MOMENTA x VOX. Wet Futures
Jen Bervin, Carolina Caycedo, Maryse Goudreau, Ayesha Hameed, Hamedine Kane, Ts̱ēmā Igharas, Erin Siddall, Susan Schuppli and Susanne M. Winterling
For its 17th edition, titled Sensing Nature, MOMENTA Biennale de l’image humbly invites us to consider environmental justice and its intersections with social justice as a matter of sensing and feeling as much as of analysis and grassroots activism. Although science is urgently needed—not least to tackle the climate emergency—our planetary assembly of multiplicities also craves forms of knowing, feeling, and doing that create different arrangements of coexistence.
A longing for togetherness—for love—echoes insistently in the exhibitions, inviting us to fathom other possible forms of world-making. The artists and authors invite us to forge intimate kinships with nonhuman life-worlds. They propose that we listen to—and observe, smell, touch, speak to—the land, the water, the air not with the aim of distantly understanding, grasping, or exploiting, but to resonate, to vibrate, to be together. Or, perhaps, with no aim at all. Their works and their writing make room for stories that dwell in the blurred boundaries between technology and ancestral wisdoms, weaving in both human and nonhuman modes of knowing. They celebrate that we are in relation with nature, that we are of nature.
MOMENTA x VOX | Wet Futures
This group exhibition is dedicated to the connective spaces between land and ocean. The artists propose embodied forms of being with nature. Here, they attend to human relations with microscopic algae and with enormous marine mammals; there, they behold water and ice as material witnesses to climate change. They consider the atrocities of the Atlantic slave trade and contemporary migrations unfurling across the surface of the oceans, while saluting the concealing obscurity granted by water. Like the multiple bodies of a coral, this exhibition highlights our relationality with others. It suggests that our futures are wet; they are oceanic.
Curated by Stefanie Hessler, with the collaboration of Camille Georgeson-Usher, Maude Johnson and Himali Singh Soin
Exhibition presented by MOMENTA Biennale de l’image and produced in partnership with VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine
This exhibition is made possible in part by the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the Gouvernement du Québec, the Government of Canada, the Ville de Montréal, the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (Germany), the Institut français, the Consulat général de France à Québec, and the Office for Contemporary Art Norway
MOMENTA Creative Workshops

Echoing the theme of the biennale, the workshops and activities offer hands-on creation and reflection opportunities rooted in the fine line between life and art. For this edition, MOMENTA Creative offers experiences that bring participants together around projects with an open and empathetic approach to the natural environment.
All workshops are offered free of charge in French and English and include a guided tour of the exhibition (prior booking required).
Hybrid Beings
Duration: 1.5 to 2 h
Take part in an exchange on empathy, interspecies relations, and the experience of aquatic fauna and flora. Let your imagination loose as you create a hybrid figure from the animal or plant of your choice, immortalized as an illustration or a comic.
Saturday, September 25, 2021 (as part of the
Journées de la culture)
11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Book here
Also offered Tuesday to Friday, from September 14 to October 22, for groups. For more information, please contact: education@momentabiennale.com
Memory Waves
Duration: 2 h
Take part in an exchange and a creative moment around the theme of water, thought of here as an entity permeated by the stories, memories, and politics that run through it. In relation to the works presented at VOX, share your memories and recount your experiences by designing sensory bottles: a reflective assembly of natural fragments and mementos associated with bodies of water. Experience a rewarding activity that promotes ecological awareness!
In collaboration with the
Centre d’appui aux communautés immigrantes (CACI)
Saturday, September 25, 2021 (as part of the
Journées de la culture)
2 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Book here
Saturday, October 16, 2021
10 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Book here
Guided Tours
For individuals
MOMENTA Time
Saturday, September 18, 2021
2 p.m.– 3 p.m. (in French)
Book here
3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. (in English)
Book here
Free; prior booking is required
For groups
Guided tours are offered free of charge in French, English and Spanish and designed for various groups (school, community, associations, businesses, families, individuals, among others).
Focused on the discovery of the works on display, the guided tours explore societal issues from an educational and inclusive perspective.
Information and booking: education@momentabiennale.com