June 6 to September 13, 2026
Iaohontso’ktá:tie / To Move Across the Land : Markets of Memory: The Archive of Exchange
Curators: Armando Perla & Michael Patten
La Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA), 8th edition
EXPRESSION, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe
495, avenue Saint-Simon, Saint-Hyacinthe Québec, J2S 5C3
Tessa Alexander, Arawhetū Berdinner, Jacqueline Bishop, Jori Brenon, Josue Castro, Silvia Caxi, Venuca Evanan
Mario López, Jose Luis Fernando Morales, Ehikoo Odeh, Jakob Olive, Paula Rivera, Amanda Stowers, Ritni Tears, TRAMA Textiles, Matt Tini, ARIA XYX
Situated above an active public market, this exhibition approaches the market as a living Indigenous archive shaped through trade, movement, and women’s knowledge systems. Across Mesoamerica and beyond, markets have long functioned as spaces where Indigenous women sustained economies, preserved ceremonial materials, transmitted artistic and medicinal knowledge, and maintained cultural continuity despite colonial disruption.
Rather than treating exchange as separate from culture, the works presented here understand circulation itself as a form of memory. Textiles, foodways, fibres, adornment, plants, and handmade objects move through relationships of barter, care, and reciprocity that continue to structure Indigenous life across territories. Throughout the exhibition, adornment appears as a living market practice, circulating through powwows, Indigenous trade networks, street markets, and intergenerational systems of making that connect aesthetics, ceremony, and exchange. In this context, the market operates simultaneously as school, social infrastructure, ceremonial site, and public space of Indigenous presence.
The exhibition also challenges museum models rooted in accumulation and permanence. Value emerges through movement, reuse, encounter, and redistribution. Through sculpture, textile, installation, adornment, and performance, the artists foreground economies grounded in relationality and survival, where objects remain alive through exchange and where women’s labour continues to sustain collective memory across generations.
The Market Woman
Centered around artist and scholar Jacqueline Bishop’s Fauna (2024) tea service and related textile, painting, and poetic works, this installation examines the market woman as a keeper of botanical knowledge, reproductive autonomy, and cultural continuity within the violent economies of colonialization, the transatlantic slave trade and plantation economies. Works such as The Keeper of All the Secrets (2023), printed on Sea Island cotton, foreground the exchanges of plant knowledge between Indigenous women of Abya Yala and forcibly displaced African women, tracing how these forms of knowledge became crucial to survival, healing, and reproductive care within the Caribbean. Bishop follows how these systems of medicinal practice and communal support moved through markets, shaping Caribbean women’s worlds across generations. Within these histories, Black women used plants, herbs, and market exchange networks to regulate fertility, terminate pregnancies resulting from sexual violence, and sustain forms of care excluded from colonial archives.
Installed on a textile by Trama Textiles, a cooperative of Maya women weavers formed during the Guatemalan genocide, the tea service situates women’s knowledge within broader Indigenous and diasporic systems of survival carried through markets, fabric, foodways, and oral transmission. Bishop’s paintings, garments, and poem Island Women extend this reflection, foregrounding women whose knowledge circulated through gesture, memory, and trade despite displacement and rupture.
Surrounding the installation, works by Black women artists including Ehiko Odeh and Tessa Alexander further engage plant knowledge, market economies, and the layered relationships between Blackness and Indigeneity across the Caribbean and the broader African diaspora. Together, the works ask what it means to remain Indigenous after forced displacement, enslavement, and rupture from ancestral territories, foregrounding the market as a space where memory, land-based knowledge, and cultural continuity continue to be carried through women’s labour and exchange.
Market Skin
This hallway installation presents photographs from Paula Rivera’s series La suma de todas las madres (2024–2025), including portraits of market women, and Xipe Totec (2025). The women of the markets and their families stand at the center of these works, filling the frame like charged interiors, dense with memory, labour, and inheritance. Rivera turns her attention to the apron: the garment repeatedly described by Salvadoran market women as their adornment. In Kuskatan/El Salvador, after the 1932 genocide and the violent repression of Indigenous visibility, many forms of Indigenous dress receded from public life. Textile knowledge shifted. Lace, ribbons, pleated synthetic fabrics, and aprons became part of a transformed visual language carried through markets, domestic labour, and everyday movement. The apron became protection, adornment, and continuity all at once. In the Xipe Totec portraits, Rivera reimagines the Nahua deity Xipe Totec, Our Lord the Flayed One, through bodies covered in lace aprons worn by market women, turning garments of labour into sacred skin.
Después de Mí Nada Existirá
Centered around ARIA XYX’s Pezuña (2025), this installation functions as a funerary altar for queer and trans Central American lives shaped by disappearance, slur, exile, and social death. Four monumental clay hooves rest on volcanic stone beneath suspended crimson textile forms evoking violated flesh, absent bodies, and four trans sex workers disappeared during the Salvadoran armed conflict. Intermittent blue and white light floods the space with the colours of the Salvadoran flag, turning national symbolism into an atmosphere of surveillance and mourning. On one wall, Pipián, Culero, and Maricón from ARIA XYX’s El peso de tus palabras (2019–ongoing) confront the slurs imposed onto queer children across Kuskatan/El Salvador. Opposite them, six additional perforated works extend this cartography of colonial homophobia and transphobia across Central America.
Installed alongside Juan José Guillén’s poem Dice la Wanda, the room also insists on the market as a contradictory social space. Across Central America, markets have long been places where queer, trans, and gender-expansive people worked, survived, sold goods, formed kinship, carried out sex work, and occupied public life despite constant exposure to harassment, ridicule, policing, and violence. Connected through a secondary chamber, Josué Castro’s video installation La Otra Quema (2025) extends these reflections through the Guatemalan tradition of La Quema del Diablo. Castro turns toward the figure of the devil as a mirror held against contemporary masculinities. Fire, spectacle, and ritual destruction become a way of asking what kinds of violence are continually projected outward and who is ultimately consumed by them. Together, the works position queer and trans Central American survival within an ongoing landscape shaped by colonial religion, machismo, state violence, and the unresolved promise that things might one day change.
The Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA) would like to thank its partners the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Quebec, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Secrétariat aux relations avec les Premières Nations et les Inuit, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, Tourisme Montréal, Collection Desjardins and Creative New Zealand.
Launched in 2012, the Contemporary Native Art Biennial (BACA) is a Montreal-based non-profit organization (registered in 2016) that promotes the work of Indigenous artists. The biennial is held every two years, in multiple venues, with each iteration focusing on a specific theme. The event is aimed at an ever-growing audience—Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike—and features both emerging and established artists. Our mission is to promote Indigenous art and to sensitize and educate the public on the cultural issues of the First Nations.