MOMENTA Biennale de l'image

We are excited to announce a new partnership between MOMENTA Biennale de l’image and the Toronto Biennial of Art (TBA), supported by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ). This collaboration reflects a shared commitment to building long-term, reciprocal relationships that connect Quebec-based organizations with art institutions outside the province.

Together, MOMENTA and TBA are dedicated to fostering artistic exchange, cultural dialogue, and new opportunities for artists to reach diverse audiences. We’re thrilled to co-present a series of exhibitions featuring five talented artists from Quebec in the 2024 edition of TBA from September 21 to December 1.

View the full schedule

We are deeply grateful to the CALQ for supporting partnerships that transcend provincial boundaries and promote meaningful cultural exchanges. Together, we continue to build bridges and create spaces where art can thrive, inspire, and connect us all.

We have the honour of welcoming Marie-Ann Yemsi to Montreal for a special visit, as part of a first in-person meeting with all members of the team. This inspiring meeting was an opportunity to discuss the initial preparations for the Biennale which will be held in the fall of 2025. Stay tuned for more moments around Marie-Ann’s visit to Montreal! 

MOMENTA is launching its call for submissions for its 2025 edition. The Biennale invites Canadian* artists and artist collectives, emerging and established, to submit a project to show us their works connected with the Biennale’s theme, whether at the ideation or the production stage.

In Praise of the Missing Image

In a world saturated with images, some, strangely, are lacking. The 2025 edition of MOMENTA seeks to explore the potentialities of missing images to renew narratives relating to time, history, and the world. The programmation will open spaces for dialogue, hospitality, and the expression of struggles and solidarities wherein decolonial and feminist pedagogies and ancestral knowledge intersect.

Ever since the invention of photography and film, and their proliferation during the colonial expansion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an ideological link was formed between these media and the construction of dominant narratives. This connection has been particularly evident in the production of figures of alterity – geographic, cultural, racial, economic – and in certain resulting historical blind spots. Narratives that fell outside this frame were swept away, and these stories have been either truncated or simply disappeared. With a focus on what is beyond our view – the silences and breaches in individual and collective memory – the Biennale will explore both contemporary challenges in relation to the image and the current consequences of the complex dynamics involved in constructing narratives. Which stories are told, how, and by whom? Through the unruly material of art, In Praise of the Missing Image invites us to imagine collectively the means, political and poetic, by which we may inhabit the impasses of the present and sketch out ways toward the future.

Only proposals for art projects related to the theme, In Praise of the Missing Image, and consistent with MOMENTA’s mission will be considered. Please do not send proposals for exhibition curation.

Deadline: May 14, 2024
Full submission guidelines

*People with Canadian citizenship or permanent residency status