April 18 to June 22, 2026
Opening reception April 19, 2026 – 2 p.m.
To Move Across the Land: What Survives When Borders Fail
Curators: Armando Perla & Michael Patten
La Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA)
Stewart Hall Art Gallery
Pointe-Claire (QC)
Ancestral Skin Marking Action: Dion Kaszas, Megan Samms, Dr. Mel Lefebvre (Canada).
Catherine Blackburn (Canada)
Hayley Millar Baker (Australia)
Mercedes Dorame (United States)
Susan Blight (Canada)
Korina Emmerich (United States)
Juan Carlos Sanchez Munive (Mexico)
Dion Kaszas & Megan Samms (Canada)
Orlando Dugi (Diné/Navajo, United States)
Winsom Winsom (Canada)
Feras Shaheen (Australia / Palestine)
This exhibition brings together Indigenous and diasporic artists whose practices engage cultural survival, spiritual continuity, and embodied knowledge in contexts shaped by colonial borders, displacement, and erasure. Working across film, adornment, installation, fashion, performance, and engraving, the artists gathered at Stewart Hall ask a shared question: what survives when borders fail—when nation-states, disciplines, and dominant canons attempt to interrupt ways of knowing, making, and remembering? Rather than presenting culture as static heritage, these artists activate it as a living transmission. Their works operate through care, ritual, translation, and embodied practice, foregrounding the body, the voice, and the handmade as sites where knowledge persists despite historical rupture. Together, they reframe the gallery as a space of cultural repair, where survival is not assumed, but actively sustained. The exhibition is organized around four interrelated thematic constellations. These sections reflect shared strategies rather than rigid categories, allowing works to resonate across media while remaining grounded in distinct cultural lineages.
1. Cultural Repair and Acts of Care
This section foregrounds practices that respond directly to cultural endangerment, interruption, or loss. Care here is not metaphorical; it is enacted through making, stewardship, and responsibility to more-than-human relations. It features Susan Blight (Canada), whose film work centers Indigenous ponies to address extinction, repatriation, and the ethics of care across settler-imposed borders; Catherine Blackburn (Canada), whose feather earrings and beaded medallions assert slowness, protocol, and precision as forms of cultural responsibility; Dion Kaszas, who revitalizes skin-stitch and hand-poke tattooing; and Megan Samms, who advances community-rooted textile practices using natural materials.
2. Translation Without Assimilation
Artists in this section work across languages, systems, and visual codes, translating cultural knowledge into contemporary forms while refusing flattening or assimilation. Translation becomes a strategic act that preserves complexity rather than erasing it. Featured are Juan Carlos Sanchez Munive (Mexico), whose engravings of masks and carnival costumes function as graphic archives of embodied ritual and communal performance; and Colectivo H (Mexico), whose cartoneria animal sculptures are used as components of carnival costumes.
3. The Body as Carrier of Politics and Memory
Here, the body becomes a site where political struggle, memory, and solidarity are made visible. Clothing, movement, and installation transform bodies into carriers of histories that exceed national borders. Featured are Korina Emmerich (United States), whose silk Palestinian flag dress mobilizes fashion as a moving political body and an assertion of transnational solidarity; Feras Shaheen (Australia/Palestine), whose dance and performance practices traverse borders of nation, faith, and embodiment, engaging the body as a site of mourning, resistance, and survival; and Hayley Millar Baker (Australia), whose film practice focuses on preserving spirituality, treating the moving image as a protective vessel rather than documentation.
4. Ritual Space and Refusal of Neutrality
This section challenges the idea of the gallery as a neutral container. Through installation, fashion, and material gesture, these artists transform exhibition space into sites of offering, ceremony, and cosmological orientation. Featured are Mercedes Dorame (United States), whose installations are informed by Indigenous science, land, and non-linear temporalities; Winsom Winsom (Canada), whose altar-based installations using sticks and assemblage reframe the gallery as a space of ritual and offering rather than display; and Oraldo (Orlando) Dugi (Diné/Navajo, United States), whose fashion works merge beadwork, leather, silk, and Indigenous technologies to rethink masculinity, vulnerability, and the body as architectural structure.
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.