MOMENTA celebrates its 19th edition this year, and its first as a contemporary art biennial. The biennial takes place in 11 venues across Montreal. Various exhibitions featuring the work of 23 Canadian and international artists will be presented from September 10, 2025.
Marie-Ann Yemsi, curator of this edition of the biennale, says that “certain images are missing”, and that the theme of this year’s MOMENTA reflects this lack and its impact on contemporary society. When an image is missing, artists reinvent, recreate or sublimate it. PHI curator Cheryl Sim says “thank God for art!”
“How are stories told? How are they told? By whom?” are at the heart of Marie-Ann Yemsi’s curation, and for the exhibition at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (which is, in a way, “MOMENTA’s HQ”) she worked with artists examining “the place between images stemming from colonialism [among other things] and the impact they have had on the collective imagination”. Like the reconstruction of a past felt but never photographed.
Éloges de l’Image Manquante at MAC
The central exhibition, and the first to be seen at MOMENTA, is at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (MAC) at Place Ville-Marie. Works by 5 artists respond to each other in the museum’s rather labyrinthine space.
Joyce Joumaa’sBêtise Humaine blurs the first France-Algeria soccer match (in 2001) after the country’s official decolonization date. Algerian fans invade the pitch, and the underlying anger and violence of the scene is exacerbated by images of the siege of Algiers.
Lee Shulman and Omar Victor Diop’sBeing There stretches the Anonymous Project into a bittersweet rewriting of 1950s America, posing Omar Victor Diop in existing photographs – and in “whites only” spaces. Lee Shulman refers to his work as “uncomfortably funny”, and as a comic reminder that “everyone should have a place at the table”.
30 × 42.5 cm (unframed) Courtesy of MAGNIN
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A (Paris) © Lee Shulman / The Anonymous Project © Omar Victor Diop
An Incomplete Calendar , by Sanaz Sohrabi, explores the empty passages of decolonization in OPEC countries (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) through artistic archives and the great halls where the future of black gold-rich countries is planned after the departure of the colonizer.
Maureen Gruben’sNuna Aliannaituq is a sculpture made of melted permafrost beads from her village of Tuktoyaktuk, and the clay used is like a dream of something that has already disappeared.
Ivan Argote’s Levitate is a three-channel video in which the artist recreates the removal of colonial statues in Rome, Paris and Madrid. He questions public space as a space that has yet to be decolonized. It’s quite funny and irreverent. On one of the videos, white on red, he says “dreaming is key”.
Practical info
MOMENTA takes place at 11 venues in Montreal;
- MAC Place Ville-Marie, 1 Place Ville-Marie
- PHI, 407 rue Saint-Pierre
- Center Clark, 5455 Avenue de Gaspé
- Dazibao, 5455 de Gaspé Avenue, room 109
- Darling Foundry, 745 Place Sable-Gris
- Galerie de l’UQAM, Université du Québec à Montréal, Pavillon Judith-Jasmin, 1400 Rue Berri J-R120
- Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd West, room LB-165
- Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1380 Sherbrooke St W
- Optica, 5445 de Gaspé Ave, #106
- VOX, 2 Sainte-Catherine East St, #401
Happy biennial!