Author Archives: Ryan Alexander Diduck

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Down With Love

LUMI, 9-course Tasting Menu, SonoLux, 9 July 2026

Chef Graham Hood’s first of two desserts with the new summer 9-course tasting menu at LUMI, Hôtel SonoLux. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Venus de Milo, who said to Colonel Sanders, ‘Mmm, this is finger lickin’ good’ … never got a dinner.”
—Red Buttons

Even folks of my parents’ generation might have trouble remembering the Borsch Belt comedian Red Buttons, who achieved modest fame following World War II as an early television pioneer and recording artist with, among other niche successes, a minor hit in the double A-side, “Strange Things are Happening.”

Born Aaron Chwatt to Russo-Polish Jewish immigrant parents in Manhattan, New York, in 1919, Buttons struggled harder than his contemporaneous comedians, like Jack Benny or Bob Hope, to gain a foothold in emerging media.

To put it generously, Buttons wasn’t handsome. He didn’t possess natural charisma. He resembled a garden gnome, with his stout physique and shock of ginger hair. And he garnered a reputation for being impossible to work with, having fired more than 80 writers from his eponymous General Foods-sponsored variety programme, until the company and his network, CBS, publicly cancelled him in 1952.

Buttons enjoyed a second life in the 1970s as a regular panelist on The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, a series of T.V. specials in which famous actors, singers, and politicians would take a kicking in the form of insult comedy from their peers. Don Rickles might have been the master of this genre. But Red Buttons developed a routine, a rhythm, a pattern that he would apply in 19 episodes to such celebrities as Frank Sinatra, Muhammed Ali, and Betty White, leaving his fellow panelists, like Orson Welles and Milton Berle, in stitches.

Buttons would question why host Dean Martin should honour so-and-so when so many other notable historical figures “never got a dinner.” He would then list off a litany of famous personalities followed by one-liners like, “Lot, who said to his wife, ‘salt I’ve got, it’s popcorn I need!”

The one-liner is an underrated device that contemporary comics have largely abandoned in favour of more topical humour. But jokes dependent upon current affairs don’t enjoy the shelf life of a timeless and politically incorrect Buttons witticism like, “Adam, who said to God in the Garden of Eden, ‘I’ve got more ribs, have you got more broads?’”

St. Vincent Symphonique with Ruby Plume, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 28 June 2026

St. Vincent performs at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier with the Montreal International Jazz Festival. Victor Diaz Lamich for FIJM.

“Well, some people try to pick up girls, they get called assholes
This never happened to Pablo Picasso
The girls would turn the color of a juicy avocado
When he would drive down their street in his El Dorado
He could walk down your street, girls could not resist his stare
So Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole
Not like you.”
—David Bowie, “Pablo Picasso”

A recent New York Times op-ed titled “Go On, Date Your Co-Workers” pricked up my attention, for obvious reasons.

The increasing estrangement between women and men, what has newly been termed “heteropessimism,” was the subject of Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast only a few weeks prior. And Magdalene J. Taylor, senior editor at Playboy, astutely noted in her own guest essay in May: “Gender relations are tense to the point of hostility these days.”

In this post-#metoo moment, something that was once considered as innocuous as inviting a colleague or even a stranger to dinner can carry the risk of wild accusations and potentially devastating consequences.

It is no surprise that a woman wrote the Times article encouraging inter-office romance. Because along with the carpet-bombing condemnation of even an inkling of male desire, female sexual prowess has been concurrently rebranded in our era as overdue feminist empowerment. A woman can behave like Don Draper from Mad Men nowadays and rather than being called “Jian” or getting dragged on social media, she is simply asserting her long-sublimated femininity. You go, girl.

There is no shame in sluttiness — nor should there be. But sexual intercourse is not necessarily the be-all and end-all of associating with people, regardless of sexual identity or gender normativity. Maybe, and this may be a radical suggestion, hanging out with someone of the opposite sex without the expectation of sex can go some way to bridging the perilous gender divide.

“The best relationships — the ones that last — are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship,” writes Gillian Anderson, best known as X-Files it-girl and author of We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere.

“The person who was just a friend is … suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with.”

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh & Frédérique D. Oberland with Jessica Moss, La Sala Rossa, 27 June 2026

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Frédérique D. Oberland perform at La Sala Rossa with Suoni Per il Popolo Festival. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“In every modern country that is Christian or post-Christian, women are the beautiful sex — to the detriment of the notion of beauty as well as of women.”
—Susan Sontag, On Women

We don’t tend to describe men as “beautiful.”

Men, especially in Montreal, known for its packs of man-bunned buttoned-down jeans-and-sheux-wearing walking Adam’s Apples, are “handsome” or “dapper” or “dashing,” qualifiers that are more often associated with sartorial style than with physical charm. Heaven forbid a fellow be beautiful, lest he is effeminate, or an adolescent — Björk’s archetypal “Venus as a Boy.” Especially a man of a certain age can never be described as beautiful.

At the same time, masculinity has become the purview of the manosphere, of incel subcultures, dangerous radicalism, repressed testosterone, Louis C.K. apologism, and right-wing hysteria. These are ugly qualities, not beautiful ones. The modern man might instead do well to aspire to a beauty in spirit in order to overcome any lack or loss of aesthetic splendour.

Beauty is regrettably constrained when it is beholden to the eyes, or age, or the fairer sex, only.

Diana Krall with Anaïs Cardot, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 26 June 2026

Diana Krall performs at the Montreal Jazz Festival. Victor Diaz Lamich for FIJM.

“I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, ‘I’m going to pee…’”
—Charles Bukowski, Women

Man, I love a beautiful woman. I think of Nicolas Cage’s soliloquy in Adaptation — “one has eyes that dance; one has eyes that contain the sadness of the world” — or sometimes of Cheech Marin’s infinitely more vulgar inventory in From Dusk till Dawn that has no place in polite company.

Summer is the season to “try with pleasured hands,” as The Zombies’ Rod Argent wrote; “Un beau jour c’est l’amour et le cœur bat plus vite,” according to Françoise Hardy. Tell me more, tell me more! All I can say is, if loving a beautiful woman is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

Quinton Barnes with Preoptic Ridge, Le Système, 2 July 2026

Christian Richer and Frédérique Duval perform as Preoptic Ridge at Le Système, 2 July 2026. Rory Creelman for NicheMTL.

