Author Archives: Ryan Alexander Diduck

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Follow the Art: in conversation with Eli Kerr

Snow once again blankets the city on 6 March 2025 and Galerie Eli Kerr, the modest-sized exhibition space on St. Laurent Boulevard, is crammed to capacity with visitors.

So much so that it is practically impossible to get a good look at the artworks presented at the show, simply entitled Three, which collects three brass, pewter, and bronze reliefs by Maggy Hamel-Metsos, two black-and-white inkjet prints on paper by Geneviève Cadieux, and a solitary impressionistic image called a failure by the painter Liza Lacroix.

Patrons mill about with wine glasses and Montellier cans clutched in hand, double kissing, laughing, mingling in spirals. The curatorial project at work here is about what is on the walls, yes. But it is also sub-textually about gathering together this assemblage of Montreal’s visual arts crowd for whom an au courant vernissage is an event worth braving a late-winter blizzard.

Credit gallerist Eli Kerr — for both the walls and crowd.

Kerr, 36, is one of a handful of visionary Montreal-based curators generating a buzz on The Main and, in doing so, reinvigorating a sense of novelty and delight amidst a global downturn in the art world. Sales in the worldwide art market fell by 12% in 2024 according to a study commissioned by Art Basel and UBS.

Nonetheless, now might be the most opportune moment to helm a new venture in the workaday art sector, where transactions have actually increased, and in a city like Montreal, where art is valued by a wider swath of the general population.

“I thought it was a good time,” Kerr deadpans of his counterintuitively deliberated enterprise, “because this is all I know. I can’t compare it to better times.”

“I really like working directly with artists. We can make decisions much quicker.” Gallery view of the vernissage for “Three,” 6 March 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Kerr relocated to St. Laurent in a storefront nestled between Mount-Royal and St. Joseph, right next door to kindred spirit Nicolas Robert, from a mezzanine-level gallery on Avenue du Parc that he opened during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. A native Montrealer, Kerr was away at that time in Ontario, working through a graduate degree in Curatorial Studies at the University of Toronto.

“It made sense in uncertain times to head back to a place that one understood, and be home around my people,” says Kerr of his return five years ago. “My family, the artists, and the friends that I have. The first gallery came out of a sense of wanting to — needing to — do something.”

Kerr describes his initial commercial endeavour as no larger than a “parking space” that nonetheless allowed him to exhibit singular works of art in alternative ways, focussing specifically upon one sole piece, or a select assortment of them. And while museums and larger art centres were mandated by the government to be closed throughout the Covid crisis, street-level galleries like Kerr’s were among the few businesses allowed to remain in operation.

“I was able to walk this grey line,” recalls Kerr. “It provided that base necessity of being able to put on small-scale exhibitions. And then the opportunity to move to St. Laurent came up, and that opened up a lot of doors. I’m really committed to showing new work. Having artists show things they’ve never shown before. Departing from the precedent — that’s what we want to do in terms of exhibitions.”

Prior to being the proprietor of his own eponymous gallery, Kerr cut his teeth working as an assistant to a variety of local artists and eventually landing a job at Fonderie Darling. “I’ve been organizing exhibitions independently since about 2015,” Kerr tells me.

“There’s a world of insight you can gain working for people. But I’ve always found it hard to work in the arts for myriad reasons. It’s really tough to make a living. It’s tough to do the projects you want to do, in terms of artistic direction. The other option is working in a museum or in an artist-run centre. But you have to have a more by-committee way of making decisions and I really like working directly with artists. We can make decisions much quicker. We might be doing things totally backwards. But there’s an edge to that.”

Gallery view of “The Lion’s Share,” a solo exhibition by the photographer Fatine-Violette Sabiri. Photographed for NicheMTL.

At the St. Laurent location, Kerr represents nine artists, a small but robust stable of Francophone and Anglo, local and international talent. The current show on view is called “The Lion’s Share” by the photographer Fatine-Violette Sabiri, and Kerr gives me a walk-through of the gallery, describing what he finds fascinating about her works.

“A lot of the photographs are taken in these before-moments that are in the periphery to a main event,” he explains. “People preparing for a fashion show. There’s a bunch of horseback riders preparing for a competition. She’s looking at these side moments. It’s something spontaneous — and quite painterly.”

The curatorial turn more broadly betrays an impetus for the organization of people and things in a dynamic that implies a propensity for power, but reveals an aptitude for aesthetics. And Kerr possesses a keen eye and sensitivity for the artists and works of art he chooses to display in his space.

“It is such an intuitive process,” he says. “It takes a long time. The most important thing is the human relationship. You have to really want to live with their ideas. And vice versa. It’s a thick question. What I really like about our gallery is that everybody knows each other, more or less. There’s a certain chemistry in the group. It’s not just about the gallery’s relationship to each individual artist. We’re trying to make something where relationships emerge between the artists. I don’t think a lot of galleries work that way.”

While many of Kerr’s artists work within diverse media — sculpture, photography, ready-mades, drawing, and painting — there is a thread of contemporary relevance that sets his sights apart. Kerr seems to be acutely attuned to something in the zeitgeist of this precise place and time. A selection of Joyce Joumaa’s thermostat light boxes, for example, was acquired following her solo show last summer by the Musée d’art contemporain. Kerr’s is an artists’ art space that appeals not only to art lovers and collectors but also to art historians, musicians, writers, adjacent cultural workers, and most notably, his fellow curators.

