Category Archives: Play Recent

NicheMTL’s signature column rounding up the city’s latest avant-garde.

Play Recent

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.

Standard
Play Recent

The Mass Ornament

David Altmejd, Elle, Bradley Ertaskiran, Until 4 July 2026

A metal duct mounted on a concrete block wall, casting a shadow on the surface below.
David Altmejd’s L’etoile casts a shadow on the wall in the bunker at Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“An object of art is an honest way of making a living, and this is much a different idea from the fancier notion that art is a scam and a ripoff. The bourgeoisie have, after all, made it a scam. But you could never explain to someone who uses God’s gift to enslave that you have used God’s gift to be free.”
—Rene Ricard, “The Radiant Child”

The dance between artist and observer is as transient as any dance craze that has come and gone before. It used to be fashionable for the critic to try and gain access to the artist and understand their motivations; at one time, critics fancied themselves psychoanalysts who interpreted the inner workings of artists through their art as if they were forensic crime scene investigators or handwriting experts. Artists, too, have perennially shaped their art for their critical audiences, attempting to anticipate their tastes and desires, to comment upon some underlying condition or natural disposition intrinsic in the contemporary public.

Today, when all art is accessible with a click or a tap or a swipe of the screen, and everyone can observe anything and become an instant expert upon it, what is the objective of the critic that the casual viewer cannot achieve?

It is no longer enough to comment upon structure and form and tradition and perceived inspiration, or to speculate on the artist’s inner impetus for making art. The transactional circumstances of this brand-new dance, too, are laid bare. Artists are no less workers than those who toil on assembly lines or suffer through service industry jobs. And critics have infiltrated the ranks of artists, compelled to draw upon some creative zeitgeist and produce novelty.

Artists and critics are each doing The Watusi on opposing sides of a two-way mirror in 1982, displaced in space and dislocated in time, alienated in virtual communities and disconnected by digital technologies that function to enrich their shareholders by exploiting and enslaving us both. Art, as any other productive pursuit in the hyper-capitalist age, pays in attention rather than capital, where wealth is measured in engagement and ignorance is bankruptcy.

All art and its observation, regardless of medium or language or form, teaches these dance moves today. The critic’s business is to reveal the artist’s obscure secrets while enshrouding the obvious ones in labyrinthine layers of mystery.

Wagner and Debussy: From Love to the Sea, Lawrence Power, viola and Elim Chan, conductor, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 14 May 2026

Conductor leading an orchestra, deeply focused, wearing a black outfit, with sheet music in the foreground.
Elim Chan conducts the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. Eduardus Lee for the OSM.

“Nothing is more compromising than a thought! But the state of mind which precedes thought, the labour of the thought still unborn, the promise of future thought, the world as it was before God created it — a recrudescence of chaos.… Chaos makes people wonder.…”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner”

To watch the mass behaviour of a crowd — at a Habs game or an F1 event or the vernissage for an art star’s latest exhibition — is one of the few activities left in which we are presented with the whole rather than its fragments, or wherein the fragments reveal the whole. It is like reading a book in one sitting or devouring a meal in a single mouthful. It is like looking at an ocean from space and recognizing that all the individual ripples and waves conceal one leviathan. Chaos is merely order uncharted.

LODE, La naissance de l’art, Galerie Eli Kerr, Until 27 June

A partially covered large object leaning against a wall, surrounded by wrapped items and a row of small red cups on a dark mat, with wooden crates nearby in an industrial space.
Installation view of LODE, La naissance de l’art, Galerie Eli Kerr. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Fate is expressionless, it is as cold and alien as the stars into whose galactic configurations men project the entanglements which they subconsciously create themselves.”
—Theodor Adorno, “Fantasia Sopra Carmen”

Adorno, writing on Georges Bizet’s Carmen, suggests that freedom is the antithesis of virtue. We can extrapolate from this suggestion that artistic freedom is the antithesis of artistic virtue, and that freedom for artists to paint what they will betrays a profound decline in character, a lack of faith in the trajectory of art history, or a breach in the hull of the vessel that has buoyed art since the first cave paintings appeared at Lascaux.

It is the artist’s job to be truthful in disclosing this decline. It is necessary for the artist to surrender their free will and their agency, itself such a trendy buzzword, and submit to the vibrancy of things. An honest artist will organize matter in some virtuous manner and factor out freedom from the equation. Casting images back into the world is a reiteration of the chaotic impulse that obliges the reactivation of imagination.

