Designed to be “accessible,” according to the pamphlet, this means they are intended to communicate with a non-art world audience, categorized as those who have not been artistically educated, new language learners, and the neurodivergent. These “plain language texts” in French and English barely aim to be descriptive and usually fail to say things like “there is a couch.” Instead, they provide reductive official interpretations of the works and usually contain asinine assertions such as, “They transform suffering into strength” or “stories are forgotten because they are not told.” Neither of these is as bad as non-plain (I suppose that makes them “fancy”) interpretations, such as, “fires can be rekindled even from ashes.” I do not cite these examples because they are the worst. The therapeutic-political jargon that is consistently called upon in the fancy voice is even more hackneyed than the gift card sophistry of plain language texts.
The framing statement provided by the curator combines the most generic aspects of the previous four Momenta curatorial statements into a gumbo (to use the privileged “creolization” trope) of clichés and keywords so rote that almost every sentence reads as though generated by AI to suit a grant application. (Of course, it was not. It was undoubtedly written with extensive committee and specialist review and went through dozens of drafts over several months. If you have ever gone through such processes, you will not be surprised that the results are worse than simply letting a machine do it.)
Here is the slop in its entirety without comment:
In a world saturated with images, some, strangely, are lacking. This edition of MOMENTA seeks to situate these lacunae in a historical perspective. Ever since the invention of photography and film, and their proliferation during the colonial expansion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an ideological link was formed between these media and the construction of dominant narratives. This connection has been particularly evident in the production of figures of alterity – geographic, cultural, racial, economic – and in certain resulting historical blind spots. Narratives that fell outside this frame were swept away, and these stories have been either truncated or simply disappeared. With a focus on what is beyond our view – the silences and breaches in individual and collective memory – In Praise of the Missing Image will explore both contemporary challenges in relation to the image and the current consequences of the complex dynamics involved in constructing narratives. Which stories are told, how, and by whom? [p] Can the subaltern speak? wondered the Indian philosopher Gayatri Spivak in her celebrated essay. With this question at the core of its reflections, the Biennale aims to open up multiple perspectives for experimentation and speculation on the nature, uses, and production of missing images. Following traces and echoes from the thinking of Édouard Glissant, it deploys an archipelago of forms and ideas, emanating from a constellation of subjects, viewpoints, and artistic positions. A significant engagement with concepts of the archive, the document, traces of recollection, and body memory will underline their potential to build a repertoire of languages from which artists may draw to probe the univocity of dominant narratives. This reordering of collective and individual memories in contemporary narratives is aimed at re-establishing the voice of the Other and the memory of different knowledges, exploring their imaginaries, and revealing issues at stake in the enduring mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization. How to speak about ourselves on our own terms, be the subject of our own story within societies in which certain communities have been stripped of their lands, languages, cultures, or humanity? Linking collective struggle to the formation of the self, the artists will propose critical reflections often inspired by concepts such as hybridization, infiltration, fluidity, and fugitivity. They will create emancipatory images for new stories of the living, and bring to light personal narratives and collective histories that have been invisibilized, minoritized, marginalized, or erased. [p] Conceived as a gathering that will draw its strength from the active co-presence of many, the 2025 edition will open spaces for dialogue, hospitality, and the expression of struggles and solidarities wherein decolonial and feminist pedagogies and ancestral knowledge intersect. The narratives and gestures employed by these artists will evoke the vital necessity of bringing together diverse voices and stories, and will underline the transformative and healing experience of choosing consonant words and forms to speak of oneself. Through the unruly material of art, In Praise of the Missing Image invites us to imagine collectively the means, political and poetic, by which we may inhabit the impasses of the present and sketch out ways toward the future.
It is slop, and pretending it is not is artistically and historically illiterate. That it is slop is what is historically and artistically significant about it.
In other words, the enframing functions as a technique of erasure, blacking out, or redaction of the works to safeguard their appearance and functionality as institutional discourses. It creates a sort of chiaroscuro for the objects it fetishizes to set off their easily recognizable features and obscure the general content. The framing only makes sense if you erase the fact that all of its basic rhetorical flashpoints have been generic to the norms of institutional discourse (both inside and outside of the plantation of Contemporary Art) for decades. Invoking them is either ignorance or deliberate mystification.
NB.: To avoid being excessively redundant and pointless, I am not going to review every exhibition, but most of them (around three-quarters).
