Maureen Gruben’s work at Montreal’s Momenta festival features necklaces made from clay beads made of local soil taken from the eroding shoreline in her Northwest Territories community.Kyra Kordoski/Momenta
Maureen Gruben is a senior artist from Tuktoyaktuk, NWT, who often involves her community in her work. She is represented in a current Montreal show by a display of about three dozen large round necklaces made from 4,800 clay beads. The solid earth-coloured beads were fashioned by many hands with local soil taken from the eroding shoreline and melting permafrost in the area.
This contribution, Nuna Aliannaittuq, is probably the most important art work in Montreal’s current Momenta festival for the mere fact of its materiality. It is a physical presence in the midst of many digital and photographic images.
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Montreal’s new/old Momenta, the latest incarnation of an event that started in 1989 as a month-long photography festival, is repositioning itself as a contemporary art showcase, but it will need more painting, sculpture and installation to get the job done. Right now, it looks like a photography and digital art festival by another name, while this year’s theme – In Praise of the Missing Image – seems particularly tailored to photography. (Gruben has also contributed a compelling video showing closeups of the melting permafrost beneath the tundra. Drip, drip, drip.)
Confusingly, Momenta refers to this as its 19th edition, because it can trace it roots back to the Mois de la Photo – Montreal’s equivalent of Toronto’s Contact or Vancouver’s Capture – which started in 1989 and continued to 2015. Then it changed its name to Momenta and from 2017 to 2023 became a festival devoted more generally to the image. In 2024, it announced a broader mandate for 2025 covering all contemporary art, so this one is also a first edition of a new Montreal biennial.
British artist and filmmaker Lee Shulman dove into his archive and inserted Omar Victor Diop's presence into U.S. family found photos of the 1950s, in collaboration with the Senegalese photographer.Lee Shulman & Omar Victor Diop/Momenta
The show that features Gruben’s work is the keynote exhibition, mounted by the Musée d’Art Contemporain in its temporary quarters in the lower level of the Place Ville Marie. (MAC is now predicting that the much delayed renovation of its home in the Place des Arts will be ready in 2028.)
The MAC exhibition, an international gathering curated by Marie-Ann Yemsi, responds to Momenta’s theme very directly. The British artist and filmmaker Lee Shulman and the Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop present a collaboration: Shulman has delved into his vast archive of found photography, pulled out U.S. family photos of the 1950s, and inserted Diop’s mischievous presence into picnics, tourist outings and holiday dinners.
In many of the images, set during a time when segregation was a part of American life, Diop looks right at the camera.Lee Shulman & Omar Victor Diop/Momenta
Set during a period when racial segregation was still a fact of American life, the point is obvious as one Black face appears in each all-white scene. This is the most overt example of the missing image theme, but it’s also one of the most compelling. The way the project inserts itself back into history is oddly disarming: Sometimes the introduction of Diop’s figure is as complete as a deep fake; other times it’s more in keeping with Stalinist photo doctoring. Often Diop waves or raises a glass as he looks right at the camera as though winking knowingly at the contemporary viewer.
More obliquely, the Lebanese-Canadian artist Joyce Joumaa addresses history with a film that revisits a tense racial event from France’s recent past: In 2001, during the first-ever international soccer match between France and Algeria, Algerian football fans, determined they would not lose to the colonizers ever again, poured onto the field and stopped the game.
Sanaz Sohrabi, an Iranian artist who teaches at Concordia University, offers a longer film, an artistic documentary of sorts, based on her research about the intersection of the arts and OPEC, the multinational petroleum cartel that was founded as oil-producing nations became independent from colonial powers after the Second World War.
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Juxtaposing clips of its early meetings in the 1960s, with various artistic by-products, including postage stamps and folk songs, Sohrabi exposes the optimistic nationalism of those early years and the relationship between art and propaganda. The most intriguing bit of cultural diplomacy she uncovers involves filming the fabulous Alexander Calder acoustic panels installed in a Caracas concert hall in the 1950s. Calder was patronized by John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose family company, Standard Oil, had interests in Venezuela at the time: The soaring abstract art is politically earthbound after all.
Sanaz Sohrabi's work at Momenta looks at the intersection of the arts and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which formed after the Second World War. Here is an OPEC record cover.Sanaz Sohrabi/Momenta
The Colombian artist Iván Argote offers a more humorous consideration of colonialism, with some inventive hoaxes surrounding public statues presented as a video installation. In Madrid, he takes a full-size copy of a prominent statue of Christopher Columbus and drives it around on a flatbed to the consternation of motorists. In Paris, he sets up a crew of workers who look ready to remove the statue of Maréchal Joseph Gallieni from the Place Vauban. The French First World War hero was also a colonial warrior and is shown standing on the shoulders of female figures representing the colonized. In Argote’s video, the statue is finally hoisted by a crane: More deep fakery – and satirical prodding of authorities to take action.
If you visit the MAC venue, don’t miss the one painterly element in this exhibition, located in a hallway outside the gallery: In River Water, the Inuk artist Niap has created massive wall panels that reproduce her abstracted watercolour landscapes created with water collected from rivers in Nunavik. The contrast between the scale of the panels and the softness of the watercolour medium is striking and the landscapes offer a strong companion to Gruben’s permafrost work.
Inuk artist Niap's watercolour landscapes were created with water collected from rivers in Nunavik.Niap/Feheley Fine Arts/MAC
MAC is but one of 15 participating venues in Momenta, and many of the others are also showing work that would feel at home in a photography and video festival, with a heavy emphasis on video. One highlight is Josèfa Ntjam’s swell of spæc(i)es, a fantastical digital animation at PHI in Old Montreal.
It takes place underwater, in space and on some rocky planet, as shapes shift, merge and reform while photos of Black ancestors give way to flying meteorites. The squid and the jellyfish are recurring characters, and alongside a large curving screen are two jelly-fish-shaped listening posts where you can hear the French artist speak her poetry in evocative tones. The idea, which takes an Afro-futuristic approach to fashion a creation myth, seems rarefied: Surely the protoplasmic ooze is one place free of colonial constructions in need of dismantling. But the piece, which includes AI animation, is visually spectacular and reaffirms PHI’s status as the place to visit if you want to see true advances in digital art.
Momenta continues at various Montreal venues to Nov. 1.