“It’s been a nice surprise that the group of existing galleries has been very supportive of us,” says Kerr. “They frequent our gallery and come to our events. In most cases they are older than I am and have more experience. It is competitive — the perceived market is only so big. But at the end of the day, it’s good that we all support the same mandate of contemporary art. That does us all well.”

Kerr’s enthusiasm is infectious and evident in every subsequent show he produces. The next exhibition, he tells me, will showcase a series of artworks comprised of decomposing foodstuffs that the Torontonian artist Alan Belcher created. Still, Kerr’s affection for Montreal and the Plateau neighbourhood in particular is apparent in abundance.

“There’s a lot of energy here,” he observes. “It’s always been an exciting city that way. It’s interesting to think about the place of visual arts. But you have to follow the art.”◼︎

Since 1957, a solo exhibition by Alan Belcher opens 7 June and runs until 24 July 2025 at Galerie Eli Kerr, 4647 St. Laurent Boulevard.

Cover image: Eli Kerr photographed for NicheMTL.

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The Instrumentalization of Others

Eric Chenaux Trio with Markus Floats Ensemble, La Sala Rossa, 21 May 2025

Eric Chenaux performs at La Sala Rossa, 21 May 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Now is the time to be famous or fortunate.” —Mark Carney, Value(s)

“The system-preserving power is no longer oppressive but seductive.” —Byung-Chul Han, Why Revolution is Impossible Today.

Power under capitalism is identified as the fulfillment of desire, the abatement of want, wanting and subsequently having. Yet, unless fulfillment can somehow be observed, it is not genuine power.

Here, desire must be distinguished from need. We need food, water, air, clothing, shelter, rest. Beyond those needs are non-essential desires. We desire gourmet food, bottled water, designer garments, sprawling mansions, lavish vacations. (One key difference between those with power under capitalism and those without it is that they enjoy better versions of the things we need.)

Still, power is displayed ostentatiously through the satiation of more and more frivolous wants, the invention of novel dreams conceived solely for the purpose of realizing them. Nowhere is this more evident than 21st century libidinal desire. There are many more than 50 shades of gray today.

Doubtless, we all crave physical intimacy. But sexual desires have multiplied and proliferated, bloomed and blossomed into evermore niche categories and satisfying them has become a symbol of the utmost form of power. More often than not, sex these days is transactional.

Take for instance the Canadian case of the woman known as E.M. and the five former World Junior hockey players she has accused of assault.

A six-way erotic encounter is beyond what might be considered a reasonable intimate requirement. However, fulfilling that desire is a symbol of extreme power than only professional athletes or rap music moguls — or current U.S. presidents, probably — can accomplish. And capitalizing upon that desire is a uniquely post-modern specimen of seduction.

A perverse merger of humiliation and pride emerges when the satisfaction of aberrant desire is publicised — in the news, say, or in court. And the surplus byproduct of this publicity is pure power for everyone involved, the acute focus of extrovert energy. The more witnesses to libidinal depravity, the better.

If a tree falls in the forest and there is no evidence of a group chat at trial, did it really fall?

La Bohème, Opera de Montreal, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 13 May 2025

The cast of La Bohème take a bow at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 12 May 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“That which Wisdom made into a crown for its head, these evil men made into sandals for their soles!” —Israel ben Benjamin of Bełżyce

In the first month of 1941, just on the cusp of America entering in earnest into World War II, then-U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a State of the Union address to Americans that the rest of the world has come to call “The Four Freedoms Speech.”

In it, Roosevelt outlined the cornerstones of modern liberal democracy as the freedom of expression, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear. The artist and Saturday Evening Post illustrator Norman Rockwell depicted these freedoms in a series of famous paintings that adorned four consecutive covers of the publication in early 1943.

Each iteration is striking in its symbolism and characterization — and becomes naturally more so in light of the accumulation of the historical weight of subsequent global events.

I find the final image, Freedom from Fear, particularly fascinating. Rockwell depicts a nuclear family scene at bedtime, a typical Anglo-Saxon mother and father tucking in what appear to be sleeping twin boys. (The twins to me have come to represent the World Trade Center and the destruction of the doubling of the sign, although this is certainly an irrational and impossible interpretation.)

On the floor of the twins’ bedroom are two ragdolls (not 30, as there might have been had the painting been created in 2025). And in the hand of the patriarch — who remarkably resembles Sterling Hayden, who made his film debut that year opposite Fred MacMurray in a picture called Virginia, the name originally given in the late 16th century to the entire colonial coastal region, from Maine to Bermuda — is a folded-up newspaper.

The visible portion of its half-obscured headline reveals the words “Bombings” and “Horror.” The peaceful scene that Rockwell conjures is ostensibly in ironic contrast to the new war raging in Europe at that time and furthermore echoes the attack on Pearl Harbour which would draw America into global conflict for a second time during the 20th century’s first half.

There is undeniably a melancholic character to the image, what we might call “a vibe” that resonates deeply within the North American consciousness.

Schubert’s Famous “Trout” Quintet, Musicians of the OSM, Bourgie Hall, 9 May 2025

Musicians of the OSM receive a standing ovation at Bourgie Hall, 9 May 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I should have been as though I had not been; I should have been carried from the womb to the grave. —Job 10:19

The common refrain of the past century has declared that there has never been a modern war on our soil. Of course, this ignores the genocidal annihilation of Indigenous populations as well as the Revolutionary and Civil Wars that soaked the land in blood during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Nennen with Everly Lux and Boar God, La Toscadura, 16 May 2025

Boar God perform at La Toscadura, 16 May 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.” —James Bovard, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty

We generally conceive of capitalism as the economic system proper to democracy. And from democracy we extrapolate a transcendentalist conclusion of moral goodness, as if the majority always demonstrates that which is wise, right, and true.

