April 18 to June 21, 2026
Opening reception: April 18, 2026 – 2 p.m.
Iaohontso’ktá:tie / To Move Across the Land: Fashion and the Body
Curators: Armando Perla & Michael Patten
La Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA)
DRAC – Art actuel Drummondville (QC)
Opening Performance: Aicha Bastien-N’Diaye (Canada)
Melanie Monique Rose (Canada)
Jeanine Clarkin (Aotearoa New Zealand)
Arla Lucia (United States)
Omar Monroy (United States / Mexico)
Ritni Tears (Finland)
Porfirio Gutiérrez (Mexico / United States)
Taalrumiq (Canada)
Isaac Te Awa (Aotearoa New Zealand)
ARIA XYX (El Salvador)
Tekaronhiahkhwa Standup (Canada)
Aicha Bastien-N’Diaye (Canada)
Feliciana Baustista (Mexico)
Renati Waaka (Aotearoa New Zealand)
This exhibition gathers Indigenous and diasporic artists who work with fashion, adornment, performance, and the body as sites of sovereignty, memory, and refusal. Across garments, beadwork, jewelry, drag, clay, and textile practices, the body emerges not as a neutral surface, but as a territory shaped by colonial violence, gender regulation, displacement, and survival. Rather than treating fashion as trend or ornament, the artists in this exhibition approach it as a technology of care and resistance: clothing as protection, adornment as archive, performance as authorship, and making as a way of restoring relational ties between body, land, and community. Together, these practices insist that the dressed, adorned, and performed body is a living archive, one that carries Indigenous knowledge forward while refusing assimilation and erasure. The exhibition is structured around four interrelated thematic areas that articulate how fashion and the body operate as cultural, political, and relational sites.
1. Second Skin: Clothing as Protection and Continuance
In this section, clothing functions as a second skin, offering protection, continuity, and cultural presence. Garments are not simply worn; they carry land-based knowledge, ancestral techniques, and collective memory. Fashion becomes a way of sheltering the body while asserting Indigenous survivance in contemporary space. Artists include Taalrumiq (Canada), whose fashion is grounded in Inuvialuit culture and emphasizes sharing, protection, and visibility; Jeanine Clarkin (Aotearoa New Zealand), whose Māori fashion practice is rooted in activism, whenua, and long-term cultural continuity; and Melanie Monique Rose (Canada), whose fibre and fashion works draw from Métis material histories and relationships to land.
2. Adornment as Archive: Beadwork, Metal, and the Right to Sparkle
Adornment here is treated as a living archive. Beadwork and jewelry operate as systems of knowledge transmission, precision, and authority. These works reject the idea of adornment as excess, instead asserting it as evidence of lineage, skill, and intellectual sovereignty carried on the body. Featured artists include Arla Lucia (United States), whose beadwork engages storytelling, cultural reclamation, and cosmological mapping; Tekaronhiahkhwa Standup (Canada), whose raised beadwork is grounded in Haudenosaunee knowledge systems and intergenerational practice; and Omar Monroy / El Techichi Jewelry (United States/Mexico), whose gender-expansive jewelry is rooted in Indigenous Mexican heritage and ecological consciousness.
3. Border Bodies: Politics of Making in Matrilineal Lines
These practices center making as refusal. Whether artists are working on their own lands or from within diaspora, they are resisting colonial borders that seek to regulate Indigenous aesthetics, control Indigenous economies, and discipline Indigenous bodies into “appropriate” forms of visibility and value. The here is genealogical. Across these practices, knowledge is carried through matrilineal lines: learned from mothers, grandmothers, aunties, and women-centered networks of care and labor. Materials and techniques operate as forms of relation, not as neutral resources. Weaving, adornment, featherwork, and material practice become acts of continuity that refuse colonial attempts to sever Indigenous bodies from their lineages. In this section, making is inherited, practiced, and lived. The body becomes a site where matrilineal knowledge persists despite displacement, regulation, and extraction. What these artists share is not simply technique, but a commitment to reasserting connection through the hands, through repetition, and through the labor of women who taught them how to make—and how to survive. Featured artists include Porfirio Gutiérrez (Mexico/United States), whose Zapotec weaving, natural dyes, and performance connect Oaxaca to diasporic contexts; Isaac Te Awa (Aotearoa New Zealand), whose adornment and fashion are grounded in contemporary Māori taonga practices emphasizing reconnection among people, materials, and land; and Feliciana Bautista (Mexico), whose adornment and fashion include a feather shawl.
4. Gender on Purpose: Performance, Drag, Clay, and the Body Remade
In this final section, the body is openly authored, reshaped, and claimed. Through drag, performance, and sculpture, gender is treated as intentional, constructed, and politically charged. These works confront colonial and heteronormative control of Indigenous bodies, proposing alternative modes of embodiment, desire, and kinship. Featured artists include ARIA XYX (El Salvador), whose ceramic sculptures engage masculinity, violence, and gender roles, positioning the body as a site of affective and political struggle; Renati Waaka (Aotearoa New Zealand), whose portraiture and Māori takatapui performance translate Indigenous presence into contemporary visual language without severing genealogical ties, foregrounding Indigenous joy and utopia; and Aicha Bastien-N’Diaye (Canada), whose performance practice extends these themes.
The Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA) would like to thank its partners the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Secrétariat des affaires Autochtones, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, Tourisme Montréal, and Collection Desjardins.
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.