I hope I’m not telling tales out of school by recounting that the hip-hop artist Quinton Barnes and I had an insightful and in-depth conversation the other day about the complicated relationships between gender and race and economics and culture.

A beautiful man if ever there was one, Barnes lamented that modern Black music, in North America at least, has historically been the oyster from which white pearls have been plucked since the age of negro spirituals, when the likes of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis mined Juke Joints for what came to be known as Rock n’ Roll.

Of course, “rock n’ roll” originated as a Black euphemism for sex that over the years became deracinated and sanitized to the point that any Catholic nun can say she loves rock n’ roll without getting her habit ruffled.

Another example of a phenomenon co-opted from the Black community is the term “cancelled,” which according to my deep dive, has its earliest origins in the sense that we use it today in the 1968 Brunswick recording by Erma Franklin, Aretha’s sister.

“Like a credit card that ain’t been paid,” Franklin sings, “you’ve been cancelled.”◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Quinton Barnes performs at Le Système, 2 July 2026. Rory Creelman for NicheMTL.

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All Dressed

Day For Night: in conversation with Jennifer Alleyn

Montreal is known as a 24-hour city. The metropolis shines brightest in the shadows.

The two decades between 1960 and 1980 saw nightlife explode with cultural hubs like social and dance clubs that welcomed and nurtured bohemian subcultures. At the same time, the city became a destination, attracting immigrants from around the world with a cosmopolitan atmosphere supported by bilingualism and multiculturalism. Particularly the Plateau and Mile End neighbourhoods assumed an international character, an island within the island.

The Montreal-based artist and filmmaker Jennifer Alleyn came of age in this milieu.

“This was my ‘hood,” Alleyn tells me as we sit beneath a staircase on the patio at Café Myriade on St. Denis, escaping the blazing sunshine of an early summer afternoon. “I grew up in this neighbourhood. There was Warshaw, there was Schwartz, there was a Polish bakery, there was a Greek shoe repair, there was the Hungarian meat place. When I was a kid, I believed that everybody came from elsewhere.”

The street bustles and buzzes with midday traffic and extrovert energy. But Alleyn’s latest film, Kairos, is a more introverted and contemplative affair. Kairos tells the story of Emmanuel, portrayed by the actor and playwright Emmanuel Schwartz, a fictionalized version of an actor amidst a midlife crisis who finally lands a gig hosting a late-night talk radio show and establishes unexpected connections with the callers who tune in nightly.

“We were looking for places that were a bit more deserted,” Alleyn explains of the Montreal locations that populate the film. “Those tiny lights that are not in the midst of the noise of the day. Even the visual noise. I adore the silence,” she says, “the quiet of night.”

Nocturnal reveries are effectively supporting characters in Kairos. The film lingers on beautifully framed Antonioni-esque architectural cinematography and delicate drone panoramas of apartment exteriors with a nod to Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Kairos constructs a dream-like version of Montreal that doesn’t quite fit together, allowing the viewer to fill in real and imaginary spaces: the Farine Five Roses sign; the rooftop studio in the Cooper building on St. Laurent Boulevard just below Duluth; the tiny cafe in the lobby of 10 Avenue des Pins.

Via email, I reach Emmanuel Schwartz, who explains, “The Montreal of this movie feels like a cross between Leonard Cohen’s, Amir Kadir’s, and Kim Thúy’s Montreal. The great thing about a city, about identity, is that it’s always becoming, isn’t it? That’s what’s beautiful about this place,” says Schwartz, “that we are free to change, to be a whole bunch of things, some we can’t even name.”

Conceived during the depths of the pandemic, with Schwartz in mind as the lead, Kairos captures and communicates urban alienation and longing for connection that characterizes life in post-modern cities — particularly Montreal, which is traditionally described as a pas de deux of two solitudes. “We really have something like a twin mind,” Alleyn says of Schwartz.

“The great thing about a city, about identity, is that it’s always becoming.” Emmanuel Schwartz. Photograph courtesy of Jennifer Alleyn.

The movie version of Emmanuel curiously finds companionship in the disembodied telephonic voices, people from elsewhere, who tell their stories with an intimacy that can only be achieved over the phone.

“He’s seeking exchanges, real exchanges,” Alleyn tells me. “The technological society tends to erase these conversations because it’s such a capitalist way of interacting, in a way. To me, there is such a connection with the voice. It’s a heart-to-heart. It relieves all the possible preconceived images that we can build when we meet a stranger. It is direct access to a human being.”

That experiential access transcends language, nationality, and identity. Radio, too, plays a role that harkens back to a kind of social media that existed before the internet, paradoxically fostering a closer form of community. “All the walls fall,” says Alleyn, “all the preconceived walls fall through the radio.”

Alleyn is the daughter of Edmund Alleyn, the celebrated Quebec visual artist known for experimenting with form and mixing various media, incorporating abstraction and technology, and often using his works to commentate on the radical transformations Quebec society underwent following the Quiet Revolution. Coming of age to an extent in her famous father’s shadow, Alleyn more deliberately cultivated her confidence and unique creative voice.

“It’s true that it was very rich to witness the arts in the making,” Alleyn recalls. “But my father was a very strong figure. When I was young, it was very impressive. People tend to think that this could have opened up the possibility for me more than someone who has a doctor or a mechanic for a father. He really was a confirmed artist. He had a vocation. At 14 he did paintings and was like, ‘this is my life. This is what I’m meant to do.’ And it was clear, and it came from the sky. For me, to believe that I could also have this artistic capacity or sensibility, it took me a lot of time because it’s a really big thing to confront. I was a shy child.”

Jennifer Alleyn found that photography offered a way into making images that were not immediately associated or compared with her father’s. “I had my little camera when I was 10,” remembers Alleyn. “I see better behind my camera. I go closer to people with my camera. Cinema is my territory.”

“Cinema is about immorality.” Jennifer Alleyn on the set of Kairos. Photograph courtesy of Jennifer Alleyn.

She became renowned first as a documentary filmmaker with My Father’s Studio in 2007, a touching portrait of Edmund that received the prestigious Gémeaux Award and was named best Canadian film at Montreal’s International Festival of Films on Art. Her preceding film, Svanok, based upon a dream her father recounted to her, won a more meaningful award: his approval. “I did it with a tiny crew,” says Alleyn, a broad smile emerging on her face. “And when he saw it, he was really happy. And he said, ‘this is cinema.’”