Moin with Sediment Club, Espace SAT, 21 May 2026

A live music performance under blue lighting with musicians playing instruments on stage.
Moin performs at Espace SAT. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I see the girls walk by
dressed in their summer clothes,
I have to turn my head
until my darkness goes.”
—The Rolling Stones, “Paint it Black”

The record label Blackest Ever Black, which released Moin’s first recordings, as well as those produced under their alter ego, Raime, was the sort of label that inspired obsession. Blackest Ever Black’s output varied widely in genre — from the sludgy punk of Raspberry Bulbs to the oddball lo-fi indie of Officer! to four-to-the-floor stompers by Regis and Tropic of Cancer’s angular new wave. And yet there was a unified aesthetic to everything they released into the world: dark, cool, metropolitan, modern.

Blackest Ever Black label boss Kiran Sande was concurrently a commissioning editor at Fact Magazine, one of the first publications to offer me an audience. Sande was my favourite editor to write for and an enigmatic and ephemeral presence thereafter. Music criticism at that time consisted of snarky love-hate relationships with of-the-moment artists rising and falling on the Boomkat splash page and generating passive-aggressive reviews on corporate websites. Sande was the last of a certain type of visionary, a genuine charlatan, aiming with 100% accuracy.

Insoon Ha, Artist-in-Residence lecture, Fonderie Darling, 21 May 2026

A woman standing in front of a group of people in a bright, industrial-style room, giving a presentation or lesson. Windows with natural light and a variety of plants and materials visible in the background.
Studio view of Insoon Ha in residence at Fonderie Darling. Ana Lucia Londono Flores for Fonderie Darling.

“You know Marx and Lenin were pretty lazy dudes when it came to working for somebody. They looked at toil, working for your necessities, as something of a curse.”
—Huey Newton, Speech Delivered at Boston College, 18 November 1970

The criteria for cultural importance are not popularity, marketability, or influence. Import is weighed in granular increments, accumulative intuition. Mass movement is science. Stirring a single soul is magic.

Art is not the Polio vaccine. It is a compulsion, the need to see, and to be seen, and to see what others see, and to grasp the invisible. Writing about art is even less consequential. Criticism doesn’t save lives. In many instances, it wastes them.

The invention of the wheel was art. Understanding the nature of wheels is essential. The dance steps may have changed, but dance is eternal.◼︎

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: Installation view of David Altmejd, Elle, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Standard
Play Recent

The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell

Meet the artist Maskull Lasserre, Arsenal Contemporary, 13 May 2026

A person wearing a gray sweater and dark pants is seen from behind, standing in an art gallery with modern artwork displayed on the walls.
Gallery view of the artist Maskull Lasserre at Arsenal Contemporary, Montreal, 13 May 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The forest reveals its truth for those who are travelling through it on foot.”
—Werner Herzog, “I Rant Against the Jungle”

Trees comprise forests. Though seldom do we see both at once.

Our human perception is such that it focusses upon orders of magnitude, from minute detail to grand scale. Take a walk through a forest and observe this spectrum of awareness in action. Thus, knowing God is impossible because we either apprehend His individual works or an abstract accumulation thereof.

A forest is comprised of trees just as the Kingdom of Heaven is made up of minor miracles.

Andy Stott with Corporation and William Hayes-Dulude, Espace SAT, 9 May 2026

A crowd of people in a dimly lit venue surrounded by purple haze, with soft light beams coming from above.
Andy Stott performs at Espace SAT. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Those who remain at the surface do so at their own peril
Those who dive beneath the surface glorify the grotesque.”
—Genesis P-Orridge & cEvin Key, “Beauty Is the Enemy”

American Transcendentalists considered truth, righness, and beauty to be self-evident. The philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce in the early 20th century conceived of these virtues as the “Ends” of phenomena, under the purview of normative science, the laws of which to Peirce were both universal and necessary.

The universality of truth, rightness, and beauty is indicative of Peirce’s pragmatic understanding of nature and the specificity of the American interpretation of Idealism. But the notion of their necessity addresses something more profound.

Logically speaking, order could not emerge from chaos without truth, rightness, or beauty. Nor could nature function in absence of these three Ends in divine equilibrium, a sort of contemporary, new-world holy trinity.

“I am going to make a series of assertions which will sound wild,” Peirce proclaimed in his fifth lecture on the subject at Harvard University in 1903, “although I cannot omit them if I am to set the supports of pragmatism in their true light.” For Peirce, truth, rightness, and beauty transcended human taste and were philosophically unquestionable. This left no room for argument from his audience, whom he proceeded to call “undeveloped” nominalists, a bold and patent dig at New England’s intellectual elite.

“Reality consists in regularity,” Peirce proclaimed. “Real regularity is active law.”

