MOMENTA Biennale de l’image, Montréal 2023

Masquerades: Drawn to Metamorphosis

MOMENTA Biennale de l’image is delighted to announce the complete list of artists and exhibition venues participating in its 18th edition, from September 7 to October 22, 2023. Designed by curator Ji-Yoon Han, Masquerades: Drawn to Metamorphosis aims to explore the dynamics of visibility and invisibility that shape representations of the self and the other from the metamorphic potentials of mimicry.

Deployed in fifteen locations across the city, the biennial program will bring together 23 artists from abroad, representing 15 countries, and from 4 provinces and 4 Indigenous nations of Canada. From one exhibition to the next, processes of transformation, mimicry, and mutation will be activated, questioning the func-tions of the image, between representation and metamorphosis.

“From one exhibition to the next, Masquerades makes the infinite nuances of proliferation dance in the dynamics of appearance and concealment, chal-lenging conventions. It is an invitation to multiply ourselves in the distorting mirrors of alter ego, avatar, and personification. It calls on the trance, the euphoria of singing, and the intoxication of the carnival, through which one can attain ecstasy—literally, stand outside oneself.”

Ji-Yoon Han, curator

Publication: MOMENTA continues its collaboration with the prestigious German publishing house Kerber Verlag with the launch, on the Biennale’s opening day, of a publication that brings together various perspectives related to its program and the issues behind it. The publication offers presentations of each exhibition; an essay on the metamorphic potential of “skin consciousness” by the American scholar and theoretician of culture Anne Anlin Cheng; and an essay by the curator, Ji-Yoon Han, who reflects on the notion of the image through the prism of the theme.