In the larger area of the centre, Myriam Omar Awadi’s Les feux que vos derniers souffles ravivent (Mouvements I et III) is advertised as “prob[ing] the tensions among memory, orality, and transmission. […] Through a poetic and fictional approach, Omar Awadi intertwines archives, stories, and performative forms to make the forgotten voices... In this sensitive space—combining video, sculptural elements, and sound devices—absences and silences take on material form.” In the smaller space, OK Pederson’s Orchard Station Road is advertised as “soundwaves from a distant future, where the effects of the apocalypse still persist. By combining fiction and reality, Pedersen deconstructs traditional storytelling, inviting us to lose ourselves in a space where past and future intertwine…”
The two exhibitions are unified by the curation, although there is no indication in the supplemental framing as to why this should be the case or why Omar Awadi’s installation is set up to clearly dwarf and dominate the other. This unity is achieved in much the same way that Clark would customarily refashion its space in the manner of a theatrical set or model home for their annual fundraising exhibitions. In this case, the space is covered in soft black carpet, heavy, velvety black curtains, with the typical amorphous pillows or beanbags plopped on the floor and the occasional bench.
In the larger space where Awadi’s work is shown, there are also things sewn into the makeshift wall and carefully manicured piles of dirt with glass, dead pink microphones directed at dirt, and other types of sculptures. It reads blatantly like a joke about the stupidity of pretending that the gallery can display "the world" and make it speak, but this seems to be the opposite of the intention. It is an updated version of the kitsch variation of velvet painting and likely the most formally interesting aspect of the entire biennial. All of this serves less to frame the video works than to shelve them. With the space utilized in such a tactile and domineering way, the videos seem like little more than props that could be easily exchanged for anything else. It is in this respect that this “island” in the “archipelago” of the biennale most nakedly lays out one of the basic curatorial conceits: the construction of the field of appearance. As a result, far from focusing on narrative per se, it de-privileges the individual narratives to foreground a normalizing curatorial statement as set design and the artwork as the accent items in a conceptual decor scheme.
I sat through both videos and cannot recall anything about them. Given that Pederson’s work “deconstructs traditional storytelling” through a post-apocalyptic narrative and futurist fantasies, this is not surprising. I sit through several video pieces doing this every month in this city alone. It is one of the dominant sub-genres. In this instance, that does not matter much since the videos do little more than provide light fluctuations and some ambient noise for the setting. Installed in this manner, they really only function to give a vibe (with the appropriate political murmurings lodged in the “unconscious” of space) and reinforce the presence of archaic tech (the radio in the Pederson installation) as a sign of nostalgia and its cognates.
Na Mira's Poussières at Dazibao seems like a bit of a hodgepodge of strategies, the result of which comes off more like an over-the-top display case with an underwhelming and almost invisible product. The most interesting thing about it is that it seems entirely out of place in the rest of the biennale. It provides a nice Zen emptiness/ice cream break moment in the middle of the thing.
Getting back to more post-apocalyptic futurist fantasies, Anouk Verviers’ Une communauté de corps accueillant des cellules en migration involves two video works which are projected in the small theatre. The room is filled with some vaguely floral sculptural stuff that looks like it was leftover from a cheap 1970s sci-fi TV series set at the perimeter. The two video pieces are quite uneven. Both take the form of dystopian narratives and are relayed by sound and subtitle over a set of “ritualistic” (this used to simply be called neo-primitivism) images or performances. The first involves a set of figures attempting to absurdly erect a phallic column out of dirt, only to have it collapse. This is overlaid with various stuttering, strutting sequences and shots of buildings while a female voice asks asinine questions to a computer and seems incapable of understanding the machine’s plain responses. (Again, in the context, this comes off like a joke about the biennale's curation.) The accompanying text interprets this and the absurd ritual as demonstrating “how [figures] care for, respect, and help each other.”
The visual layering used in the first video is done much better in the second work, where it is accompanied by some garish editing choices that give it an instantly dated look. This only adds to the antiquated vibe of its dystopian fantasy, which fuses some dated cyberpunk with equally dated feminist/queer clichés. This is appropriate given that the visual language of the video at best resembles the sort of no-budget exploitation or underground films from the 70s that mined very similar territory with more awkward technical means. Like many of those films, it is clunky but has a few striking and memorable moments that make it worthwhile. For instance, there is a brief sequence where two women slice up an orange and then reassemble it as a sculpture; the punctured flesh and running juices of the fruit, and the clumsily ritualized way of dealing with them, provide one of the most striking images in the entire biennale. Narrative dominates more here, overcoding the imagery and tending to make it seem interpretive. Both videos are reduced in the curatorial statement to “metaphors for endometriosis.”
