MontrealArea: 364.7 km²Time zone: GMT-5

Montreal is the second-largest French-speaking city in the world, after Paris. Its name derives from the triple-peaked mountain in the centre of the city, Mount Royal. In Mohawk, it’s called Tiohtià:ke (“where the group divided”) and in Ojibwe it’s known as Mooniyang, “first stopping place”.

Thirty thousand feet over Labrador in eastern Canada, I’m watching a graphic of an aeroplane traversing the globe on the seatback television in front of me. The woman sitting closest to the window in my row has closed the blind, so for now this simulation of a view will have to do. The aerial perspective is strange. We mostly encounter it in normal life in the context of technical images – maps, the weather forecast, and – more recently – videos of boats being blown up off the coast of Venezuela by the Trump government. As a result, it asserts a kind of authority that what you’re seeing is in some way scientific. From above, the landscape of someone else’s life is easily reduced to its topographic qualities. As we begin our descent toward MontrealTrudeau International Airport, the pilot drops the plane’s wing to reveal the city below. From this height, it looks almost completely flat.

I’m in Montreal as part of a cultural delegation of curators and writers visiting the 19th edition of the MOMENTA Biennale d’art contemporain, In Praise of the Missing Image. On the ground, across 11 venues, Marie-Ann Yemsi shows the work of 23 artists who uncover and draw attention to untold histories and spaces of omission and absence.

The start of my visit coincides with the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation – known as Orange Shirt Day – commemorating the indigenous children who were abducted into the Canadian Indian residential school system. Administered by the Catholic Church, these schools removed young people from their families and forced them to adopt Euro-Canadian culture. Instances of sexual and physical abuse were numerous, and many children were never returned to their homes. At Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, on the ground floor of Concordia University’s J.W. McConnell Building, the biennale’s director Dominique Sirois-Rouleau and artistic co-ordinator Dounia Bouzidi are introducing the work of Raven Chacon – they both wear orange-coloured tops.

Although his work is often shown in a fine art context, Chacon’s practice is rooted in his work as a composer. In the gallery, this expansive understanding of composition is realised on paper and in audio, video and textile works. The show opens with an installation retelling the Navajo creation story, followed by a series of lithographic prints combining aspects of Western musical notation with tribal geometries, numerology and more ambiguous patterns. Next, in a room curtained off from the rest of the exhibition, a video plays of a composition scored for an ensemble of revolvers, handguns, rifles, and shotguns. Despite its separation from the rest of the show, the sound of Report (2001/15) bleeds into Chacon’s other works. On the opposing side of the wall against which the film is projected hangs Storm Pattern (2021) – a multi-channel sound installation and textile score for a field recording made at Standing Rock Oceti Sakowin camp on Thanksgiving weekend 2016 at the height of protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. It is accompanied by the sound of drones flying, notated on the score by two crossing lines, like a plus sign. Elsewhere, there are zig-zagging diagonal lines like lightning bolts, four arrows which converge inwards at the centre of the tapestry and a series of asymmetrically undulating lines which represent the “black snake”: oil. I am surprised at how quickly one adjusts to the constant sound of gunfire: after a few moments, the sharp punctuating sound of bullets seems to have faded almost entirely into the background of my consciousness.

Outside the gallery, his two-channel video Maneuvering the Apostles (2024) plays. The video documents a prompt for a drone-mounted camera to fly as close as possible to the turbines of a wind farm before being sucked into its blades. Filmed at Nordlys Vind, one of Europe’s largest wind farms and the traditional homelands of the Sámi, the video shows a drone’s eye perspective as the device descends further into clouds shrouding the wind farm. The footage is accompanied by tremolo-affected audio recordings of birdsong. The distorted sound of birds calling under the influence of a repetitious and propelling tremolo mirrors turbines pushing and distorting the air around them. In many Native American cosmologies, existence is understood as being divided into three distinct realms: This World, the Under World below us, and the Sky World above. Chacon’s drone rejects the top-down, so-called “God’s Eye View”, typically associated with the aerial perspective. Instead, he scans the landscape around the turbines, the home of what Chacon describes as our vertical relations – the creative beings that occupy the world above ours. The sound intensifies. We are drawn further into the clouds, propellers slicing the frame top to bottom, until the entirety of the screen becomes filled with nothing but white mist.

We leave the show and walk to the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, or MAC. While a new site for the museum is under construction, its exhibition programme is temporarily taking place in the basement of the Place Ville Marie in downtown Montreal – a shopping centre-cum-food court-cum-office block described by its developers as an “urban gathering hub”. This unusual arrangement has forced the institution to reconsider its curatorial approach. Formerly a retail unit, the exhibition space is incredibly malleable, Dounia explains, and there are really no limits to how they can partition the space or what they can construct in it. But, as the building is not climate-controlled, the museum can show none of its permanent collection or any works that have specific conservation needs. Under these circumstances, they’ve decided to hand over the entirety of their current space to MOMENTA for the duration of the biennial, showing the work of six artists primarily using photography, moving image and installation.

