The Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone, 8th edition
Iaohontso’ktá:tie / To Move Across the Land
Opening: Saturday June 6, 2026, 1 pm to 5 pm
In the presence of Deny Obomsawin, Abenaki elder, and the curators.
For the opening at EXPRESSION, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe, a free shuttle service will be available. As seating is limited, we kindly ask that you reserve your spot.
1 pm
L’église Notre-Dame-du-Rosaire
The Body as Transgression / Law, Spirit, and Prohibition
Artistes: Sonny Assu, Cholita Chic, Rodrigo Vazquez Guerrero, Stevei Houkāmau, Carlos Lara, Kent Monkman, Niio Perkins, Jose Ernesto Ferrufino Portillo, Juan Carlos Recinos, Lisa Reihana, Amanda Stowers, Nathan Taare, Uriel Urban, Volcancitto, Damian Xaneri, ARIA XYX.
Performances: Manitou Singers, Jamie Berry, Pounamu Rurawhe
Installed within the former Église Notre-Dame-du-Rosaire, this curatorial intervention engages Christianity as a colonial technology that has regulated bodies, suppressed Indigenous spiritual systems, and structured regimes of education and social control across territories. This includes the criminalization of sexuality and gender, as well as the systematic repression of ceremonial practices, languages, and belief systems, often recast as witchcraft, sin, or devil worship. These logics extended into institutions such as residential and mission schools, where architecture, pedagogy, and doctrine worked together to discipline Indigenous life at every level. Through drawing, sculpture, painting, video, projection, scent, performance, and adornment, artists reinsert forbidden spiritualities, erotic sovereignties, and embodied knowledges into a space historically shaped by prohibition. The architecture serves as a site of confrontation, where the Church is exposed as a structure of control. Within it, bodies refuse containment, spiritual practices reappear, and suppressed forms of knowledge assert presence. The result is a reconfiguration of power, grounded in embodiment, ceremony, and refusal.
3 pm
EXPRESSION
Market as Archive: Economy, Women’s Knowledge, and Survival
Artistes: Tessa Alexander, Arawhetū Berdinner, Jacqueline Bishop, Josue Castro, Silvia Caxi, Filiberto Chali, Venuca Evanan, Jose Luis Fernando Morales, Ehikoo Odeh, Jakob Olive, Paula Rivera, TRAMA Textiles, Matt Tini, ARIA XYX.
Situated above an active public market, this exhibition approaches the market as a living Indigenous archive shaped through trade, movement, and women’s knowledge systems. Across Mesoamerica and beyond, markets have long functioned as spaces where Indigenous women sustained economies, preserved ceremonial materials, transmitted artistic and medicinal knowledge, and maintained cultural continuity despite colonial disruption.
Rather than treating exchange as separate from culture, the works presented here understand circulation itself as a form of memory. Textiles, foodways, fibres, adornment, plants, and handmade objects move through relationships of barter, care, and reciprocity that continue to structure Indigenous life across territories. Throughout the exhibition, adornment appears as a living market practice, circulating through powwows, Indigenous trade networks, street markets, and intergenerational systems of making that connect aesthetics, ceremony, and exchange. In this context, the market operates simultaneously as school, social infrastructure, ceremonial site, and public space of Indigenous presence.
The exhibition also challenges museum models rooted in accumulation and permanence. Value emerges through movement, reuse, encounter, and redistribution. Through sculpture, textile, installation, adornment, and performance, the artists foreground economies grounded in relationality and survival, where objects remain alive through exchange and where women’s labour continues to sustain collective memory across generations.