Art in Montreal

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

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. The previous three iterations of the MOMENTA Biennale (2017, 2019, 2021) were the product of the expansion