May 2 – June 20, 2026Opening reception: Saturday, May 2, 2026, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.To Move Across the Land: Colour Is Not NeutralCurators: Armando Perla & Michael Patten La Biennale d'art contemporain autochtone (BACA)Art Mûr This exhibition brings together Indigenous and diasporic artists who treat colour as material knowledge rather than surface effect. Working across painting, textile, adornment, sculpture, performance, photography, and video, these artists expose colour as something mined, woven, worn, carried, and fought over, rather than chosen or applied. Here, colour emerges from land, labor, and violence: from jade and pounamu, from clay and pigment, from thread, bead, braid, and blood. It carries histories of extraction and trade, colonial desire, spiritual cosmology, and political resistance. Against Western colour theory’s abstraction and neutrality, these artists insist that colour is situated, contested, and embodied. Within the biennial’s broader examination of borders, this exhibition foregrounds how colour itself has crossed borders violently and ceremonially alike. Pigments, stones, and dyes travel through colonial routes, spiritual exchanges, and diasporic continuities. What this exhibition makes visible is that colour is never innocent. It remembers where it comes from. The exhibition is structured around four interrelated thematic areas that articulate how colour functions as extraction, cosmology, resistance, and transnational memory.

April 18 to June 21, 2026Iaohontso’ktá:tie / To Move Across the Land: Fashion and the BodyCurators: Armando Perla & Michael PattenLa Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA), 8th editionDRAC – Art actuel Drummondville175 Rue Ringuet, Drummondville, QC, J2C 2P7Opening Performances: Aicha Bastien-N’Diaye, Porfirio Gutiérrez.Isaac Te Awa, Aïcha Bastien-N’Diaye, Feliciana Baustista, Jeanine Clarkin, Porfirio Gutiérrez, Arla Lucia, Meryl McMaster, Kent Monkman, Caroline Monnet, Omar Monroy, Melanie Monique Rose, Tekaronhiahkhwa Standup, Taalrumiq, Renati Waaka, ARIA XYX.This exhibition brings together Indigenous and diasporic artists working across Turtle Island, Cemanahuac (Mesoamerica), and the Pacific, where practices of adornment, performance, image, and material transformation reflect the sovereign knowledge systems that originate them. This constellation moves through land, body, and relation, going beyond object-based display and refusing the divisions that separate art, fashion, and jewelry.Raised beadwork by Kahnawà:ke artist Tekaronhiahkhwa Standup affirms beadwork as a living connection to culture and continuity, sustained through teaching and community. This grounding in material practice is found across multiple territories. Sculptural works by ARIA XYX, a Nahua mestizx artist from Kuskatan / El Salvador, confront the ongoing violence of the Salvadoran state against queer and trans existence, where the body is shaped through pressure and survival. In relation, photographic works by Renati Waaka, a Māori artist, articulate Takatāpui utopia through clay and performance, offering another condition of Indigenous and queer life across the Pacific.Across his painting, Cree artist Kent Monkman challenges colonial narratives through Miss Chief Eagle Testickle’s use of fashion and political satire, reversing the gaze and reworking art history from queer and Two-Spirit perspectives. Textile and land-based practices are carried through the work of Zapotec artist Porfirio Gutiérrez, whose weaving and natural dyes hold migration, memory, and lineage. These relations extend into fashion and adornment through artists such as Inuvialuk and Gwich’in fashion designer Taalrumiq, whose designs carry storytelling and material knowledge across generations.The curatorial framing unfolds through the encounter of these works across territories, where distinct material languages, from beadwork to painting, from performance to textile, hold their own grounds while entering into relation without being reduced to one another. The exhibition aims to hold these works in conversation without collapsing their differences, while also focusing on their refusal of the colonial categories that have sought to contain them.The Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA) would like to thank its partners the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Quebec, 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, Collection Desjardins and Creative New Zealand.

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