The two exhibitions at Optica offer an interesting, if perhaps unintended, juxtaposition. One is an exercise in pompous queer colonialism and the other in representational naivety. Lou Sheppard’s Rights of Passage is a drag opera composed using AI and starring three fungus/human hybrids drifting around the GTA to interact with its fauna as “the work orchestrates points of queer emergence, where unclear boundaries between city and nature, past and future, access and intrusion allow us to imagine other paths toward common ground.” In practice, this means a wall of screens and a wall of speakers. Spread around the room are some lumpy, vaguely biomorphic abstract sculptures that resemble the bean bag furniture dumped by curators on the floor of video installations lately. At the centre is a long water sculpture that resembles a canal and which reverberates with the sound of the opera. The water feature is quite effective, and it is better if you ignore the rest.
Paul Seesequasis’ Dévoiler le jeu du Créateur is “is a new iteration of the project that focuses on lacrosse, a sport that is sacred for the Haudenosaunee. Historical photographs and contemporary images come together in an installation that reactivates collective memory. By revealing narratives absent from official history, Seesequasis invites us to reconsider the role of archives in transmitting Indigenous cultures and in shaping reconciliation dynamics.” Basically, it is set up as another instance of mix-and-match aesthetics where names and narratives are supposed to be tagged to images in order to perpetuate a form of authoritarian reterritorialization to cope with the cracks caused by the autonomization of art. This is easily comparable to one of the central exhibitions from the previous biennale.
Iván Argote’s video Levitate is shown in a kind of makeshift alcove at MACM. The piece consists of three videos, one projected on each wall. These generally depict different angles of the same event or object. The video work consists of three parts: each occurs in a different geographical location and involves a different kind of monolith or monument. At the center of the exhibition is a cluster of soft sculptures that suggest toppled monuments rendered as velvet-covered couches. This heap is something you could sit on, something it shares in common with the heaped seating that’s commonplace in the biennale. Each section of the video opens with various anecdotes and naive questions like, “Why are all these objects in Paris?”
The piece relies heavily on the juxtaposition of different angles of the same scene. The result usually stresses the lack of dramatic tension or content. Sometimes he attempts to assuage this by anthropomorphizing the figure of the monument, but generally these are treated through a variety of scales, leaping from drone shots of cities to shots of the monuments being moved, largely on cranes which mirror the floating camera. Each section is punctuated by raspy breathing sounds, which, along with its anecdotal “letter to a friend” rhetorical structure. This is another way it performatively humanizes its barely developed polemic.
Sanaz Sohrabi’s An Incomplete Calendar video positions itself as a “map of imaginations and contradictions.” Much of it functions in the form of a university lecture, complete with a slide show that flirts with both documentary and more abstract imagery. Along with the fetishization of pedagogy (the artist is a Concordia professor), there is the generic type of magic realist figure, carrying a mirror in a tear or eye shape that they use to cover their face. They turn up at contemporary buildings referenced in the narrative and serve as a kind of avatar for the hypothetical existence of a cultural imaginary that can be adequately described by being pinpointed in geographical locales. (This is very different from the figure whose head was encased in a mirrored box in Verviers’ video.)
Sohrabi’s 70-minute documentary is shown in a darkened room, its limited seating set in a curve. Most of the space is left empty. The aesthetics of the documentary basically double those that one would commonly find in schlock documentaries on The History Channel (layering, hyperbolic questions, talking heads, mood music, a fascination with maps), only slowed down and elevated by better photography and video effects. There is the voiceover of various experts, although, notably, they are not usually shown facing the camera. Only heard, their voices are juxtaposed with various archival objects. These are mostly magazines, postcards, and other forms of media, which are explicitly shown being handled to accentuate their tactile value. These media forms are often provided with footnotes, which are superimposed on the screen. Sometimes blocks of video are superimposed on them. These archival videos are often juxtaposed, or set side by side, and most of the primary voiceover consists of various hyperbolic statements, implied narratives, and speculative questions.