We talk at length about the differences between cinema and photography. “I don’t like the word ‘shooting,’” Alleyn proclaims. “You’re killing time when you’re shooting. Cinema is about immorality. That’s why long takes are so wonderful. Then, you really have encapsulated time. That’s what makes cinema very alive. It’s true that cinema is most powerful when time becomes alive again.” She pauses and proclaims, “It is something that you retrieve from the terrible bulldozer of time.”

This image sticks with me: time as bulldozer, indiscriminately razing all of human experience, and the camera and its operator trying desperately to preserve some semblance of it. It is a delightful metaphor. The Greek word “Kairos” is distinct from “Chronos,” chronological time that unfolds linearly. Kairos means seizing upon decisive moments, those windows of opportunity that present themselves within time’s relentless march.

The sunlight creeps around the staircase that Alleyn and I sit beneath, chasing the shadows.

“You save some moments,” she contends, “and you can survive time.”◼︎

Cover image: Jennifer Alleyn photographed by Justine Latour.

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Midnight Indigo

Fondations, Pur Pasteur, Fondations (Self-released)

Pur Pasteur performs at White Wall Studio 22 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”
—Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

Montreal is a city known for its nightlife. The inky blue sky that appears in the summertime between midnight and dawn is the dome under which much of Montreal’s arts and culture is incubated. “The productive hours,” an artist friend recently defined it.

I prefer to preserve a sanitized image of the urban night, a city of late-night strolls and romantic encounters. But Montreal’s nighttime economies have come under fire at the policy level since at least Expo ’67, when the SPVM, QPP, and RCMP established a joint task force in 1966 to counter the rise of illegal activities that often unfolded under the cover of night.

Matthieu Caron, author of Montreal After Dark, writes that the tabloid media at the time amplified perceived crises like drug abuse and sex work, “to create panic regarding security and moral standards.”

Montreal’s unofficial nightlife ambassador Sergio Da Silva argues on the contrary that nightlife cultivates community and culture. Da Silva pointed out during his municipal candidacy campaign in 2025 the incongruity of noise regulations aimed at loitering bar patrons in neighbourhoods that greenlit major residential construction projects. And ironically, many of those apartments now sit unoccupied.

Montreal’s new mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada on Friday announced at a press conference, to phoney fanfare, that Montreal will contribute $540,000 to renovate 45 vacant housing units for “vulnerable residents.” Meanwhile, roughly 25,000 immediately inhabitable rental units remain vacant as moving day approaches, in part because landlords are legally allowed to significantly increase rents on units that have not had a tenant for more than 12 months.

Short-term rentals, too, are notorious contributors to the seamier side of Montreal’s nightlife and also eat into the availability of affordable housing. An investigative analysis that The Globe & Mail published on 22 June exposed a human-trafficking ring that lured teenagers to Montreal bars only to be ensnared into the skin trade through interprovincial networks of short-term rental units.

It is possible that the Airbnb next door might be the source of the rattling mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

Vent bleu, Maude Arès, Guido Molinari, Anne-Marie Proulx, Fondation Guido Molinari, Until 23 August 2026

Guido Molinari, Vent bleu (1995), Acrylic on canvas, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec collection. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“When, with an expression so ill-bred as to be fatherless, I enjoin a small offensive fellow to ‘fuck a duck,’ I don’t mean he should.”
—William H. Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry

It is disappointing when it rains on a parade, to which we might say, ‘fuck this.’ It is disappointing when the metro leaves just as you arrive at the station, to which we might say, ‘fuck that.’

But nothing is as disappointing as another person, a celebrity or someone in a powerful position, especially someone whom you might once have admired, respected, even loved, behaving in an unbecoming manner, to which we might say, ‘fuck you.’ Petty, spiteful, unclassy, envious, vainglorious — these are ugly characteristics that come into focus in the light of a 10,000-degree Kelvin day.

They say that revenge is a dish best served cold. And it might be tempting to blow a cool blue invective toward someone who has wounded you. But the best revenge is no revenge at all. The most effective remedy for the blues induced by another person’s private hell is not to add more blue, but to become a gray rock.

Character is revealed in distress tolerance. Let disappointing people be, to live out their life sentences imprisoned by their own miserable existence, immersed in a blue cocoon.

Max Richter with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 26 June 2026

Max Richter introduces The Blue Notebooks at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 25 June 2026. Victor Diaz Lamich for FIJM.

“Pay blue—Pay back the blue you stole and bottled and doled out in eye droppers of junk—pay back the blue you stole for your police uniforms—pay that blue back to sea and sky and eyes of the earth—”
—William S. Burroughs, Nova Express

Max Richter, the German-born British composer performing on Thursday night at Place des arts with the Montreal Jazz Festival, explained to the audience that he wrote The Blue Notebooks in response to U.K. complicity with the U.S.-led 2003 Iraq invasion, whilst contemplating philosophically how to treat others and how best to exist in the world.

Creative pursuit is one answer. For every monstrous act, it seems that there must be an immense and equal and opposite outpouring of beauty and goodness and justice. The form this justice takes is different in every instance, but most often it manifests in works of righteous art. The Sorrow and the Pity, for instance, would not exist without French Nazi sympathy.

Kaïros, dir. Jennifer Alleyn, Cinéma Moderne, 24 June 2026

“Blue is a noose strangling a vulnerable sky.”
—George Elliott Clarke, Blue Elegies, for David Odhiambo

Air fluctuates differently at night. The city’s oscillations and its corresponding pulse appear to slow to a gentler rhythm. This is when those with acute sensitivity can rest, or feel at peace, or feel more comfortable inside their own skin.

There is something about darkness that is paradoxically revealing, as if another kind of light manifests in the shadows. Our contours blur into obscurity, uniting us.

Remembering Gabor Szilasi, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 13 June 2026

Attendees gather to view an exhibition of Gabor Szilasi’s photographs after the Celebration of Life ceremony in his honour at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 13 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“More lights
Blue signs
All gold
All new
So small
So high
Down there
Tonight.”
—Brian Eno, “A Different Kind of Blue”

Nearly a half-century after Susan Sontag wrote On Photography, it is still difficult to explain what makes a good photograph. Photos are “praised for being subtle,” Sontag wrote, “or interesting, or powerful, or complex, or simple, or — a favourite — deceptively simple.”

To this list we might add sentimental. A photograph that evokes melancholy either in its subject matter or its materiality is bound to elicit an emotional response in the viewer. Identification — if we recognize the person or the location or the situation that the image depicts — contributes to the perceived quality of a photographic image as well.

