Art in Montreal

Taking up the entirety of Centre Vox’s exhibition spaces is Greek artist Janis Rafa ’s Landscape Depressions . It is part of Vox’s Chronopolitics programming, the aim of which is “to provide a forum for artists advocating ethical stances on the future, and to prompt critical reflection on the social and political issues around the notion of time.” A slightly different version of the exhibition under the title Feed me. Cheat me. Eat me ran at the Eye Filmmuseum. At the entrance is the introductory text and the video, A Sign of Prosperity to the Dreamer , in which dead birds fly through the sky again thanks to an explosion. The remainder of the exhibition spans four distinct spaces. The first space shows The Space Between Your Tongue and Teeth . It involves three screens, each of which tends to be dominated by light in a specific colour. On each screen is a different view of horses being trained for racing. They have metallic bits stuck in their mouths, they run on treadmills,...

This is the last part of my coverage of MOMENTA. In the previous two articles, I addressed the disparate implications of two of the key shows and how the one undid the other, and I examined how the logic of images , regardless of the framing imposed by artists and curators, tended to complicate or invert the officially sanctioned interpretations of their purported communicative content. In the first article , I looked at how the entire event was framed. This meant both its broader framing in the press through a rhetoric of crisis that exploited various medical metaphors, and the way that MOMENTA was more specifically conceptualized this year by its curator Ji-Yoon Han. In her concluding essay in the MOMENTA catalogue, the curator substantially extends the kind of panic discourse that was already employed as a plea for funding and publicity. She uses this to frame the event with an extraordinary amount of hyperbole. We are told that we live in a “frantic age” in which artists have lo...

MOMENTA has opened. While I have only seen about two-thirds of it so far, it does seem to be better than past instances. I have already written an introductory preamble examining the self-contextualization and curatorial claims that have accrued around this iteration. In this, and a few future articles, I will examine some of the actualized exhibitions. There are, from the outset, a series of interesting clashes amid a number of the exhibitions. I will only deal with a couple of them here, but they seem neatly in line with the general theme of masquerades. The two discussed here were directly funded by MOMENTA so this should not be surprising. One of the three exhibitions on at Galerie de l’UQAM is The Roman de Remort, or the inhumane, villainous fabliaux of the Ultimate Carnaval by the collective Marion Lessard (Marie Cherbat-Schiller, Alice Roussel, Jean-Nicolas Léonard, Claude Romain, and Élisabeth M. Larouine). According to its official gloss: Marion Lessard appropriate...