With this year’s biennial coming up and almost everyone lazing for the holiday season, it seemed like a good time to recall the defunct version of the event, which expired in 2011 after which it was revived (twice) and hybridized. The first came as one of the peak achievements of the Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal (CIAC), which, far more than the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), seemed to take the premise that the city needed Contemporary Art seriously. The biennial is one of the most generic forms that Contemporary Art tends to be marketed in. It can have a national orientation, such as the Whitney, or an internationalist one, like the Venice. There are other variations and in Montréal it was a hodgepodge. A lot of ink has been spilled on the difference between these models of biennial and those that have been popping up in the “global south,” and that biennials, as associated as they may be with the “post-colonial turn” and/or with globalizing capital
A critical revue of contemporary art in the city.