But both capitalism and democracy are pervious to subversion which manifests in profound contemporary Western melancholia.

This sorrow is treated with the consumption of consumer goods and the collection of distracting experiences, tempered by a false sense of relief for the privilege of living in a precarious absence of violence.

All the while in the 21st century, fear constantly stalks freedom.

Nicolas Baier, Mise au foyer, Blouin | Division, 10 May – 21 June 2025

Nicolas Baier, Moderne, 2025, Inkjet print on aluminum, 106 x 142 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

That’s the way the pan flashes
That’s the way the market crashes
That’s the way the whip lashes
That’s the way the teeth gnashes
—William S. Burroughs & Tom Waits, “That’s The Way.”

The most dependable way to induce a Dark Age is to manufacture amnesia. Broadly speaking, there are two methods of accomplishing this.

The first is the brute method. Destroy archives. Eviscerate institutions of higher learning. Cut lines of communication and links to history.

The second method is more subtle and insidious. It involves the constant eradication and reproduction of states of normalcy, ideally to such an extent that the only constant is instability. No one remembers yesterday because they are too worried about what might happen tomorrow.

Two recent books — Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs and Henry A. Giroux’s The Violence of Organized Forgetting — forewarn of these strategies.

I know I have previously read them both but scarcely remember what they describe.◼︎

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Cover image: Gallery view of Nicolas Baier, Mise au foyer, Blouin | Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Une année sans lumière: notes on a new dark age at Quebec universities

Many inside and out of academia were deeply troubled recently when Donald Trump’s White House decided to withhold U.S. $400 million in grants and contracts at Columbia University over what the administration described as the school’s “failure to address on-campus antisemitism.”

The U.S. President in April also terminated $2.2 billion in funding for Harvard and announced in May that an additional $450 million would be frozen because, according to a joint statement from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the General Services Administration, the university had become “a breeding ground for virtue signalling and discrimination.”

An overwhelming majority of international scholars have voiced their concerns that targeting these institutions’ budgets (which fund broad and unrelated research activities like cancer treatments and viral outbreak prevention) as a reaction to ideological disagreements between Trump and university administrators, amounts to an unprecedented act of political coercion, and may be unconstitutional.

Both Harvard and Columbia have filed lawsuits in Federal Court against Trump’s moves. Doubtless it will only hurt the White House that their lawyers were educated at Harvard and Columbia.

Trump’s cuts have manifested immediately in staff reductions. Columbia is set to eliminate 180 jobs, while Harvard President Alan Garber took a voluntary 25 percent pay cut. However, neither of these measures will be enough to offset the cumulative multibillion-dollar shortfalls these universities face.

Academics have roundly denounced the Trump administration’s decisions by various means, writing damning op-eds in sympathetic publications, or, more dramatically, leaving the U.S. altogether.

Jason Stanley, who authored a book entitled Erasing History, how fascists rewrite the past to control the future and until March was Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale, has since relocated to Toronto as an academic refugee. Stanley, who is Jewish, claims that the United States is “tilting toward authoritarian dictatorship.” As one of the west’s leading authorities on political philosophy, he should know.

To Canadians, it appears appalling that American centres for higher learning might be punished, or purged, because of their political leanings. But it is obviously happening domestically, too. And it is happening specifically in Quebec for even less rational reasons. It is not political ideology that is being penalized here, but rather native language and regional origin.

Last year, the media widely reported staggering tuition increases implemented by the CAQ government to be levied against international and out-of-province students starting in the 2024-’25 academic year. Ostensibly, the plan was to correct a supposed imbalance in funding between the province’s French and English universities. The increased tuition would serve a two-fold purpose: the surplus revenue from foreign Anglophone students would be transferred to Francophone universities to fund French-language education for Francophone Quebecers, thus resisting the supposed decline of French in Quebec, as well as limiting the share of public capital escaping the province from foreign students who often leave after graduation.

Resulting from Quebec’s policy shift, enrollment is down across the board — applications from international students to all universities have declined by an average of 43 percent — and McGill this week announced the elimination of 60 staff positions. Ironically, it is Francophone universities that have experienced the steepest drop-offs, with UQTR at around 60 percent. Who knew, few from the international Francophonie want to move to Trois-Rivières.

This is why the CAQ’s policies are so ill-conceived — because in attempting to injure English-speaking students and immigrants, Quebec is hurting everyone, native Francophone Quebecers included. If fewer international students are paying the hiked tuition prices at McGill and Concordia, then UdeM and UQÀM are receiving less than hoped for in financial transfers from these schools.

Not to mention the secondary and tertiary damage. If Quebec universities are facing a projected $200 million deficit this year, guesstimate all the additional currency these foreign students will not be spending in the province — on food, rent, bills, clothes, Opus cards, nightlife, and all the other things students typically spend their money on. Imagine the losses for the SAQ and the SQDC alone.

It should go without saying that French-speakers are also landlords, grocery clerks, employees of Hydro Quebec and Videotron, Uniqlo and H&M, food servers, bartenders, delivery, bus, and Uber drivers. Students, whatever their language and nationality, animate an immeasurable proportion of Quebec’s economy. Kneecapping them hurts Quebec first — and most.