Unsentimental photographs, however, have their own virtues. Surveillance photos that are void of any aesthetic considerations, like lighting or composition, possess a certain documentary charm. Ruined photos that flaunt their mechanical flaws, or in which an errant thumb appears, or that cut their subjects off mid-face, or are hopelessly out of focus, also frequently make for good snapshots.

These glitchy kinds of images defy easy identification, capturing every part of the moment in interesting and powerful and complex ways, yet with deceptive simplicity.

Intelligence is measured in the acceptance of ambiguity.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Max Richter and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble perform at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 25 June 2026. Victor Diaz Lamich for FIJM.

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999 Words

One Weird Trick

“A cool tool is …
Anything useful that increases learning, empowers individuals, does work that matters, is either the best, or the cheapest, or the only thing that works.”
—Cool Tools: A Catalogue of Possibilities, Kevin Kelly

The 2013 directory entitled Cool Tools is a compendium of technological objects that promises to help its readers, for example, put on a house concert, design a logo, rear an optimistic child, replace bulbs with LEDs, bypass real estate agents, and scores more apparently useful activities.

The tools clearly do not accomplish the tasks themselves. But they facilitate the work with machinery designed to economize jobs that have become commonplace time occupiers in modern life. According to Kelly, machines like the pineapple slicer/corer, the pocket chainsaw, the TUSA hyperdry snorkel, and the Matterform 3D scanner are the coolest tools.

Intelligent machines don’t just surround us. We seamlessly integrate them, most often unconsciously, into our daily lives. From the mobile phones to which we are eternally tethered, to the terminals that dispense and take our money, to the vehicles that transport us, to the boxes in our homes that we use to keep our food frozen, wash our clothes, warm our soup, condition our air, watch movies, and listen to music, technology is everywhere, ubiquitous, invisible. We really only notice technology when it doesn’t work as intended.

An illuminated projection on a curved surface displaying text about vibrant user experiences and sound elements, with a light point in the background.
Rough realtime translation of Lucas Paris’s Q&A following Vibrant User.Online at the Satosphère, 16 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A spate of recent musico-technological events including the ELEKTRA biennale and the Society for Arts and Technology’s 30th anniversary has again placed technology at the focal center of local cultural production. Montreal is known for its techno-predilection. The MUTEK festival in particular has since 2003 positioned Montreal as a vital international destination for digital arts. The LUMINO festival, Cité Mémoire, Oasis Immersion, and current and past public artworks like Utopie by Jonathan Villeneuve and 21 Balançoires by Daily tous les jours signal Montreal’s municipal commitment to technological innovation in the service of art.

This begs the question: does technology make better art? Does it make our artists better? The tools artists use no doubt shape the works they create. But do modern technological advancements actually stimulate creativity?

Currently, the hottest debate revolves around creative Artificial Intelligence. Should artists use A.I.? And if so, does this toolbox simplify art-making processes like, say, a pineapple slicer/corer might simplify making fruit salad? Should art be innovative, as if it were a technology?

It is helpful to recall Joseph Weizenbaum’s influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason in which the computer scientist and ELIZA programmer proclaimed that computers lack the capacity for moral judgement. Computer Power’s most famous anecdote recounts how Weizenbaum’s secretary became so engaged with ELIZA, his benign computer programme designed to mimic a psychoanalyst’s routine, that his secretary asked him to vacate the room.

It might be tempting to maintain that machines don’t require moral judgement when human users can steer and, when necessary, override A.I.’s deficiencies. Yet, ELIZA’s inability to judge seemingly interfered with Weizenbaum’s secretary’s judgement, as if the evolution of the machine precipitated the devolution of our own. The fact that his secretary knew full-well how ELIZA worked is what prompted Weizenbaum to issue dire warnings about A.I.’s dangerously seductive allure.

A performer in a stylish outfit singing into a microphone on stage, with blue lighting and a DJ behind a covered table.
Xela Edna performs at Espace SAT 11 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The intelligent tool that still fascinates me most is MIDI, or the Musical Instrument Digital Interface — so much so that I wrote a book, Mad Skills, about its cultural history. Ostensibly, MIDI is the protocol that enables digital musical instruments to “talk” to one another, as if exercising judgement. But what it really is, is a mechanism for technological control, not only of one technology over another, but also of music technology over analogue music making, of corporate control over maker culture — ultimately, the tyranny of the binary.

Circuitry is not the technology most essential to MIDI. Curiously, MIDI’s intelligence has nothing to do with computers. It goes much further back than that. Indeed, the clock may be the first artificial intelligence.

“The clock,” wrote Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization, “is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men.” There would be no techno music were it not for clocks. The clock measures and regulates and quantifies and values time, the medium within which all of existence unfolds.

Like ELIZA, the clock itself is incapable of moral judgement. Rather, the clock reshaped the erratic immorality of chaos into a strict moral code of stability: “under the rule of the order,” Mumford contended, “surprise and doubt and caprice and irregularity were put at bay.” Clocks did not just produce synchronization. They also created the concept of asynchrony.

A performer interacts with electronic equipment on a table while a visual projection of circular patterns is displayed behind them in a dimly lit space.
Myriam Bleau performs with the ELEKTRA festival at Centre PHI, 18 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The MIDI clock was always off by a hair’s breadth. And this reintroduced a degree of chaos into the digital musical order, kicking events, in a manner of speaking, off the grid. Montreal artists — like Myriam Bleau, who performed a skittering set on 19 June at Centre PHI with a collection of illuminated spinning tops, or Xela Edna’s unexpected technical glitches on the night of her album launch at the SAT for My Data Cannot Rot — consciously or subconsciously intervene in the clock’s domination and trouble the notion that technological tools are unquestionably cool.

Fluorescent lights flicker rhythmically. Data indeed rots. Anyone who has ever relied on Montreal’s Métro system understands that time is just a suggestion here. If the train is running late, more time is simply added to the clock. The Métro’s turnstiles are locked from forward motion. But everyone knows that if you spin them backwards half a turn, you can slide right through.

Technological innovation doesn’t de facto produce better art. It is arguably in the ethics and aesthetics of technological failure that creative revolutions are incubated. If intelligent machines encourage our moral stagnation, then winding the clock back might be the most promising strategy to push us forward. Sometimes, what works best is that which evidently doesn’t.