Although it narratively introduces a relationship between Contemporary Art or Modernism (they are not meaningfully historically distinguished here) and the petro-economy, it never finds much of a visual logic to cope with it other than a retreat to fairly safe and naive types of representation as concrete instances of some sort of “cultural imaginary.”
One of the other significant aesthetic-political ideas it introduces, namely, industrialization as a copycat act, does go somewhere. Despite exploiting an affected “melancholy,” in its examination of dead utopian fantasies and fetishization of print materials and their imaginary tracings of “subjects,” it is the documentary’s strategies of simplification and doubling with minor differentiations (copying) that tend to dominate the video.
Within the context of its presentation, it is transformed more into a statement about the homogeneity of biennales of Contemporary Art than an examination of petro-capitalism. At the centre of the documentary are lingering shots of Noriyuki Haraguchi’s installation of a calm pool of oil that lucidly reflects the Brutalist architecture of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Within the context of the biennale, this image distills the self-reflexive quality of the documentary as a murky meditation on the documentation of documents. This meditation could be extrapolated further into a reflection on the role of “slop” within the biennale and the function of its many irreflective mirrors, whether that is the literal mirror-headed figures, or the mirror functions attributed to discourses and archival objects.
Joyce Joumaa’s video Bêtise humaine is advertised as transforming the museum into a “site of memory and confrontation.” To attest to how “postcolonial struggles … continue to persist,” her video juxtaposes appropriated footage from a football match between Algerian and French teams with footage taken from the 1966 feature film The Battle of Algiers.
The football footage is crudely cropped, blown up, and blurred, leaving the figures barely legible blobs. The film, already a fictionalization and mythification of history, is turned into something resembling animated line art. It superimposes on only one side of the screen, which presumably suggests that only half the people involved have any recollection of it, and it has been reduced to sketchy lines without depth or detail. Combined with the softened, almost gelatinous figures in the football footage, it is a “confrontation” between two low-information blobs that reads much more convincingly as an indictment of the value of the persistence of memory (or the “cultural imaginary”) than anything else. This is all staged to be watched from metallic bleachers on fake grass, giving the spectacle of “postcolonial struggles” the quality of a theme restaurant. This, again, could be taken as a statement about what the biennale is actually performing and the function of the "missing image" as elite entertainment.
In Twòn Kreyol, Raphaël Barontini rattles out the most mundane clichés of decolonial art practice imaginable. Predictably, this means using a lot of textiles, mannequin-like figures, an interest in costumes, and deliberately crude collage techniques that seem like they index some violent pathos. This is all presented with a mix of cheap theatricality and dress shop aesthetics described as “a polymorphic pictorial approach.” No less predictably, it relies on a kind of “magic realism” that blurs history and fiction, in this case, figures from that omnipresent referent, the Haitian Revolution, including references to Voodoo spanning over to Victor Hugo. What is stressed by the enframing is the “dream” quality of the work and its “meticulousness.”
Keeping in line with everything else in the biennale, it is asserted that this is all archival-based (meaning: someone collected something) and deals with history that has been erased from “official history.” It is hard to take this seriously given that I have seen more of this set of strategies, content appropriation, and moral claiming than I can remember, even simply over the past few years, let alone over the past few decades, and inevitably with the same enframing. It is just a narcissistic sub-genre detached from any real historical content or substantive thinking.The only that sets it apart is its bland use of colour.
Set behind another black velvet curtain at UQAM is Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy – for two ancestors. Two rectangular screens sit slumped against the wall, not facing one another. A stumpy plinth has a stack of subjective reflections printed on it that you can take away like the prayer cards you typically find in many churches. There are three tiny soft stools you can sit on. The delay between the videos creates the sense of a musical round. In both videos, a set of seven female opera singers, mostly in black, step up onto a short podium as if they were receiving a prize, utter a note, and step down again. Each of the women echoes this note, which forms no word and creates an incessant, seemingly endless drone. According to the institutionally provided interpretation, this droning is intended to “enact radical, decolonial, and black feminist practices of care and repair.” It is advertised as a “survival practice,” a work of “collective mourning” of genocide, and of “radical refusal” in which the “public is invited to take part.” Although beyond the generally pious context of the biennale, it comes off more like a luxury white noise machine.