When we arrive, Sanaz Sohrabi, one of these six, is waiting for us. She’s showing her film An Incomplete Calendar, which traces the history of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) between 1950 and 1980, not just as an economic alliance, but as a cultural and political movement. Originally shown as an installation featuring archival material and ephemera from OPEC member nations, Sohrabi’s research into cultural production in this 30-year period has been reconceived in the form of an essay film. The resulting audio-visual collage reveals how oil functioned not only as a physical resource but as a means for establishing political liberation and transnational solidarity between countries in West Asia, North Africa and Latin America.

The film has a circular narrative structure, beginning with Sohrabi’s discovery of the vinyl record Rhymes and Songs for OPEC, a collection of folk songs from member nations recorded to commemorate OPEC’s 20th anniversary by the Concert Choir of Central University of Venezuela in 1980. Over the film’s hour-plus run time, the filmmaker, in conversation with Jihan El-Tahri, Murtaza Vali, Laleh Khalili, Layla Maghribi, Eduardo Prato Moros and Leonardo Montaño Salas, retells the history of OPEC aided by its representation in physical media. Relics like newspaper cuttings, postage stamps, vinyl albums, and architecture reveal oil’s importance in the histories of liberation and independence movements, nationalisation, industrial development, and international solidarity – held within them is a potential history of OPEC as a model for dismantling Western imperialism in the Global South. Once splintered, the radical political and cultural framework represented by these objects is reassembled in Sohrabi’s film. It ends as it begins, at the University of Venezuela, where Sohrabi stands on the same stage where Rhymes and Songs for OPEC was performed and recorded.

The credits roll, and I notice that the chairs we are sitting on are the same as those in the auditorium onscreen. Framed on the wall outside Sohrabi’s projection are some of the envelopes featured in the film. One commemorates the Afro-Asian Youth Conference, another the First Arab Petroleum Congress. The stamps are decorated with illustrations of winding pipelines, tankers crossing the Suez Canal and rows of oil derricks. Everyone has left now, and I walk out of the MAC and take the stairs up a level and onto the street. It’s the end of the day and I join the steady flow of people walking home from work. Heading back to my hotel, I notice bits of rubbish lining the curb – cigarette butts, a disposable coffee cup marked with lipstick, a MetroCard, and a pamphlet which tells me that Jesus loves me. Nothing is ever really thrown away.

The next morning, I wake up early and decide to go to Parc du Mont-Royal – the view over the city is beautiful. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed Central Park in New York City, it surrounds Mont-Royal, the mountain which gives the city its name. I walk down the mountain toward the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, where we are met by Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre, curator of Quebec and Canadian contemporary art, for a tour of the museum’s new displays. Marie-Claire Blais is exhibiting a huge curtain painted with patches of light blue, orange, red and pink; made from panels of burlap, it hangs from wire in the centre of the gallery. It looks like a red sky, curling at one end like a wave. The installation is accompanied by an audio recording of Blais painting the burlap in her studio; the sound of her brush moving against the scratchy, unprimed fabric is like lapping tides.

Upstairs in Kent Monkman’s painting Protecting the Medicines (2023), the sky is burning too. Native American protestors pull each other back and try to push away police in riot gear, brandishing truncheons. A man wearing a tactical vest and vaguely colonial-looking safari boots with tan trousers turns the butt of his assault rifle toward a protester, preparing to bring it down on his head. Behind them, a great pine forest is ablaze. This is one in a series of Monkman’s paintings of indigenous people being attacked by police, entitled The Protectors. In an earlier painting, Washing Mary’s Tears (2018), a woman lies on the ground wincing in pain, fist clenched, as a riot cop sprays mace into her face. She is attended to by two friends who are pouring glistening bottled water into her eyes while a further two cops point their weapons at the women. These are just a few of the monumentally sized paintings on display as part of Monkman’s exhibition History is Painted by the Victors – his largest to date. In his work, Monkman subverts the form of history painting, a term coined by the French Royal Academy in the 17th century to describe large-scale paintings with historical, mythical, or Biblical subjects. Monkman’s paintings borrow from the iconography of historic and modern painting to address social, political and environmental issues in present-day Turtle Island, as North America is referred to by some Native Americans. One such example is The Deluge (2019), where he borrows the motif of the Biblical flood from the book of Genesis. In this case, Monkman depicts himself in the form of his alter-ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle – hanging off a cliff with two children clinging onto her shoulders and waist. Three adults wearing traditional clothing reach over the cliff toward the painter and children, attempting to pull them toward safety and away from the implied flood of European settlers below.