As tech-savvy as Montreal presents itself, our cutting-edge technologies seldom function as advertised. And so, we exploit weird tricks, cool tools to navigate our social spaces, our culture.◼︎

Cover image: Public Appeal performs at Espace SAT 11 June 2026. Rory Creelman for NicheMTL.

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Animal Instinct: in conversation with Dana Gingras

“All radical engagements are inventions in some sense: unthought, untried, extraordinary.”
—Erin Manning, Politics of Touch

Movement is the body’s only constant. And movement implies uncertainty, change, risk. We never know when we move precisely where we will end up. So, a degree of belief is necessary.

A general sense of disembodiment has emerged in the digital age, as if the virtual is immaterial. We tend to get lulled into thinking that data is invisible. And free. We forget that it requires tremendous natural resources to produce and store and move information around. The digital world always returns to the physical.

“Bodies have a certain kind of weight, a certain kind of history,” the filmmaker and choreographer Dana Gingras says. “Just through the weight of our bones, we have this connection to the earth.”

Gingras has invited me round to her studio not far from the Rosemont metro on a particularly rainy afternoon, my soaking clothing a reminder of my own bodily weight. Weeks earlier, I had met Gingras at Cinéma Moderne for the first public screening of Jump Cut, a series of eight late-night cable access-style short films that Gingras had produced in association with the CTM Festival and Goethe-Institut.

Jump Cut began as a pandemic project when Gingras and her collaborator, the contemporary dancer and video artist Sonya Stefan, found themselves under the coronavirus restrictions and itching for a creative outlet.

“We thought we’d be back in the fall,” Gingras recalls. “It’s just a three-month blip, we thought. But by the latter part of 2020, I was like, ‘what are we going to do here?’”

That February, Gingras and her dance company, Animals of Distinction, were mid-stride with the Montreal post-rock band Fly Pan Am touring Frontera, a production that combines the band’s stark music and her troupe’s acrobatic performance. “We had all sorts of invitations that year,” Gingras says. “And then we all know what happened.”

In a tragic twist of irony, Frontera, a meditation on borders and mobility with a 33-member cast and crew, was reduced by covid protocols from travelling internationally to sheltering in place in the Mile End. Not content to sit still, Gingras and Stefan began inventing scenarios and sharing them via email.

“We started making up these characters — Max Clown and Dirty Ghost,” Gingras tells me. “We were going a little stir-crazy. And the building across the street at the time was completely abandoned, and I had a key. So, we were going over there to explore, and we just ended up doing it there.”

Gingras and Stefan shot and edited the first episode of Jump Cut that autumn and enlisted other co-conspirators including the video artist Sabrina Ratté, provocateur Peaches, Hotel2Tango proprietor Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Fly Pan Am’s Roger Tellier-Craig, and the electronic musician Marie Davidson to contribute to an ongoing series that would occupy their time throughout the depths of the pandemic.

“We didn’t think we would make it into anything. And then CTM came on board as a co-producer,” Gingras explains, “and we were able to do a whole series.”

A surreal digital artwork featuring a translucent waterfall effect, with abstract shapes and a figure partially obscured by flowing material, set against a gradient background.
“We talk all the time about the glitch.” Still image from Jump Cut #2 with Marie Davidson, Sabrina Ratté, and Dana Gingras.

A serial collaborator, Gingras is a rare artist who is able to immediately inspire trust and respect in her colleagues.

“She has a strong vision,” Marie Davidson tells me, “but also great intuition. Working with her was a real pleasure. She gave me a lot of space to explore, and doing a project with her brought back energy into my own practice afterwards.”

Tellier-Craig’s connection with Gingras dates back more than two decades when she commissioned him in 2005 to work on the original version of Monumental, the choreographic piece for which Godspeed You! Black Emperor ended up performing the live score.

“She really trusts people,” reveals Tellier-Craig. “She gives you a lot of freedom. It’s very fluid. I’ve seen her work with dancers, and she has this calmness and openness which is really surprising when the stakes are so high. There are so many people involved and there’s a lot of money being spent. She’s very together,” Tellier-Craig says. “I admire her.”

I note a thematic thread of glitchy aesthetics running through almost every Jump Cut episode. The author and professor Laura U. Marks writes in her essay entitled Loving a Disappearing Image that decaying media that flaunt their tenuous connection to reality “all appeal to a look of love and loss.” The materiality of the medium comes to the fore in each Jump Cut when the image is interfered with, and during the screening at Cinéma Moderne, even the Vimeo platform co-operates by dropping out at times and displaying just the spinning “throbber” icon.

“We talk all the time about the glitch,” says Gingras. “It is absolutely fundamental to my choreographic work. I’m not interested in perfection. I’m interested in how dissonance can create discomfort — but also discomfort because it decenters ideas of perfection, or standards of beauty. Those standards are so oppressive that you want to mess with them. I want to be reminded that there are other possibilities. Glitch is that,” she grins. “It’s the pearl. It’s the grit.”

A woman in a stylish gray shirt and black leather pants is sitting on the floor, posing with a calm expression against a plain backdrop.
“Sometimes things don’t go the way we want them to.” Dana Gingras photographed by Justine Latour.

Dana Gingras was born in a small northern British Columbia town and moved with her family to South America before ending up in Scotland in her teens, just in time for the post-punk scene to explode. “Music was really part of the water I swam in,” Gingras says.

“I saw Siouxsie and the Banshees when I was 13, the night that the original lineup broke up, and there was a huge riot in the theatre. Robert Smith of The Cure stepped in. They did a 20-minute version of ‘The Lord’s Prayer.’ I was like, ‘this is so amazing.’ It was chaos and cathartic energy and that’s what I was drawn to. I was like, ‘Aha, this is what I want to do.’ But what form it was going to take, I had no idea. I didn’t know it was called dance or choreography. I just knew that putting ideas together into some kind of cohesive structure and making something political, something that delivered some impact, I was like, ‘This is it.’ Just seeing what could be expressed through the body that wasn’t necessarily language-based. Or that the meaning could stay open enough that everyone could have their own emotional experience with it. I was very interested in that.”

Gingras eventually returned to Canada and studied dance, “probably to stay sane,” she deadpans. “Like, I feel much better now that I’ve thrown myself at the floor a hundred times,” she laughs.

Gingras started out and has since remained outside of institutional pedagogy, having taken technical classes but never studying formally. “It’s given me a lot of freedom to make it up as I go along, instead of feeling like because I’ve done that training, that’s how I need to express myself.”

