April 18 to June 21, 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), 8th edition
Stewart Hall Art Gallery
176 Chem. du Bord-du-Lac-Lakeshore, Pointe-Claire, QC, H9S 4J7

Ancestral Skin Marking Action: Dion Kaszas, Megan Samms, Dr. Mel Lefebvre.

Catherine Blackburn, Hayley Millar Baker, Mercedes Dorame, Susan Blight, Korina Emmerich, Colectivo H, Juan Carlos Sanchez Munive, Dion Kaszas & Megan Samms, Orlando Dugi, Winsom Winsom, Feras Shaheen.

This exhibition considers what continues when borders fail to contain Indigenous life. It centers practices that do not depend on the nation-state, the museum, or disciplinary categories to exist. Through land, body, and relation, the artists here carry knowledge and refuse interruption. These practices endure within structures that attempt to fragment, regulate, and contain them.

Movement across body and territory shapes how these works come into relation. Anishinaabe artist Susan Blight traces the return of Indigenous ponies across imposed borders, grounding the work in care, memory, and responsibility. Through moving image, Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung artist Hayley Millar Baker draws on ancestral knowledge and cosmological thought, holding grief, embodiment, and spiritual presence within contemporary life. This grounding in the body continues through tattoo activation led by Nlaka’pamux artist Dion Kaszas, in collaboration with L’nu and Nlaka’pamux artist Megan Samms, where skin marking is brought back as ceremony, protection, and transmission. Through video performance, Palestinian artist Feras Shaheen places the body within displacement, mourning, and endurance. These practices extend through collective and land-based work, including Colectivo H, where artistic practice is tied to the continuity of carnival knowledge, as a living archive of Indigenous memory. Their adornment and material practices extend these relations. Their cartonería (papier-mâché sculptures), used during their carnival, emerges from communal practices where making sustains cultural memory and reshapes relationships to the non-human. Installation by Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame and an altar-based work by Arawak Maroon artist Winsom Winsom situate land, spirit, and presence within the space. Fashion by Diné artist Orlando Dugi and Puyallup artist Korina Emmerich extend these concerns onto sovereignty and the body, where cloth and design carry political and cultural life. Dënesųłiné artist Catherine Blackburn works with beadwork and stitching as forms of sovereignty and ancestral connection.

The curatorial framework focuses on practices that continue despite conditions that attempt to suppress them. Each work is grounded in forms of knowledge carried through community, land, and embodied practice. Many of these works engage the continuation and recuperation of ancestral techniques through making, ceremony, and use, including practices often excluded from contemporary art spaces. The exhibition places these works in relation without collapsing their differences, maintaining each as a distinct system of knowledge grounded in its own lineage and responsibilities.

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, and Creative New Zealand.