Standing outside the museum, I notice the surrounding neighbourhood is home to the diplomatic offices of many European countries. Outside the Polish embassy, by a public display of paintings by Tamara de Lempicka, I meet two women heading to a protest at the Russian Consulate. They are wearing white scarves, the edges of which are marked with thin yellow and blue stripes and have a dove printed in the centre. A resident living opposite the consulate has covered their home in Ukrainian flags. The women tell me they go there to protest every day at 12 pm. After following them up the hill, I leave them outside the building. It is fenced off from the rest of the street, topped with sharp barbed wire, and surrounded by CCTV cameras. Outside, a few clear bin bags have been dumped on the side of the road. One of them, I notice, is filled with shredded documents and worn Calvin Klein underpants.

The Deluge (2019), Kent Monkman.

At Artexte downtown, records are treated with a little more care. The venue serves as a library for the contemporary art community in Montreal and Canada more broadly. The library was founded on the principles of democratisation and the rejection of biases and gaps in the institutionalised history of Canadian art. The resulting collection is largely shaped by its users. It has an incredibly open acquisition policy and collects a broad variety of documents but, as a not-for-profit, has a limited budget – relying mostly on donations from members of the community. There is no expectation that people will become members of the library, you don’t have to request access to the space, and no record is kept of your attendance. Some visitors do, however, choose to leave traces of their time there: compiling bibliographies for future researchers – lists of objects relating to subjects like the work of Indigenous Canadian or contemporary women artists and their locations in the library’s rolling stacks.

Alongside these are documents recording the bienniale’s own history, which started as Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal in 1989, organised on the 150th anniversary of the medium by VOX centre de l’image contemporaine. In the years since then, MOMENTA expanded its remit to include other images, before finally reimagining itself as a biennial of contemporary art. However, the spirit of the biennial’s original conception is still present in a satellite exhibition of photobooks curated by Serge Allaire in Artexte’s exhibition space. This curated reading room provides a cross-section of contemporary photobook making in Québec, categorised by approach – poetry and photography, photo essay, social landscape, and documentary.

I slip out of the exhibition at Artexte – the show is hidden in a back room, accessible via a gap in the rolling stacks – and wander back to my hotel room. Surfing the hotel television, I see that room service opens at five and decide to order something. My burger is delivered by a robot called “H2M2”. It’s a plastic column with wheels attached, a small screen which greets me, and a motorised lid which opens to reveal my dinner. The robot is covered in a retro-futuristic livery, vinyl wrapped to give it the appearance of having spindly robot arms, a mouth with gaping smile, and two bulging eyes which stare at me while I take flash photographs of it in the hallway outside my room.

I woke up at 5am the next morning. The dark sky over the city’s downtown district is patterned with lights from office blocks and apartments. Metro workers are striking today, so I take a taxi to Mile End toward a cluster of the biennial’s venues. I ask the cab driver, Abdulaziz, to take me to a café that does strong coffee – almost every café I’ve been to here makes the kind of flavourless coffee I associate with North American chains or a trendy weak brew which claims to highlight the flavour of the bean. Abdulaziz agrees with me that both taste awful, and instead we drive to Café Olimpico, which he says I’m going to like. After a while talking, I found out he’s from Libya and studied in the US before moving to Canada to be with his brothers. We chatted about Sanaz’s film, OPEC, and Gaddafi – he was a teenager when the regime was overthrown. The early years of Arab socialism and the Third International Theory were good, he tells me, but eventually things started to go wrong. The worst thing that can happen to your country, he says, is that America takes an interest in it. I told him that I went to university with Gaddafi’s niece, but we weren’t really friends, which he finds hilarious. We cross Saint Laurent, a historic dividing line in the city in terms of language, class and ethnicity, and into the more Francophone side of town. I ask him what it’s like moving to Quebec. He says it’s hard, but people aren’t fake like the Americans.

He was right, the coffee at Olimpico is strong. I sit drinking an Americano and watching footage from the Freedom Flotilla livestream. In every livestreamed attempt to bring aid into Gaza by boat, I’ve noticed how focused on controlling images the Israeli military seems. The ships’ broadcasts cut in and out as their signals are jammed. When they are boarded, the soldiers carry guns and cameras and wander the vessels looking for the source of the livestreamed footage, take the crew’s cameras and point them toward the ground.