Then, there is the damage to Quebec’s reputation as a destination for advanced education. Clearly, foreign students this year have already reconsidered coming to this province to attend university. Even if the CAQ quickly reverses its policies and resets tuition fees to precedent rates, international students have already been given the impression that they are less welcome here than in other Canadian provinces.

Quebec risks further exacerbating its stereotypical “Brain Drain,” a phenomenon observed for at least the last quarter century as talented graduates evacuate elsewhere. No doubt, fewer academic rock stars will choose to work in Quebec in the future because they will have the privilege of teaching fewer high-quality students. Perhaps this is why Jason Stanley chose UofT over McGill.

Students move to Quebec to train as doctors, professors, legislators. They start businesses, become community leaders, and thicken the soup of Quebecois society. They make celebrated movies, write insightful novels, and establish important literary journals. They launch legendary record labels, found defining festivals, establish iconic recording studios, and form bands of distinction that go on to produce albums that define entire generations. Some of them start magazines to write about it all. Especially students deepen the profundity of the culture of a place.

The CAQ’s strategy is a ridiculous equation that anyone with intelligence can see is straight-up bad math. It is anti-immigrant and xenophobic at best, and intolerant and flat-out racist at worst. And its impact in practice is so arbitrary that it actually makes American policy look nuanced for at least naming a target. Trump despises the woke. Whereas Legault abhors everyone who isn’t a mirror image of him.

Education is not an affront to politics, nationality, or language. Rather, it enriches them all.◼︎

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100% In It: in conversation with Radwan Ghazi Moumneh

The power is out at Thee Mighty Hotel2Tango.

The legendary Montreal recording studio on Van Horne Avenue that has produced some of this city’s most iconic recordings over the past two decades, by the likes of Arcade Fire, The Dears, The Barr Brothers, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, among many others, a building that is normally positively buzzing, both literally and figuratively, stands eerily quiet on a recent Wednesday.

In a whirlwind of apologies for the lack of electricity, its co-founder, the composer and recording engineer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh arrives right on time, to the minute. Hydro Quebec had months ago scheduled an outage to accommodate routine maintenance work, Moumneh tells me. But he had forgotten, and on this afternoon, we would have to proceed under natural light. In the studio’s main room, fortunately, the sun streams in as if from some divine source.

Moumneh wears dark glasses, his head covered by a bright pink hoodie and a pair of signature leather loafers over bare feet. He speaks rapidly and affably and philosophically and curiously self-deprecatingly, entirely void of any sense of rock star ego, even if it might be warranted by the sheer volume of celebrated albums in which he has participated. Recordings by Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Jessica Moss, and Land of Kush, just to name a few.

“The other day,” he confides, laughing, “we were at the PA, and my son turns to me and asks, ‘Dad, are you famous?’ And the clerk looks at me like maybe I am. And I’m just standing there like someone who’s trying not to be recognized, with a potato and an onion in my basket. And I say, ‘no — and we’re not getting any chocolate or chips, either. We’re getting an onion and a potato for dinner.’”

Moumneh and his business partners Efrim Menuck, Howard Bilerman, and Thierry Amar purchased the unassuming white complex that houses Hotel2Tango nearly 20 years ago. Constellation Records has its offices upstairs, and Grey Market Mastering rounds out the edifice as a one-stop record workshop. This is our Abbey Road, our Brill Building, our Sound City all rolled into one — in a city with its own undoubtedly signature sound.

“When people make their records here, it’s such a precious thing,” Moumneh muses. “So, I make sure my heart’s 100% in it. Each one is such a unique experience and a very important piece of the puzzle. And each one has really annoying things that make me get fucking upset at the artist because I’m like, ‘God fucking damn it, this sucks. This is a silly way to work. This is a silly thing that you’re doing.’ But I’m also very conscious that that is a very important part of making something. Nothing can be wholly perfect. The perfection is the bad and the good.”

Moumneh, 49, is an Orson Welles-level Renaissance man who has worked as a musician with Jerusalem in My Heart, in partnership with Edmontonian expat Erin Weisgerber, a producer, a filmmaker, a composer for cinema, dance, and theatre, an actor, and a sound designer for public art installations. He was responsible for the audio of 21 Balançoires, the musical swings created in 2011 in the Quartier des spectacles and exported to various cities around the world as a work of living urban sculpture.

The swings, a collaboration with the design team Daily Tous Les Jours, rewarded users’ cooperation with more complex melodies as they swung in unison. 21 Balançoires won numerous international awards and caught the attention of the talk show host and global tastemaker Oprah Winfrey. “I do so many different things,” Moumneh says, “but I still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing half the time. I’m still such a student of everything.”

I caught Moumneh last year at Hotel2Tango performing an improvised electronics set with the Parisian musician Frédéric D. Oberland, with whom he has just completed recording a long player to be released in 2026.

“What we do is dangerous and fun,” Moumneh explains. “Just experimentation in the truest sense. Knowing that this could be not amazing and that’s okay. That’s the spirit. Let’s do something singular and unique and we’re never going to do it again.”

Moumneh also freshly wrapped sessions with the Lebanese post-rock band SANAM, with which he will perform a handful of live dates at Suoni per il Popolo, the 25th iteration of the storied Montreal music festival, in June 2025.

“I’m going to do a duo with the synth player of SANAM,” Moumneh tells me. “And Jessica Moss will do a trio with the bassist and the drummer, who is a phenomenal musician. I’m really lucky to have these people as dear friends.”

Born in Lebanon and raised in Oman, Moumneh’s family fled to Canada in the mid-1990s while he was still in his mid-teens, as part of a government initiative to resettle at-risk migrants. “My parents had no idea where Canada was,” Moumneh divulges. “But it was this or go back to Lebanon. They were just trying to offer these crazy deals to people with young children and nowhere to go.”