In 1993, Gingras launched the contemporary dance company The Holy Body Tattoo in Vancouver with Noam Gagnon and composer-musician and co-founder of Voivod, Jean-Yves Thériault.

A performer in a sleek black outfit is dancing with dynamic movements, illuminated by blue lighting amidst a backdrop of vintage television screens displaying distorted images.
“I start from a very pedestrian place: how does the body move in space?” Still image from anOther by Dana Gingras/Animals Of Distinction. Dana Gingras, Sonya Stefan, and Group A.

“Our first work had a huge video component,” Gingras says. “William Gibson actually wrote the text for it. So, already then, there was this idea of bringing people from different artforms together. To make a performance for the body was at the center, but I’m not that inspired by straight traditional dance. I was much more interested in film and art. I wanted to speak to these other artforms, but with the body being central to choreography.”

While she was performing with The Holy Body Tattoo, Gingras suffered a torn anterior cruciate ligament which led to her first forced hiatus from dance and eight months of rehabilitation. “That was one of those moments of huge change in my life,” says Gingras. “But it ended up being a gift, so there was something in that and I tried to embrace it. Sometimes things don’t go the way we want them to. What’s on the other side of it?”

Gingras studied film in Vancouver and Los Angeles and relocated in the early aughts to Montreal. “The language here is very fluid, back and forth. Spanish is actually my first fluent language. But that’s what I love about Montreal is that you can respond in English and have someone speak to you in French and have a whole conversation in two languages. I love that.”

Nonverbal communication in many respects is by far the most effective form. Our bodies speak even when our languages are misunderstood. Gingras recognizes this crucial truth.

“There are obviously aesthetic languages that come with dance,” she says. “And I’ve always been interested in stripping that back. I start from a very pedestrian place: how does the body move in space? Stand up, sit down. What are the gestures, what are the tics? I like to strip it down, so I don’t see the dance in it, to start. To me, the dance is the game of the rhythm of these things, the repetition of these things.”

Gingras is currently working on two new projects. One is a solo performance for the dance artist Caroline Gravel, with a score by Sophie Trudeau and the visual artist Caroline Monnet’s scenography. The other is a larger undertaking called Trance Fiction, which Gingras is working on with Sabrina Ratté.

Digital art displaying abstract forms in blue and white, resembling fluid movement with dynamic, flowing patterns against a black background.
“Remember that you have a body.” Still image from Trance Fiction by Dana Gingras/Animals of Distinction and Sabrina Ratté.

“It’s a three-part project,” Gingras explains. “It’s a live performance with my dancers. It’s also an installation with performance. And it’s also video mapping for a building. So, it has different iterations of the same content.”

Without prompting, Gingras seems to confess: “I take a long time to make stuff. I like to work on things and leave them and come back and see how the world has changed, and how we’ve changed.”

We talk for over an hour about how to survive financially as an artist (she recommends that dancers have some kind of parallel career), about A.I. (Gingras promises that she does not use it for final iterations of her work), about augmenting the body with technology (she is also a Gyrotonic master trainer), and about the mechanics of the human body.

“I’ve been involved in cadaver dissection classes,” Gingras divulges. “Now, talk about a technology that’s mind-blowing, absolutely mind-blowing: the body.”

I suddenly become very aware of my own physicality: my damp garments, the way I am seated, my hand gently clenching the armrest. I relax and come back into the present moment to pet Gingras’s dog who throughout our conversation has been quietly seated at my feet. I glance down at my phone and notice the waveform of my Voice Memos app dancing in real time to the sound of our voices. I mention that technology deludes us into disregarding our bodies, mindlessly scrolling, passively consuming.

“First of all, remember that you have a body,” Gingras advises. “There is something about the body now that’s more important than it has ever been.”◼︎

Cover image: courtesy of the artist.

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Heroes & Villains

Heroes of Greece: The Age of Troy, Pointe-à-Callière, Until 7 March 2027

A white statue of a female figure with a fish tail, holding a large fish in her right hand, displayed on a blue pedestal in an art exhibit.
Statue of a Siren, 370 BCE, Pentelic Marble, National Archaeology Museum, Athens. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“And you too, your fate awaits you too, godlike as you are, Achilles — to die in battle beneath the proud rich Trojans’ walls!”
—The Ghost of Patroclus, The Iliad

When the mythological figure and fast runner Achilles decides of his own free will to oppose Agamemnon, his mother, Thetis, a powerful sea nymph who was known to metamorphose into fire, water, lions, and snakes, warns her son that it will spell his demise. And so, Achilles retreats. But Achilles’s fury will eventually twist fate and lead to the fulfillment of his wretched destiny.

“Fate,” says Anastasia Balaska, scientific coordinator of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, “is something different than the will of the Gods. And also, there is free will. Even though fate has been written, people are responsible for their actions. Achilles knew that his fate was to die. He knew that he was a tragic person. But his actions were his. He could be a hero, or he could stay at home.”

This is in contrast to the Christian notion of choice — which is what separates humans from beasts — and the connection between free will and salvation. “Christians believe that we have free will and we get what we deserve in the afterlife,” Balaska says. “The Greeks had a hero code.”

Alexei Kolakis-Landon & Tomas Dessureault, Ceremony, 6595 St. Urbain, 4-7 June 2026

A person stands in front of a large abstract painting with shades of red and dark lines, in an art gallery setting. The individual is wearing a black top and a patterned skirt, and has a crochet bag slung over their shoulder.
Installation view of a work by Alexei Kolakis-Landon. Photographed for NicheMTL

“The vague is a positive state of intensive activity enveloping all possible varieties of experience. The tendency to take form may be suspended and held in intensity.”
—Brian Massumi, Not Determinately Nothing

When you first see a new painting, the world of possibilities is open and endless. It is pure potential. There is nothing yet determined. This is the most exciting moment for an onlooker: to see without regarding, to experience in advance of identification.

When you first encounter a new face, an analogous world opens up, and every interpersonal possibility is potentially an option. This is the most exciting moment for a lover: to be overwhelmed with beauty, to resist and then settle into recognition.

The opposite of memory is pure anticipation.

William Basinski with Kathryn Mohr, Théâtre Fairmount, 2 June 2026

A performer on stage with a computer and equipment, illuminated by blue and white lights, in front of an audience at a music venue.
William Basinski performs at Théâtre Fairmount. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“There is no ‘substantial’ difference between the God of Love and the God of excessive arbitrary cruelty, lo ’mperador del doloroso regno, it is one and the same God who appears in a different light only due to a parallax shift of our perspective.”
—Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View

The sole concept that is allowed to be infinite in Western culture, albeit begrudgingly, is God. Perhaps this is because both infinity and God are unknowable to the Western mind, inconceivable to our contemporary and technocratic and increasingly binary consciousness.