Caroline Mauxion’s Must Every Step Touch the Ground? does what she has been doing for years. It borrows more overtly from archives this time, and this gives the work even less of a sense of intimacy and bodilyness. Instead, it registers as more generalized and pedestrian; the pinkish lumps and bent bars that she uses to prop things up feel more like pointless doodles than integral aspects of the blocks of texture she typically constructs. Perhaps it is a natural progression of her basic theme that her work has just become recognizable, normalized, and boring. Or maybe she has just exhausted her mining of this vein and needs to find something else to do. The latter definitely seemed to be implied in the underwhelming use of the narrow anteroom, which she cordoned off and filled with a bunch of her usual “support device” semi-abstracted, and bluntly surfaced, slinky fragments. These usually function as a kind of signature, but within this exhibition, they seem like she is scrawling her brand name over and over on things.
The most interesting instance of this kind of bloated object, however, is when she places fragmented images of body parts onto plinths. They function both as stumpy monoliths and as imploded sculptures, the figurative aspect suspended in the inverted parody of a window. Less interesting, she also blows up cutouts of elements of faces and suspends them at the entrance so they appear as a hybrid face/traffic sign/fast food restaurant kids' corner. There’s the usual crude collage of body parts, which are juxtaposed in chunky ways as well.
Probably the most interesting aspect of her work is her video pieces, which are on (again) bloated and antiquated monitors, each looping at about 15 seconds. They are made from badly superimposed “archival” images with some muffled sound that provides them with their limited atmospheric power. There’s some extremely vague suggestion of a traumatic narrative invoked (mostly by titles), and the entire installation clearly plays on the popular trend for retro horror.
It is the kind of safe, morally sanctified pornography that was generic to early hygiene films, which likewise relied on a combination of archival materials, mixed with history, fiction, some melodrama, and edifying enframing. Orupabo’s authoritarian pornographic fantasy fits quite easily next to Mauxion’s. According to the supplementary text, Mauxion is adopting “autotheory” to look at “the intersection of care and carnal desire,” exploiting her own body and “lived experience,” and recasting this through a readymade binary (straight/queer) that hallucinates social dynamics animated by that perennial cliché, “the gaze.” It is the morbid eroticism of the health care and wellness industry, not merely in its generally sterile sense of surfaces, but in its rhetorical appeals.
Half the works seem to assume that there is a legitimate reconciliation between documentation and ostensibly existing socio-cultural identities and that the moral task of art is the rectification of this. Nearly half of the other works suggest the severe dubiousness of such a claim, while others stake no clear position.
The entire biennale is not really about absent images but about an institutionally lauded poverty of the historical imagination and its displacement with nostalgia. Every aesthetic choice, whether in strategy, subject matter, texture, or tone, betrays this poverty. It is only in a deliberate impoverishment that this absence can even be fantasized about. As in Orupabo’s looping pieces, it is as though you are dealing with people incapable of knowing anything beyond the attention span of a fruit fly.
On a more practical level, there is a problem with juxtaposing static and video art. Some of the video pieces last more than an hour, although most come in around 20-odd minutes. They are essentially features and short films, and they run in loops, which means that it is unlikely you will watch any of them from beginning to end (and no one I saw ever seemed to watch more than a few random minutes). The distinction between durational and non-durational works becomes mostly dysfunctional, and this actually disables much of the artistic capacity of video art. Obviously, this considerably alters how they function, and the conditions of exhibition seem to be something that most of the artists barely take into consideration. Curated as such, they are objectified as more pseudo-documents that are carefully staged and lit as props for the illustration of slop discourse.
The central thing to extract from the discursive slop of the curator is a concern with narrative. Evident in much of the work, even the most extended pieces, is that while narratives are referenced, they are often present as something to be inventoried. On the occasions when this is not the case, the narrative sits awkwardly with the images that it is inscribed over (the narratives always come in the form of writing, a writing that invades the image even if it never competently conquers it).
Despite all the stock references to maps, topography, geography, etc., aside from the fact that it takes place over multiple venues (far fewer than usual), it all feels like a generic museum tour. The contraction of space adds to the reductive fetishization of the fantasy of maps and geography. The geographic branding of the various artists and the (vaguely implied) nationalist meta-narratives that are integral to the marketing of their work point more to the roteness of it. The slop aesthetics that many of the artists employ could have easily been reproduced in a recipe book and output by anyone, which is why authoritarian appeals are central to their function as luxury totems.
The curious thing about the recurrent use of fake grass, soft furnishings, and carpets is that, in stark contrast to things like earth or land art, which deliberately questioned and confused the relationship between in and out and what constituted an exhibition, the strategy employed here foregrounds the sealing of the artwork from any possibly corrosive relationship with an outside. It is only recirculated media in an artificial ecosystem (a dialogue).
