May 2 – June 20, 2026
Opening reception: Saturday, May 2, 2026, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Iaohontso’ktá:tie / To Move Across the Land: Colour Is Not Neutral
Curators: Armando Perla & Michael Patten
La Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA), 8th edition
Art Mûr
5826 rue St-Hubert, Montreal, QC, H2S 2L7
Performances : Manitou Singers, Porfirio Gutiérrez.
Isaac Te Awa, Jamie Berry, Marilyn Boror Bor, Cholita Chic, Diego Ventura Puac Coyoy, Angela DeMontigny, Porfirio Gutiérrez, Tayla Hartemink, Stevei Houkāmau, José Luis Fernando Morales, Adetona Omokanye, Ernesto Ovalle, Antonio Pichilla, Juan Carlos Recinos, Hugo Rivas, Lissy and Rudi Robinson-Cole, Anders Sunna, Telly Tuita, Mario López Vega, Volcancitto, Renati Waaka, Wabanoonkwe, Silvia Canil Xirúm, ARIA XYX.
Across many Indigenous and diasporic communities, colour has been regulated through systems of shame and aesthetic discipline. Throughout different colonial contexts around the world, Indigenous people have been marked through local slurs that cast them as excessive, vulgar, dirty, or unrefined whenever they sustain their own colour systems and refuse assimilation into whiteness. This exhibition names that refusal as a sovereign knowledge system and as continuity. Bringing together twenty-three artists working across Indigenous territories and diasporic networks spanning Abya Yala, Turtle Island, Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, Sápmi, and Yorubaland, the exhibition traces how colour operates as a living system of knowledge across distinct lineages, materials, and relations.
This reframing becomes visible through practices such as making and adornment, where knowledge is produced and passed down across generations. In the work of K’iche’ Maya artist José Luis Fernando Morales, multicoloured jades and stones, alongside carved forms, connect matrilineal ancestral knowledge to contemporary Indigenous design. Through moving image, colour, and the sound of cicadas, Māori artist Jamie Berry creates an immersive environment that envelops a curated constellation of transnational adornment, shaped through material exchange and collaborative making across the Pacific.
Across the Pacific, Tongan artist Telly Tuita’s Diaspora’s Children holds memory and longing through saturated palettes. This richness finds resonance in Yoruba artist Adetona Omokanye’s Spiritually Fashionable series, where fashion becomes a site of spiritual and aesthetic presence. Māori artists Lissy and Rudi Robinson-Cole bring this use of colour into immersive environments grounded in lineage and spirituality.
In Abya Yala, Aymara-Quechua artist Cholita Chic mobilizes colour as queer self-fashioning and visibility. Kaqchikel Maya artist Marilyn Boror Bor threads dyed fibre through cement, holding together land, contamination, and resistance. In Kuskatan/El Salvador, Nahua-Mestizo artist Hugo Rivas works through camp and intensity to confront histories of military violence, genocide and art world complicity, while Maya-Mestizo artist Volcancitto (Juan José Guillén) builds multicoloured collages that assert the territorial memory of the Guatemalan Pacific.
Colour remains a language we continue to speak and refuse to let disappear.
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.