I rejoin the rest of my group at Centre CLARK, where they’re showing two films: Myriam Omar Awadi’s Les feux que vos derniers souffles ravivent (2022) and Orchard Station Road by OK Pedersen (2025). I duck behind a curtain and into Pedersen’s film. There’s been a solar flare, the only remaining source of power is from charged disposable lithium-ion batteries and society will be forced to rebuild. Orchard Station Road is assembled from found video footage and the filmmaker’s own material shot on hand-developed celluloid film, and follows an unnamed narrator through the immediate aftermath of a space weather event, which has set society back a decade. In some ways, the story recalls Covid-19 – the banality that accompanies the high-stress experience of global crisis and the futility of the capitalist growth mindset, which such events reveal. Footage of Barack Obama praising American democracy is intercut with film of tiny-home residencies and Mariah Carey and a dancing car performing “Auld Lang Syne”. The film is informed by Hito Steyerl’s essay Documentary Uncertainty (2007) where she proposes a new approach to documentary filmmaking that not only reflects the social and political anxieties of the time but also looks forward, in an attempt to transform these fears into affective propositions for the future. After joining a community which has achieved self-sufficiency, our narrator finds themself working on a construction project building a road to nowhere – a metaphor for a country which, even in a state of collapse, has lost belief in anything except economic progress.

Montreal’s official language may be French, but its trendiest neighbourhood has a distinctly English name. Mile End, Montreal, took its name from Mile End, London, around 1800. Like its London equivalent, it is a historically Jewish area. Unlike its London equivalent, its name signifies nothing: it isn’t thought to be precisely a mile away from anything. Other notable Mile Ends can be found in Adelaide, southern Australia, and on the hit 1995 Pulp album, Another Class. 

A worker replaces the signage outside Montreal Convention Centre.

Galleries Dazibao and OPTICA, which are also showing work as part of the biennial along with MOMENTA’s own offices, are located in the same building as Centre CLARK. I joined Dominique, Dounia, and the rest of the bienniale’s team there for lunch. The building and those that surround it were once textile factories. Now they house creative and artistic enterprises, in particular CGI and 3D animation studios alongside other producers of synthetic images, who are amongst the main employers in the city – the entirety of the building’s eighth floor is used by French video game developer Ubisoft.

Later that evening, Raven Chacon is in town to give a performance at the Chapelle de la Cité-des-Hospitalières. Metro services are still halted, so I rent a BIXI bike, the city’s particular brand of roadside pushbike rental, and cycle to Raven’s performance. I get lost trying to navigate the city’s grid layout – a series of one-way roads which seem to alternate at every turning – and I’m forced to circle my destination like a dog chasing its tail. The bike ride is uphill the whole way. When I arrive, I am totally out of puff and boiling hot. I deposit the bike, inhale a cigarette, and wheeze towards the entrance. The attendant at the door checks my ticket and asks me my name. “Full name?” I ask and she writes down the word “fumée” – smoke.

In the church, an orchestra plays Chacon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Voiceless Mass (2021). Performers begin playing on stage before vanishing after the first movements. When their playing resumes, only the conductor is visible – standing beneath a bloody Christ on the cross. Voiceless Mass was originally written by Chacon for the pipe organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee and has since toured churches internationally. The sound of instruments emanates from blind corners and the balconies of the church – as I listen, I develop a heightened awareness of the spatiality of the building, of hidden and invisible corners and the dark histories that might occupy them. The music swells from the church’s outer edges; I begin to feel as if the walls of the building are being ripped apart. Sitting in the pews, I clasp my hands together, hang my head forward, and enter the brace position in anticipation of the building’s collapse. Later, I realised it must have looked like I was praying.

The next morning, I head to Parc Jean-Drapeau. I’m leaving tonight and wanted to see it before I go. On the metro, a few days earlier, Dominique told me her dad helped construct the city’s underground transport system. It’s unconventional in that it is not on rails but wheels. The carriages roll on thick inflated rubber tyres, riding on tracks through deep tunnels which peak and trough, using gravity to smooth the ride. During construction, tonnes of soil from beneath the city were removed and added to Saint-Helen’s Island, where Parc Jean-Drapeau is located. I wander past the island’s out-of-season funfair, an empty competition-sized swimming pool, and The Biosphere, a huge geodesic dome with a museum inside. As I’m walking, I meet a woman flying a drone over the museum. She tries to show me the view on her phone. Against the harsh sun, the drone’s perspective is barely visible. The sun’s light forms iridescent stripes across her screen and reveals smudged fingerprints. We talk for a while, and after I tell her I’m a photographer, she’s interested to hear what I think of her pictures. It’s not hard to imagine the kind of images she must be taking, and I tell her I think they look good. .

The delivery robot that brings room service. The Hôtel Monville was the first in Canada to use such a robot, which travels automomously through the hotel and even uses the lifts.