Moumneh remained in Montreal while his family returned to Lebanon fewer than five years later. “My parents spoke no English and no French. They hated it here,” he says, elongating the operative word. “I was like, ‘I really need to have my own thing, away from you guys.’”

Soon, Moumneh found his footing attending engineering school and teaching himself to play a variety of musical instruments. “I just started playing music because I met a couple of weirdos in class and they were like, ‘hey, do you want to try and learn how to play music?’” He relocated momentarily to Lebanon but moved back to Montreal in the early 2000s and was among the cohort that founded Hotel2Tango. “I was working on stuff before that, too,” he says, “but this is where things really got serious.”

Moumneh travels to Beirut twice a year, he tells me, to visit family and close friends, recounting how the city was bombed twice on his last sojourn. “It was typical, stupid shit,” he deadpans. “3:30 in the morning jumping out of bed because the whole fucking neighbourhood is bombed and you’re like, ‘fuck you guys.’”

It is striking how nonchalantly he speaks of the routine violence that Lebanon has endured historically, escalating again with the most recent war in neighbouring Israel. “It’s not as dramatic as it sounds,” Moumneh says. “It is dramatic, but people deal with it on a whole different level. Our idea of danger is a different thing. People like my parents can’t leave, but people who are young can’t live there. All the youth leave because it’s so dead-end.”

“I absolutely worship challenges. I live for them.” Radwan Ghazi Moumneh photographed for NicheMTL.

We talk at length about the disparities between the West and Middle East. “Two people can go to the same area and have completely different experiences of what they understand Lebanon is,” he describes. “It’s very un-understandable. That’s our sectarian system. If you want to see the extremes of all aspects of life, you go to Lebanon. It’s just extremes in every direction. It’s a really spectacular place. There is obnoxious wealth, of course. Beyond obnoxious wealth. And beyond insane poverty. And beyond insane beauty. And beyond insane ugliness. There is more beauty than there is ugliness. And even in the ugliness there is beauty.”

I ask him to contrast Montreal and its unique brand of ugly beauty.

“If someone was to come from abroad and only visit Montreal and that to them is what represents Canada, how distorted of a fucking idea would they have of what Canada is? This is a crazy place. It’s so absurd that this whole place,” he says, spanning out his arms, “is an arbitrary country. You can fit three Montreals into Lebanon. It’s so tiny. It’s like from here to Ottawa. And yet we have a million different populations that are so drastically different. There are so many dialects, so many accents, culinary differences, cultural differences, within one tiny little blob. Imagine. It’s all beautiful. But it’s sad, also, the destructive side of it.”

Finding beauty in despair, or creating it when none seems readily available, is the responsibility of the socially conscious artist, someone like Moumneh with that superpower that produces spontaneous voltage, especially when the electricity is out, either metaphorically or actually.

“I love throwing myself into hoops of fire,” admits Moumneh, speaking now more broadly about his general approach to life. “I love it. I love the challenge. I absolutely worship challenges. I live for them. I think it’s what keeps you mentally a child. It feels like you have so much to learn.”◼︎

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh performs as part of Suoni per il popolo with SANAM 21 June 2025 at La Sala Rossa, 4848 Boulevard St. Laurent.

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The Last Detail: notes on nano-factions in culture, music, and Montreal

“Markets, machines, and monsters might inspire us. Rulers of any kind? Not so much.”
—Nick Land, “Flavors of Reaction.”

A paradoxically growing micro-trend has emerged in Montreal and worldwide, gaining momentum in post-pandemic cultural production: the tendency toward the micro.

Focus on smallness or outsize scale, hybridity, and detail has lately characterized an increasingly large body of work, and it is interesting and important to note for a number of reasons.

Generally, inclinations in various creative pursuits tend to reflect broader sociocultural shifts. In America, for instance, jazz emerged at a time when urbanism began to dominate the modern experience. Psychedelic rock was born out of the student protest movement and burgeoning drug culture fermenting in a chaotic anti-war context.

In Europe, Dadaism arose against the violently irrational backdrop of World War I. And Futurism foreshadowed fascist technocracy.

Today in the west, wars neither hot nor cold simmer and threaten the tenuous global neoliberal order. The traumatic event is always mere moments away from puncturing the smooth veneer of the social interface. Meanwhile surveillance society overwatches it all.

There is little by way of a shared, common understanding that we can identify between cultures and nations, save for precarity itself. As such, monoculture has become and apparently will remain polymorphous.

Gallery view, Myriam Dion, Frieze (detail), 2024, Drawing with wooden pencils on Japanese paper, 936 cm x 156 cm. Video by NicheMTL.

Extreme economic uncertainty, the constant threat of the State alternately deploying physical force internally, or preventing it externally, and the cracked foundation of the Real itself owing to deepfakes, artificial intelligence, and the virtual digital veil — all of these conditions simultaneously lurk beneath niche nano-factions in culture, music, and art. Dissensus, not consensus, unites us, a contradiction of the hyphenated micro-moment.

The 45th Canadian election may be predictive for the divisive and fragmented structure of antagonism to come, and the fractious zeitgeist that has been brewing in liberal democracies since the pell-mell pandemic protocols beset each individual against each other. Faced with uncertainty, voters across the country turned away from marginal third parties and towards the poles.