An eternal existence simply does not compute in modern civilization. The de facto teleological trajectory that we recognize is from indeterminate to determined. The infinite cannot be a starting point because infinity has no beginning. Nor, for the same reason, can God be the end.

Leonard Cohen sang in his 1992 song entitled “The Future” of a deficiency in quantification — “won’t be nothing,” Cohen growled, “you can measure anymore.”

However, the reverse is proving to be true. Everything is measurable, quantifiable, either off or on, never neither.

Quatuor Molinari plays Dmitri Shostakovich, Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, 31 May 2026

A string quartet performing on stage in a venue with bright yellow walls, featuring four musicians in white shirts holding their instruments. There are empty chairs on stage, and an audience is visible in the foreground.
Quatuor Molinari performs at Conservatoire de musique de Montréal. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I’ve been in this town so long
So long to the city
I’m fit with the stuff
To ride in the rough
And sunny down snuff, I’m alright
By the heroes and villains.
—Brian Wilson, “Heroes and Villains”

That heroism is so often associated with war, and victory in war, is what Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud would have likely diagnosed as the impediment to the growth of culture. Still, in today’s wars, there is no victory. Or rather, victory is expressed in the ability to sustain ambient engagement rather than to prevail in any given battle.

In order to transcend capitalism, which we must now acknowledge is commensurate with war and the decline of culture, it is necessary to devolve to a state of persistent vagueness, for incongruity and indeterminacy to endure. We should redefine heroism, then, not as victory or defeat but as resistance to the tendency to take form.

Lynda Gaudreau, Romances, VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine, Until 20 June 2026

A collage of vintage newspaper clippings featuring headlines about crime, scandals, and various incidents, displayed on a wall.
Installation view of Romances at Centre VOX. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The hatred directed against war is perhaps like the mania that alone has the strength to free the subject from the tyrant.”
—Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence

There is a segment of any crowd that will cheer for the bad guy. At the movies or in the boxing ring, or even in the American presidency, villains are charismatic and command transgressive attention.

Strength is a quality of both heroism and villainy. The evil force flexes its muscle, and the hero overpowers this force with superior strength. There is built-in drama in this conflict, a familiar narrative arc along which we can plot our progress. The further we are away from victory, the closer we must be to the beginning of the narrative, and the more the necessity to build strength.

But cultivating weakness, what is currently understood as “soft power,” refusing the narrative arc of conflict, posits an alternative story to the might-is-right barbarism that dominates global affairs, from politics to music and art and everything between.

The dominant narrative is that if a narrative doesn’t represent the victims of domination, invent a stronger narrative. But reinforcing strength, whether through militarism or through the stories that we tell each other, only further entrenches the universal notion of an arms race.

A call to action is no longer the appropriate response to violence when “CTA” also describes effective marketing copywriting. Strength is inherently capitalistic. Strength is a virtue of the God of Love and the God of excessive arbitrary cruelty.

I propose a call to inaction. Inaction is not interesting. It is not productive. It is not a compelling narrative. Inaction can be neither good nor evil. Inaction neither wins nor loses. It is neither perpetrator nor victim, neither villain nor hero.

Inaction is indirection. It has no subject nor object. It has no aim nor purpose. But neither is it purposeless.

Inaction at once acknowledges and disregards God’s will, our will, and fate.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Statue of Zeus, the arbiter of fate, 2nd century BCE, Marble, National Archaeology Museum, Athens. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

The Dislocation of Culture: notes on Art Speaks with Homi K. Bhabha and Glenn D. Lowry

Beginning about a decade ago on the social network formerly known as Twitter, anonymous accounts began cropping up posting out-of-context screen grabs from popular television shows.

Feeds dedicated to the most-watched programmes, like The Sopranos and The Simpsons, attracted followers in the hundreds of thousands, and before long, almost every T.V. series had its own viral no-context Twitter account. The Guardian expressly singled out @oocsopranos as “a shibboleth of sorts,” an inside joke for the initiated.

Part of the thrill of these feeds was the simultaneous randomness and hyper-specificity of orphan images that would every now and then coincide with concurrent events or appear to shed new light upon some aspect of pop culture.

Another pleasure was their ability to resuscitate, recirculate, and remediate one form into another, in this case transplanting conventional television into the online realm and generating an exhilaration around the juxtapositional currency of it all.

The Harvard University professor Homi K. Bhabha might have identified in no-context Twitter feeds “the process of reinscription and negotiation,” where surplus meaning is produced in the time-lag between the originary text and its variant reiteration. But in 1994, when Bhabha was writing his seminal tome, The Location of Culture, Twitter did not yet exist, and it would take until just now to place these disparate notions, like a Ringgold alongside a Picasso, side by side.

I couldn’t help but think of out-of-context Twitter accounts as Bhabha and The Museum of Modern Art’s director emeritus Glenn D. Lowry engaged in conversation last Wednesday at la Grande Bibliothèque for the most recent Art Speaks event. Specifically, I couldn’t help but recall the thin sliver of time during which presenting no-context content seemed radical and new — those halcyon days between Twitter as a space for niche memes and the completion of its transformation into a river of fundament.

If Lowry and Bhabha’s discussion was any indication of the museum’s imminent trajectory, we are currently witnessing the art institution’s analogous swirling into the sewers of mass culture. It was less worrisome that this talk advanced no new ideas than that even the old ideas were defanged.

Like a number of attendees, the superficiality and lack of spontaneity in Bhabha and Lowry’s dialogue disappointed me. I was furthermore disappointed by the self-congratulatory mansplaining to questions from some very smart women around how to make contemporary art engaging to young people, A.I.’s propensity to misinform, and the MMFA’s chief curator Mary-Dailey Desmarais’s inquiry about the museum’s pedagogical responsibility.

But what was most disappointing was the insistence that destabilization is the most productive way for museums to meet this present moment of profound and cascading crises. Amongst the game of Buzzword Bingo that this pair played onstage — Immersion! Activation! Agency! — the notion of deliberately destabilizing historicity came off at best as antiquated, and at worst, reckless.