With the standalone channels of video, the general setup is nostalgia for the old ways of watching TV. Some of the museum walls are even painted with curves that suggest old TV sets, and strewn with photographs of anonymous people with their televisions. To put it too cutely, the biennale is not about missing images beyond the sense of missing as longing, which is perhaps why it is so saturated with a nostalgia and kitsch, pretentiously described as history. One could add to this that nostalgia is stilted or stunted. This is not just because it is “academic” in the worst sense of the term, but it seems to be embodied in an affectively and intellectually stunted set of presentational strategies.
The theme restaurant style of presentation common to the exhibitions only makes the supposed claims of the works that much more difficult to take seriously. The “archival” in this instance (and many others in Contemporary Art) is just a pompous way of saying that it is a regurgitation. Like Orupabo’s videos, it is a loop of a few seconds that gives the consumer a safely aestheticized form of crystallized panic attack. “Decolonization,” like “queering,” names the moralization of initially radical formal practices into essentially conservative state ideological forms in ways that are not cynical, just vapid, something which is occluded by layering sanctimony on top of it.
As with most Contemporary Art in the city, the biennale has an antiquarian and peculiarly lifeless quality. This may be why its adherents tend to be so obsessed with mourning and resurrection, whether in the manner of Voodoo or redemption. Even then, it can only suggest lifelessness as a kind of drone, whether through performative mourning of auditory drones or the largely pointless roving of camera drones. Notably, all the videos lean heavily on the use of soundscapes. These are droning, electric, generally extremely limited in range and mood, and do an enormous amount of the heavy-lifting since the imagery and its editing rhythms tend to feel consistently unremarkable and unmemorable. The short attention span that dominates seems to confuse the boring with the absent.
On a final note: an interesting tension is created between different notions of indexicality, that claim which is central to photography in general and the notion of documentation in particular.
In Niap’s River Water, abstract watercolour landscapes are made and then blown up to be pasted on the side of the MAC as a mural. The original pieces used water from different rivers, the claim being that the different waters created more saturated and brighter images than tap water. This was then codified as "as a full collaborative process" and said to attest to a kinship between the personal, environmental, and cultural. Given its proximity to the pharmacy across the hallway, one wonders whether you could make no less dubious claims about using various flavours of water they have in stock. One should also question the extent to which the claims that the water "collaborates" with the artist are privileged over the degree to which the final product is the result of several additional steps that index it to an entirely different set of relations (technical and institutional). Given the "expresive" nature of her claim, this should transform what is actually on display into a statement very different from the one which is codified in its advertising.
Meanwhile, Maureen Gruben's Nuna Aliannaittuq (also at MACM) gathers "thousands of clay beads shaped by members of her community with earth sourced from eroding coastal sites. [...] Blending collaborative practices, local materials, and territorial memory, Gruben underscores the deep connections among environment, culture, and Indigenous self-determination in the face of climate upheaval." Like Niap, she reinforces the idea of art as indexical, but its indexicality only really works when you tell stories about the things they supposedly reference. There is frequently not much more than an arbitrary or sentimentalizing connection between the various series (or objectified “knowledges”) that they try to hook up. If there is nothing visually interesting about either work, they are conceptually interesting as ways of trying to do what photography is often purported to do without the traditional technical device of photography.
Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop inserts himself into slides taken in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s; the slides are from The Anonymous Project, a collection that the British artist Lee Shulman has been building for years. At first glance, the images appear charming, evoking a wave of nostalgia—which is quickly dissipated by the vision of a homogeneous society in which racial segregation still prevailed. Whereas Shulman’s collection highlights the absence of diversity, Diop’s intervention undermines it.
The interesting thing about this is that it goes to the heart of the curatorial conceit of the entire biennale, the rhetorical conceits of which are themselves an erasure of the history of the past nearly forty years of the content of Momenta.
The kind of "intervention" that Diop makes would make sense if he were dealing with a national or official government collection, but that is not what this is. The Shulman + Diop pieces make explicit that narrative intervention is itself a form of redaction and erasure, not for the sake of a more accurate accounting of history but to force historical records into conformity with ideological convictions. The “intervention” is itself a propaganda fantasy filled with a morbid and hallucinatory nostalgia, and an inordinately crude and moronic one among the exhibitions.