Still, sectarian regionalism complicates a strictly polar explanation, as the western provinces leaned right, the east leaned left, urban centers voted liberal, rural districts and the suburbs chose conservatives, and Quebec, perhaps predictably, voted for itself.

The result is the proliferation of separatist sentiment beyond its most anticipated territories, ostensibly pitting province against province, city against town, and French against English, in a time when national unity in the face of Trumpist (or worse, Putinist) neocolonialism is imperative. The divided are most easily conquered.

So, whither art?

The pointillistic precision of visual artists like Nico Williams, who meticulously beads together unlikely quotidian objects, and Myriam Dion, whose painstakingly exhaustive tapestries defy reasonable size and scale, require deepening distance from their subjects to recognize.

The detail of David Bellemare’s “Dark Painting for Dark Times” series, exhibited in a new group show at Galerie C in the Belgo Building, is reminiscent of Magic Eye images for which viewers are required to relax their eyes to discern objects. Only through parallax view does form emerge.

Nico Williams, NDN Hustle (2024-?) 11/0 Japanese Glass Cylinder Beads, thermally-fused/braided polyethylene thread. Wood. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Further down the deconstructed-music rabbit hole that defined the last decade, Tim Hecker’s microtonal glissando in recent works like “Heaven Will Come,” the galloping-horses of Big|Brave’s “innominate no. vii,” and NO HAY BANDA’s staccato exponential rhythms that animate “Life on an Incline or Clean Geometry,” all point to swelling multiplicity and the instability of an assortment of conventional systems. The only thing that is assured in these forward-facing artists’ compositions is that the future is uncertain.

The prevalence of the “post-” prefix affixed to assorted musical genres, like post-club and post-rock — and especially post-classical, a spiralling vector of competing temporalities — indicates a sense of accelerative chronological energy at work. But the inability or unwillingness to construct or constitute harmony and rhythm in any traditional sense is a stronger signal of our collective struggle to “get it together,” so to speak, and as such, leaves us where we were. All the while, time, power, and capital march on.

The modern is increasingly difficult to capture as moments themselves subdivide. This problem, though, possesses as much peril as promise. For The Invisible Committee, the anonymous French intellectual collective which in 2017 published their third manifesto entitled Now, “opening ourselves to the world is opening ourselves to its presence here and now. Each fragment,” they claim, “carries its own possibility of perfection.” In the particular the universal, kind of thing. Perhaps there is optimism in trusting that now is all there ever was, and all there ever will be.

And yet, the devil is in the details.

Democracy means that each citizen is an equal part of a larger portrait of a republic. But there is nothing more dangerous than an ill-informed citizenry, or one that has become unmoored from a moral responsibility to history. Crises are manufactured specifically to generate the impression of the big picture’s unmanageability. In normal times, the political left might have relied on solidarity to intervene in blatant hypocrisy. But what happens when there is no normal, or more accurately, when everyone experiences their own bespoke version of it, when artists make and remake it anew?

Montreal might be the Canadian city best oriented to weather this new and permanent state of flux, because it was never-not myriad things existing across simultaneous nows. The concept of purity is as obsolete as a return to greatness. It presupposes a totality that never really existed.

“Multi-” is Montreal’s proper operative prefix and as such, we are uniquely positioned to come together over a lack of social cohesion. If nobody has a shared experience, then everyone does, and its vacuum unites us and poises us to lead in a leaderless world.

Montreal culture is really post-culture, a network of self-organizational relations that have the potential to transcend the monstrous descent into evermore disintegrated factions.

The question is, do we believe it? If artists are at the vanguard of cultural progress, it is clear that Montreal reserves a regiment on detail.◼︎

Cover image: Gallery view, David Bellemare’s “Dark Painting for Dark Times”, Galerie C. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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The Dark Canuck

Nico Williams, Bingo, Fondation PHI, 23 April — 14 September 2025

Nico Williams at the Bingo vernissage, Fondation PHI, 23 April 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Americans say no to drugs. Canadians say no thank you.”
—Susan Musgrave, You’re in Canada Now, Motherfucker.

I flew in July 2006 from Montreal to Victoria and drove from there in a rented Toyota about 25 kilometers south to a small municipality called Metchosin. The purpose of this trip was to interview one of the most famous incarcerated Canadians, the bank robber-turned-author Stephen Reid.

Reid at the time was a ward of the William Head Institution, known colloquially as Club Fed, a minimum-security correctional facility constructed at the lonely end of Vancouver Island’s southernmost tip.

Originally built as a 19th century immigration quarantine station, William Head might have been among the most picturesque sites for a prison, a remote and rugged stretch of oceanfront property perfumed with Douglas Fir and the saline breeze.

Reid was imprisoned, this time around, for the brazen robbery of a Victoria bank in 1999. But he had already earned a storied reputation as a member of The Stopwatch Gang, a crew of Canadian career criminals who had in the 1970s and ‘80s successfully pulled heists throughout the United States, making off with millions.

The gang earned their nickname in the newspapers because they carried stopwatches instead of guns, completing their jobs in under 90 seconds and escaping gracefully before law enforcement could respond to the 211.

What could be more Canadian than non-violent larceny? Reid told me they never failed to say ‘thank you’ to the guards as they strode out the door carrying Yankee Doodle’s hard-earned dough.

Catch Step HYA remix featuring Lunice (with EENO T and Magnanimous), La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines, 22 April 2025

EENO T and Magnanimous. Clémence Clara Faure for La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines

“By walking I found out
Where I was going.”
—Irving Layton, “There Were No Signs.”

