The Biennale de Montréal—which relaunched with a new leadership team, after a rough patch, for its 2014 edition—has announced plans for this year’s exhibition, due to be held in the Québécois city from 19 October to 15 January 2017.
“It’s very different from the last edition,” says the event’s director, Sylvie Fortin. While the 2014 biennale, L’avenir (looking forward), included many socially engaged works, the 2016 event looks at aesthetics, fiction and materiality, “not in the sense of consumerism, but in the sense of things”, explains Philippe Pirotte, the exhibition’s curator.
The title he has chosen for the biennial, Le Grand Balcon (The Balcony), is taken from a 1956 play by Jean Genet, which is set in a brothel in an unnamed city as a revolution rises up in the streets outside. Pirotte sees it more of a guiding concept than a prescriptive theme, with the focus on the works themselves. “We want to deal with politics, but in an indirect way,” Pirotte says.
“We get carried away about what art can really do,” Fortin says. “I think art is really powerful and it can play a major role in society and often does, but I think we have to be careful about how we articulate that, the claims that we make—otherwise it can become empty.”
Painting and performance will figure heavily among the works by around 50 local and international artists, including a mix of new commissions and collaborations, such as a project designed by an artist in the 1980s that was never realised, as well as existing works and museum loans.
Joining Pirotte on the curatorial advisory team is Corey McCorkle, a New York-based artist, who will also show work at the event; Aseman Sabet, an arts writer and independent curator who is working towards a doctorate in art history at the Université de Montréal; and Kitty Scott, the Curator of Modern and contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.