June 6 to September 13, 2026
Opening: Saturday June 6, 2026, 1 pm to 5 pm
Iaohontso’ktá:tie / To Move Across the Land
The Body as Transgression / Law, Spirit, and Prohibition
Curators: Armando Perla & Michael Patten
La Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA)
L’église Notre-Dame-du-Rosaire
2200 Rue Girouard O, Saint-Hyacinthe, QC J2S 5V2
Performances: Manitou Singers, Jamie Berry, Pounamu Rurawhe
Sonny Assu, Cholita Chic, Rodrigo Vazquez Guerrero, Stevei Houkāmau, Carlos Lara, Kent Monkman, Niio Perkins, Jose Ernesto Ferrufino Portillo, Juan Carlos Recinos, Lisa Reihana, Amanda Stowers, Nathan Taare, Uriel Urban, Volcancitto, Damian Xaneri, ARIA XYX.
The Devil They Taught Us
Installed within the former Église Notre-Dame-du-Rosaire, this curatorial intervention engages Christianity as a colonial technology that has regulated bodies, suppressed Indigenous spiritual systems, and structured regimes of education and social control across territories. This includes the criminalization of sexuality and gender, as well as the systematic repression of ceremonial practices, languages, and belief systems, often recast as witchcraft, sin, or devil worship. These logics extended into institutions such as residential and mission schools, where architecture, pedagogy, and doctrine worked together to discipline Indigenous life at every level. Through drawing, sculpture, painting, video, projection, scent, performance, and adornment, artists reinsert forbidden spiritualities, erotic sovereignties, and embodied knowledges into a space historically shaped by prohibition. The architecture serves as a site of confrontation, where the Church is exposed as a structure of control. Within it, bodies refuse containment, spiritual practices reappear, and suppressed forms of knowledge assert presence. The result is a reconfiguration of power, grounded in embodiment, ceremony, and refusal.
Pray the Queer Away
Los dibujos que no quemé (The Drawings I Did Not Burn, 2025) by Afro-Indigenous Salvadoran artist Carlos Lara are installed within the sacristy, a space historically tied to confession, secrecy, guilt, and moral discipline. The series emerged after a gallery in San Salvador cancelled Lara’s exhibition of landscapes, citing his queer and sexualized social media presence. In response, Lara began revisiting memories of adolescence in a deeply religious and homophobic household, where he secretly drew erotic male bodies for desire and survival, covering the Sacred Heart of Jesus before drawing or masturbating, then burning the images afterward out of fear. When Lara’s parents found out about his sexuality, he was expulsed from his home.
Inside the sacristy niche, Kent Monkman’s Miss Chief’s Praying Hands (2016) and Beaver Rosary (2016) confront the devotional rituals many queer children inherit: prayers asking a Christian god to remove desire, shame the flesh, and return the body to obedience. Beneath them, within the tabernacle itself, rests one of ARIA XYX’s binding dolls from the ongoing series No Me Dejes Por Favor (Don’t Leave me Please, 2021–ongoing), a body of work grounded in Afro-Indigenous love medicines shaped through histories of abandonment, familial rupture, and queer exclusion. The doll transforms the tabernacle into a site of affective hunger, holding the ache of those expelled from home, family, and church, yet still searching for tenderness. The installation reclaims the sacristy not as a place of purification, but as an archive of queer desire, fear, erotic memory, and refusal.
The Drag Temple of Xipe Totec
This installation gathers altar, textile, cross, and suspended image to confront the colonial suppression of Indigenous spiritual systems across Cēmānāhuac (Mesoamerica). The altar is covered with a textile by Trama Textiles, a cooperative of Maya women weavers from the Guatemalan highlands formed in response to the genocidal violence that displaced and disappeared men from their communities. At its center, Nahua-Mestize artist ARIA XYX’s Xipe Totec (2026) stands among five crosses from Crucitas (2024–2026) by Maya-Mestizo Volcancitto (Juan José Guillén), which draw from Day of the Cross altar practices in San Rafael Pie de la Cuesta. Queerized and adorned like drag bodies, the works merge Indigenous spirituality, Catholic vernacular traditions, and queer aesthetics into acts of refusal. Radiant forms recall ancestral feathered headdresses, while repoussé patterns derived from ancestral designs appear alongside embedded ceiba thorns and branches. Together, the works transform imposed Christian symbols into sites of Indigenous and queer presence connected to Xipe Totec, Our Lord the Flayed One.
Suspended above, Nonualco artist Juan Carlos Recinos’ Retrato de un peregrino (Portrait of a pilgrim, 2023), Aprendimos a llevar corona (We learnt to wear a crown, 2023), and Identidad visible de máscara sincrética (Visible identity of a syncretic mask, 2021) reference masked dances introduced during colonization to stage Christian conquest narratives. Within these performances, devil figures marked Indigenous and Black bodies as sinful or uncivilized. Here, those visual languages are reclaimed, returning body, spirit, and ceremony to the center of the church.
The Scent of God
This installation approaches scent as a material archive shaped by colonial extraction, spiritual appropriation, and Indigenous memory. At its center is KŪSKATAN / AOTEAROA (2026), a one-of-one perfume oil by Māori artist and perfumer Nathan Taare, composed in Aotearoa around balsam sourced from Kūskatan’s (El Salvador) Cordillera del Bálsamo in the Pacific coast of La Libertad and Sonsonate.
Since time immemorial, Nahua communities in present-day El Salvador used balsam for medicine, ceremony, cosmetics, and healing practices. During colonization, Spanish authorities extracted the resin through Indigenous labour and knowledge, exporting it through Peruvian trade routes while renaming it “Peru balsam.” The Catholic Church later incorporated balsam into holy chrism and sacramental oils, where it became associated with “the scent of God,” even as its Indigenous origins, ceremonial meanings, and systems of knowledge were deliberately obscured. While this sacred resin circulated through Europe, its Indigenous genealogy, ceremonial knowledge, and territorial origins were systematically erased through colonial extraction, ecclesiastical authority, and imperial renaming.
The perfume is housed in a sculptural vessel by New York–based Salvadoran mestizo designer José Ferrufino, whose bottle design maps the movement of the work across the territories of Kūskatan, Aotearoa, Tiohtià:ke, and Lenapehoking. Alongside the vessel, Nahua-mestize artist ARIA XYX from Sonsonate presents an amorphous clay form made from earth sourced from their territory, absorbing and diffusing the scent through the same lands where balsam has been harvested for generations. These works return the material to its place and lineage, transforming fragrance into an act of solidarity across the Pacific, attribution, and refusal.
The Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA) would like to thank its partners the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Quebec, the 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, the Collection Desjardins and Creative New Zealand.
For the opening at EXPRESSION, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe, a free shuttle service will be available. As seating is limited, we kindly ask that you reserve your spot >>