La Biennale de Montréal is pleased to announce the first exhibition highlights for its next edition, BNLMTL 2014: L’avenir (looking forward), on view October 22, 2014 through January 4, 2015. The newly revitalized biennial, led by Executive and Artistic Director Sylvie Fortin and co-curated by Gregory Burke, Peggy Gale, Lesley Johnstone and Mark Lanctôt, will feature 50 artists and collectives representing 22 different countries including Australia, Brazil, Palestine, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States; 25 Canadian artists with 16 hailing from Québec; 23 new works; three publications; and more related programming. BNLMTL 2014 will bring to Montréal a dynamic line-up of exhibitions, performances, talks, film screenings and other special events at the biennial’s main venue, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and at cultural venues and public spaces throughout the city.

L’avenir (looking forward) examines how contemporary artists respond to the question of “what is to come?” Shifting between assessment and anticipation, clearly grounded in the “now,” and informed by echoes of the past, the biennial looks ahead and strives to unveil a range of possibilities and rekindle some that may have been prematurely extinguished. Highlights include the North American premiere of Shirin Neshat’s film Illusions & Mirrors (2013), and Thomas Hirschhorn’s Touching Reality (2012), a video installation that gives form to the ways in which the technological imperative to touch has changed our relationship to the world. As our contemporary communication devices reformat the entire world into one world, our agency is often reduced to sliding our fingers across screens, gliding, tapping, pinching and zooming in on images, from the most delightful to the most horrid.

A new project by Polish-born, US-based artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, who received the Hiroshima Prize in 1998 for his contribution as an artist to world peace, is co-produced with Quartier des Spectacles Partnership and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal for BNLMTL 2014.

Wodiczko has realized over eighty such public projections, which often give visibility and voice to precarious or marginalized communities. For L’avenir (looking forward), Wodiczko examines the specific conditions defining homelessness in the downtown neighborhood that is home to both the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Quartier des Spectacles.

From the Arctic Perspective Initiative collective to the Second Life scifi-aboriginal narratives of Skawennati, from the playful economic speculations of Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens to Hajra Waheed’s new archi-sculptural explorations, BNLMTL 2014 will provide the opportunity to discover the works of Montréal artists who have, thus far, remained largely invisible in their home city despite having significant international profiles.

Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens’s The Prophets (2013), an installation of small whimsical sculptures made from ordinary household materials, turn graphs into models, giving physical form to economic abstractions. Goldin+Senneby propose an interplay between two modes of speculation: theatre and algorithmic trading models. For BNLMTL 2014, they literally connect the exhibition to financial trading by using the exhibition as a “laboratory” for developing algorithmic trading models with their collaborator Paul Leong, a New York-based investment banker working for Blackstone, who developed a trading strategy identifying early signs of mergers and acquisitions. This speculation’s financial performance determines the duration of the exhibition.

In two separate projects, Miami artist Jillian Mayer and Los Angeles artist Andrea Bowers tackle the ethos of our camera-phone and social media universe and consider the impact of technology on social interaction and image-making. A simple selfie or a few characters can have unexpected consequences in this new, fast-paced frontier.

Environmental topics such as global warming, the Arctic, biodiversity and water rights figure prominently in the exhibition and connect the work of a number of artists in BNLMTL 2014, including Ursula Biemann and Klara Hobza. In her recent video essay Deep Weather (2013), Biemann beautifully connects tar sands exploitation in Northern Canada to a melting Himalayan icefield and the impending submersion of Bangladesh along with the related notion of water as territory of citizenship. Berlin artist Klara Hobza’s open-ended quixotic project, Diving through Europe—a lifelong project that will take her from Rotterdam to Constanța, Romania—deftly and humourously touches on old histories of conquest, shifting political alliances and water quality.

“Successful biennials are stages from which a city shines. They promote experimentation, raise timely questions, mobilize the assets and strengths of a community and openly welcome the world. They build on an informed, original and compelling artistic vision to urge a city’s various institutions to combine their expertise, experiences and resources,” notes Sylvie Fortin, Executive and Artistic Director of La Biennale de Montréal. “La Biennale de Montréal’s special partnership with the Musée d’art contemporain—a collaboration between two prominent Montréal institutions—lays a solid foundation for the development of such a broad-based and potent event. This foundation means that we now have the complementary expertise and resources, and the responsibility, to support ambitious artistic and curatorial undertakings and bring well-deserved attention to Montréal and its arts communities. Ultimately, however, it all begins and ends with the art.”

New Vision, New Direction

BNLMTL 2014 marks a radical shift in a bold direction for La Biennale de Montréal. It is the first step in the vigorous repositioning of BNLMTL as a landmark event on the international cultural calendar. BNLMTL 2014 is presented by La Biennale de Montréal and co-produced with the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Building on this strategic multi-year, co-production partnership with the Musée d’art contemporain, and engaged in innovative collaborations with over 15 local, national and international institutions, BNLMTL 2014 is an event of unprecedented artistic ambition and scale in Canada. It is expected that its 2016 edition will further confirm BNLMTL’s value and position it as North America’s foremost international biennale, and by 2018, BNLMTL will play an influential role in the international network of biennales.

La Biennale de Montréal

304-460 Sainte-Catherine O.
Montréal QC H3B 1A7
Tel. +1 (514) 5217340
Tel. +1 (888) 6177331
info@bnlmtl.org
www.bnlmtl.org

Related images
  1. Ursula Biemann, still from Deep Weather, 2013, HD video, 8:58 minutes, English, Colour, Stereo, courtesy of the artist
  2. Shirin Neshat, production still for Illusions & Mirrors, 2013, video © Shirin Neshat; realised with support of Dior; Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
  3. Klara Hobza, still from Diving Through Europe, Part: 3 Europoort, 2013, video, colour, sound, 2:03 minutes, courtesy of the artist and Soy Capitan., Berlin
  4. Althea Thauberger, Still from Preuzmimo Benčič, 2013-2014, digital film, 57:14 minutes. Courtesy of the artist, Musagetes and Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto. Photo: Milica Czerny Urban
  5. Andrea Bowers, still from #sweetjane, 2014, single-channel HD video and mural installation, 33:48 minutes, colour, sound, courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
  6. Althea Thauberger, Still from Preuzmimo Benčič, 2013-2014, digital film, 57:14 minutes. Courtesy of the artist, Musagetes and Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto. Photo: Milica Czerny Urban