Over the past several months, and intensifying during the Federal Election campaign, Canadians of all political stripes have been engaged in some deep soul-searching to define specifically what characterizes Canada as a sovereign nation.

“Not American” is of course the most obvious answer. But we can’t simply identify ourselves by what we are not. We must, rather, assert Canadian-ness as a series of distinct and affirmative characteristics.

It may be a surprise to learn that the Scottish have a version of poutine appropriately called “chips and cheese and gravy.” The British are also known for being polite. So, what makes Canadian poutine — or politeness — any different?

African-American Sound Recordings with SlowPitchSound and Dumb Chamber, Société des arts technologiques, 27 April 2025

Dumb Chamber performs at the SAT, 25 April 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A Canadian is someone who drinks Brazilian coffee from an English teacup, and munches a French pastry while sitting on his Danish furniture, having just come from an Italian movie in his German car. He picks up his Japanese pen and writes to his Member of Parliament to complain about the American takeover of the Canadian publishing business.”
—Campbell Hughes, 1973.

Canadians pride ourselves on our inclusivity and the doctrine of multiculturalism enshrined in social policy since the first Trudeau’s term in office. We congratulate ourselves with the fact that slavery was never legally practiced in Canada, that ours was and continues to be a safe-haven nation for people escaping bondage and other forms of systemic oppression.

As opposed to the American melting pot, Canada is a mosaic, a puzzle that doesn’t just scramble disparate identities into one uniform nationality but instead incorporates each of them into a rich and panoramic tapestry.

Still, just because Canada never practiced slavery doesn’t mean that racism and discrimination didn’t exist here. They did — and continue today as we strive to shake the legacy of colonialism and reconcile historical injustices perpetrated on Indigenous land.

And yet, the present condition requires evermore nuance because Canada is not only composed of colonizers and the colonized.

My ancestors, for instance, were displaced in the late 1920s when Russia was actively colonizing the Indigenous people of Ukraine. First-person accounts by the first wave of Ukrainian immigrants, collected in a book called Land of Pain, Land of Promise, are filled with stories of gratitude for Indigenous peoples’ assistance adjusting to life in Canada.

An underlying monstrosity remains, however. The American writer William S. Burroughs described this irrepressible abomination as “The Ugly Spirit.” Righteous retribution for genocidal expansion from coast to coast to coast.

The Ugly Spirit is a stateless entity, unrestrained by borders, floating northward like a ghost or a virus, the immigrant to end all immigrants. Thinly veiled beneath the respectable surface of unblemished bureaucracy, white linens and starched shirts and sunny ways, peace, order, and good governance, savagery lurks.

Oscillating Spaces launch with curator Anneke Abhelakh, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 24 April 2025

Gallery view of Oscillating Spaces, CCA. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Canadian history could be a drug-free alternative to anaesthesia.”
—Mike Myers, Canada.

One of the most frequent adjectives used to describe Canadians internationally is “nice.” Nice isn’t boring, although we are known as that, too. Nice isn’t kind, although kindness could be considered a constituent component of being nice.

What nice really means in practice is milquetoast. When threatened, we tend to back down. When attacked, we prefer to concede defeat than to offend our aggressors with a fight.

There’s nice and there’s naïve. The most extreme example of the perversion of niceness is the departed Canadian author Alice Munro’s apologetic acceptance of her daughter’s sexual abuse. Munro would rather have overlooked horrible transgressions against her kith and kin than to upset the larger family order in protest. In her own mind, was she just being nice?

Tolerance is one of Canada’s most admirable virtues. But when we tolerate violence against us, we should discard our national reputation for being nice and adopt a tough and just disposition. In significant ways, the Orange Cheeto’s 51st state rhetoric is forcing Canada to grow a backbone, to stand our ground, even if it means abandoning some of our soft-touch image.

Così fan tutte, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 23 April 2025

The cast of Così fan tutte performing with the OSM, Maison Symphonique, 23 April 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

“‘Cause in the forget-yer-skates dream
You can hang your head in woe
And this diverse-as-ever scene
Know which way to go.”
—Gord Downie, “It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken.”

It is appropriate that the “Elbow’s Up” rallying cry galvanizing Canadians originates from hockey, Canada’s undisputed national pastime.

There was no question which country I was in when, during the intermission at an opera, the woman seated next to me leaned over and asked if I knew the score in the Habs game. On the ice, playing arguably the most brutal organized sport, is where Canadians exchange our mannerly habits for altogether snottier, bloodier, and more dangerous conduct.

Unlike baseball, which participants can play overweight and drunk, hockey demands strength, skill, speed, guts, grit. Like revenge, hockey is best served cold. The rink is the site of inspiring Canadian victories over both doppelgänger superpowers Russia and the United States.

Interviewing Stephen Reid in jail in 2006 was like playing in the Stanley Cup final for a writer and lover of good stories. Reid was simultaneously terrifying and charismatic, cunning and cultured, a formidable conversationalist and true Canadian captain on our proverbial national team.

Goal-scoring could be considered analogous to bank-robbing in the sense of slipping one past the authorities, armed with little more than will and determination, and grace, too.◼︎

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: Nico Williams, Uncle, 2023, 10/0 Japanese glass cylinder beads and 11/0 seed beads on thermally-fused/braided polyethylene thread, mother-of-pearl buttons, 124,5 x 73.7 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All The Rage

Joni Void & Quinton Barnes, La Lumière Collective, 21 April 2025

Quinton Barnes performs 20 April 2025 at La Lumière Collective. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Your time has come your second skin
The cost so high the gain so low
Walk through the valley
The written word is a lie.”
—Public Image Ltd., “Rise.”