Wednesday’s discussion opens with MoMA founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s diagrammatic metaphor of the museum acting as a “torpedo moving through time,” going on to challenge the linearity of art history’s course and suggesting instead a rhizomatic organizational structure.

Bhabha and Lowry apparently borrowed the rhizome concept from Deleuze and Guattari who wrote in A Thousand Plateaus about the opposition between the One and the multiple: languages, territories, histories. “At the level of theory,” Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “the status of multiplicities is correlative to that of spaces” — presumably, in this instance, the museum space.

Lowry proposes drawing new lines through this archival space in order to encourage new points of accumulation, stoppage, and resonance. The idea is that dislocating artworks from narrow historical or generic lines will trace heterogeneous lines that tease out new connections and possibilities for making meaning.

Lowry invokes the example of hanging a Picasso next to a Faith Rinngold painting, contrasting their respective movements, epochs, and subjectivities, and antagonizing the audience to draw new lines of flight. In these unforeseen lines, Lowry believes, is radical potential.

A live interview event featuring two speakers on stage with a large screen behind them displaying art pieces in a gallery setting.
Glenn D. Lowry and Homi K. Bhabha at la Grande Bibliothèque, 27 May 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

One of the problems with rhizomatic structure is that it also characterizes the virus, the operative mode for the mass circulation of disorder. Releasing ideas from their traditional ecosystems opens up the theoretical space that Fredric Jameson described as the logic of postmodern historiography — “a cultural genre thus generically separated from the other one called historical knowledge.”

The “interesting dissonance” and “garish magic realism” of unexpected juxtapositions, according to Jameson, produces a “bonus of pleasure to be consumed.” This is not radical; this is capital, limiting rather than liberating, restraining instead of redeeming.

Deleuze and Guattari warn, too, that each kind of line has its dangers. “The lines of flight,” they caution, “always risk abandoning their creative potentialities…being turned into a line of destruction pure and simple (fascism).”

As a Canadian of Ukrainian descent, I am constantly reminded in this time of crisis of the cultural annihilation policy that Russia and other violent global powers are bureaucratically enacting in order to rewrite history. Destroying Ukrainian art and iconography, blowing up religious edifices, razing entire swaths of cultural memory — these are destructive strategies, not theoretical abstractions. They are really happening. The Ukrainian people right now would do anything for a sense of cultural stability.

The past is another country. Thus, we must be aware that removing works of art from their chronological context is the equivalent of redrawing maps, dislocating culture, and gerrymandering history.

So, forgive me if destabilizing historicity in an American art museum appears a bit out of step with what international institutions might be doing to face this moment of crisis. Forgive me for saying that I appreciate organization, admire order, respect historical knowledge. On the frontlines, clear communication and accurate timing may win both small battles and wider wars.

Ultimately, Lowry and Bhabha’s conversation confirmed that contemporary art has been entirely subsumed into systems of value, which Jameson hinted at as the “bonus of pleasure.” Jameson’s acolyte, the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, wrote presciently in 2004: “… the frontier zones of hypercapital do not try to repress so much as absorb the irrational and the illogical.”

Inside capitalism’s infinite confines, there is no such thing as spontaneous surplus value. Every risk is managed, every shock is measurable, every juxtaposition rendered predictable. In the lingo of out-of-context Sopranos: “Every last fucking coffee bean is in the computer and has to be accounted for.”

If time is money, as the old axiom goes, then the time-lag between sign and meaning, utterance and interpretation, is where (or, more accurately, when) excess value emerges. Its harvesting, however, is instantaneous. Therefore, the juxtaposition of Pablo Picasso against Faith Ringgold is less about activating meaning between these two diverse artists than it is about prolonging and monetizing the act of activation. Escape is impossible, not even through the gift shop.

As soon as a system starts benefiting those who protest it, the system ceases to be a structure worth protesting. Since participation time is more valuable than resistance time. Because of this, contemporary art has ceased to advance radical political ideas unless those ideas can be commodified. Even Banksy’s quixotic street art is bought and sold — and curated.

And so, radical order-making has become the avant-garde artform par excellence to oppose instability. The logical counterweight to productivity is non-productivity, just as non-violence is the antithesis of violence.

Curating contemporary art that is impossible to monetize is one radical tactic. Think of Marc-Olivier Hamelin’s recent exhibition at Centre Clark entitled Both of us were dreamers, young love in the sun, or the LODE collective’s show La naissance de l’art currently on at Galerie Eli Kerr. These assemblages of banal and unmarketable objects anticipate their designation and cultivate new configurations of accumulation, stoppage, and resonance.

Text discussing the impact of key exhibitions on qualified artists, referencing 19th and 20th-century bourgeoisie.
Detail, Comment by Nicolas Mavrikakis, 28 May 2026. Screenshot for NicheMTL, 2026-05-30 at 16.33.54.

I was heartened to read a few thoughtful critiques of Lowry and Bhabha’s conversation online, notably one that Le Devoir’s art critic Nicolas Mavrikakis had written. In it, Mavrikakis says:

On aurait pu aussi évoquer le retour en force de la censure (à droite comme à gauche), ainsi que celui de l’autocensure. On aurait pu discuter de la soumission de nos institutions à l’argent et au vedettariat de pacotille, à l’argent de la mode et du commerce parfois sale, à la logique des marques et du spectacle. On peut également évoquer la consommation des artistes par le milieu des arts, qui les jette dès qu’ils ne sont plus assez rentables; l’instrumentalisation de l’art.

We could also have invoked the resurgence of censorship (on both the right and the left), as well as the rise of self-censorship. We could have discussed our institutions’ subservience to money and vulgar celebrity, to the money of fashion and sometimes shady commerce, to the logic of brands and of spectacle. We could also have mentioned the art world’s exploitation of artists, discarding them as soon as they are no longer profitable enough. The instrumentalization of art.

I couldn’t agree more that these pressing topics were conspicuously absent from Bhabha and Lowry’s conversation. If the no-context approach is intended to provide an early clue to the MAC’s new direction, I fear that this institution, as well as all museums of its ilk, are in real trouble.

However, at the very bottom of Mavrikakis’s comment, which a friend sent me on Instagram, was a delicious out-of-context juxtaposition. The collapsable bubble prompts us to click on “Voir moins.”

This, I believe, is paramount and the most poignant advice to impart upon younger generations first encountering contemporary art — or how to confront A.I.’s insidious ascendency, or the responsibility of cultural institutions to retain historical knowledge.

See less. Triangulate better.◼︎

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