Iaohontso’ktá:tie / To Move Across the Land: Across the Pacific
Curators : Armando Perla & Michael Patten
La Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA), 8th edition
April 15 – September 20, 2027
Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke
Sherbrooke, QC
This exhibition brings together a transnational constellation of Indigenous voices from Turtle Island, Mesoamerica, Southeast Asia, and Aotearoa. Water geographically connects these territories without flattening the distinctiveness of their practices. Oceans, rivers, and tides bear witness to colonial routes, displacement, encounters, and continuities that precede and exceed the nation-state. Working across weaving, fashion, music, performance, painting, photography, and sculpture, the artists address colonial legacies, cultural survival, bodily and gender sovereignty, and ceremonial memory. Their works refuse the geopolitical, disciplinary, and ontological boundaries imposed by colonial states. They extend ancestral knowledge systems and trace relationships between land and water, bodies and territories, memories and movements. Water does not make their histories uniform: it reveals the distances, inequalities, and solidarities that run through them.
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.