The customary media scrum following the Canadian pre-election English-language leaders’ debate was abruptly cancelled on Wednesday 16 April because the Debates Commission could not “guarantee a proper environment for this activity,” it announced in a brief and vague statement.

The Commission’s executive director Michael Cormier didn’t elaborate on the reasons behind the decision. But most media observers pointed to the right-wing Rebel News group’s domination of the scrum the previous evening following the French-language debate at Maison Radio-Canada in Montreal. Rebel News was able to secure five questions while traditional outlets like La Presse and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation were each granted only one.

In a post-debate analysis with news anchors Adrienne Arsenault and Rosemarie Barton, David Cochrane, host of CBC’s Power and Politics, characterized the media group’s tactics as “rage-farming.”

Rebel News appears to be merging the strategies of American outlets like Fox and Breitbart with the MO of social media. Indeed, the “new” digital media have now capitalized for decades on inciting extreme moral outrage.

“The mission of Facebook is to connect people around the world,” stated former Facebook employee Frances Haugen in an interview with the CBS News programme 60 Minutes. “When you have a system that you know can be hacked with anger, it’s easier to provoke anger in people. Users say to themselves, ‘If I make more angry, polarizing, dividing content, I get more money.’ Facebook has created a system of incentives that divides people.”

Anger is an energy. But is it the right energy in a time when unity is more urgently necessary?

Pulse Mag Issue #1 Launch, Le Système, 17 April 2025

Ryan Diduck, left, and Pulse Mag editor-in-chief Jen Lynch at Le Système. Eva Rizk for NicheMTL.

It logically follows that if digital media arouse outrage, analogue media might offer an antidote. One reason for this may be the quantifiable time that users invest in media engagement.

The speed with which we access and discard online content encourages a general sense of agitation. When we slow down to read printed words, say, in a magazine, we cultivate a more deliberative mindset, one which stimulates empathy and understanding. These virtues are the building blocks of community.

Magazines inspire readers to read, share, and re-read. On the internet, never are any two given people literally “on the same page.”

Payare Conducts Mozart’s Moving Requiem, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 16 April 2025

Organist-in-residence Jean-Willy Kunz performs with the OSM, 16 April 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

“If America (like ‘Vietnam’) was primarily the name of a war, we would understand its historical function far better.”
—Nick Land, “2014,” Outsideness.

Obsession with war is implicitly obsession with death. Regardless of whether a war is military or economic, hot or cold, the only product that war consistently generates is casualty. More than the axiom that war has no winners, war also renders life itself, even for those only peripherally involved, null and void.

Blood, contrary to popular belief, is not a form of fertilizer.

Persons with Cabral Jacobs and Bob Tape, Atlas Building, 18 April 2025

Persons perform at the Atlas Building, 18 April 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A man complains of being hungry. All the time. Dogs, it seems, are never hungry. So the man decides to become a dog.”
—Brian Massumi, “normality is the degree zero of MONSTROSITY,” A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Modernity is inextricably linked to capitalism because no other form of socio-economic organization demands perpetual novelty.

Yet, newness has no truth value because of its inherent arbitrariness. How long does a cultural text hold its currency? How long is a McDonald’s hamburger allowed to sit on the counter before it gets tossed in the bin?

A society that prizes youth culture, in so doing, sacrifices what is true for what is new. The acceleration of so-called innovation in truth is simply the hastened refresh rate of desire. Novelty correlates with functional dissatisfaction. Capitalism thrives on habitual frustration.

Normalcy exists antagonistically against novelty because as soon as normalcy is achieved, it is no longer by definition new. Therefore, hyper-capitalism requires hyper-normalization.

Furthermore, modernity exists in opposition to pragmatism because it is pragmatic to repair and preserve and it is modern to discard and reinvent. Therefore, there is no true conservatism under capitalism. In its place, we are provoked with austerity.

Plural Contemporary Art Fair, Grand Quai, Port of Montreal, 11-13 April 2025

Gallery views at the Plural Art Fair, Grand Quai, Port of Montreal. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The greatest disorder that those who order an army for battle make is to give it only one front and obligate it to one thrust and one fortune.”
—Niccolò Machiavelli, Art of War.

Cities are modern sites for alternating periods of movement and stasis, speed, slowness, and rest. They are naturally contested and potentially violent terrains that frequently mimic fields of battle. Think of vying for space on the metro, or how quickly a queue tightens up when one of its members leaves.

The Romans routinely broke their armies up into three speed-dependent battalions. The first, the hastati, struck the quickest. If and when they failed, their ranks fell back into the second, the principes, which attacked more slowly. If and when they, too, were expended, they all absorbed into the triarii, who lumbered behind in the lengthiest regiments.

Their enemy would have to conquer three separate meta-armies operating in three unique temporal intervals in order to prevail. First there’s the tweet, then the retweet, then the legacy media story that rounds up the tweets.

Donald Trump’s shadow strategist Steve Bannon famously said in 2018 that political rivalry paled in importance to conflicts in information. Democrats were not the enemy, Bannon believed. The media were.

“Flood the zone with shit” was Bannon’s solution. In other words, advance as many competing viewpoints across as many media platforms as quickly and consistently as possible to destroy wholesale the concept of credibility itself.

A healthy republic depends not only on information but access and intelligence to discern its accuracy.

If democracy dies in darkness, fuck with the lights on.◼︎

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: Rafael Payare conducts the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, 16 April 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

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