Céline in Dior: A Dazzling Moment, Musée McCord Stewart, Until 13 September 2026

Gallery view of Céline Dion’s Dior dress exhibited at Musée McCord Stewart. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Your beauty won’t be anything
When I take off my glasses.”
Leonard Cohen, Death of a Lady’s Man

Beauty activates action. It is impossible to remain passive in the presence of prettiness. And given that beauty is universal and necessary, it is one of the most important motivating forces of nature.

However, aesthetic beauty is not synonymous with truth — often, quite the opposite. We attain beauty through augmentation and perversion and concealment and outright denial of our true nature, polishing, as it were, the brass on the Titanic.

Therefore, deception pragmatically galvanizes nature just as effectively as veracity.

Turandot, Orchestre Philharmonique et Chœur des Mélomanes, Maison Symphonique, 10 May 2026

A dramatic scene featuring a man assisting a woman in a black gown who is holding a sword, conveying intense emotion during a performance on stage.
Andrew Haji (left) and Sydney Baedke perform Turandot at Maison Symphonique. Tam Lan Truong for the Orchestre Philharmonique et Chœur des Mélomanes.

“Beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theatre of their enslavement.”
Susan Sontag, On Women

More than in any other social station, American First Ladies may be the world’s most heavily objectified and endlessly scrutinized women.

Women’s Wear Daily, the tabloid journal that chronicled “microtrends” before they were called microtrends, obsessed over Jacqueline Kennedy’s every purchase: suede skirts, knee socks, Gucci shoes. John Fairchild, WWD’s publisher in the 1960s, called Kennedy “Her Elegance.” In contrast, he dubbed Kennedy’s successor, Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Her Efficiency.”

Women’s Wear Daily treads much more carefully today when writing about Mrs. Trump, restricting its coverage to strict facts without editorializing or judgement. Among the harshest criticism it has published since Trump’s first presidency is of Melania “not being ultrathin,” as well as revealing that Wildes & Weinberg, the immigration firm that represented John Lennon during his deportation hearings, helped secure her citizenship, which she received in 2006.

Eventually, WWD turned on the Kennedy clan, too, writing of the late President’s daughter in their signature all-caps headlines (a style that a certain similarly snarky head of state has adopted), “THERE IS NO QUESTION THAT CAROLINE DRESSES MUCH YOUNGER THAN HER AGE.”

Défilé 2026 de l’École supérieure de mode, Centre de design de l’UQAM, 12 May 2026

A model wearing a unique dress featuring a mix of black, white, and patterned fabrics, designed with a strapless bodice and a voluminous skirt. The model is seated on a stool, showcasing the intricate layers and details of the garment.
Lace of a Jester, Claire Miranda-Goldstein. Photographed for NicheMTL (with thanks to Rory Creelman.)

“The pretty things are going to hell
They wore it out, but they wore it well.”
—David Bowie, “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell”

If beauty is equivalent with rightness and truth, then there is no cause to damn the righteous and truly beautiful. Deceitful beauty, however, is narcissism — “vexation of spirit,” as it is written in Ecclesiastes 2.

The question of what to do with one’s days is at the root of the Western conception of damnation and salvation. Labour in wisdom, and not for pleasure, is considered goodness before God. Labour in sin condemns the sinner to gather up all she labours for and give it to her that is good.

Labour for true beauty, however, must be righteous. Beauty gladdens the heart and unencumbers the spirit. Labour for true beauty also obscures the nature of God and makes Him unknowable. To conceal God’s work is God’s work.

Ecclesiastes 3 is among the Bible’s most well-known chapters, made famous by Pete Seeger in his song, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” which The Byrds in 1965 turned into an international hit. Fashion is instructive here as it is literally seasonal. There is a time proper to scarves and boots, and another time for shirtsleeves and sandals. To make peace in a time of war, or to acquire in a time of loss, is to disobey the Ecclesiastical calendar, like wearing white after labour day.

“He hath made every thing beautiful in his time,” it is written in verse 11, and so ugliness is also a form of seasonal beauty. There is nothing which does not eventually have its moment and purpose. This philosophy is fundamentally pragmatic because it positions the use value of beauty above its aesthetic appeal.

Beautiful utility is good work. Alternately, futility is vanity.◼︎

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: Suffering Machines, Aude B. Verville. Photographed for NicheMTL (with thanks to Rory Creelman.)

Standard
Play Recent

The Structure of Spirit

Angine de Poitrine with René Lussier and Robbie Kuster, and S.R.U.F, Club Soda, 18 April 2026

Silhouette of hands forming a heart shape in front of a spotlight during a live performance.
Angine de Poitrine perform at Club Soda 18 April 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The meaning and potential achievement of a group composed of two people cannot simply be transferred to a group entity consisting of an undetermined multitude of people.”
— Siegfried Kracauer, “The Group as Bearer of Ideas”

In every age, certain ideas ebb and flow, rising and falling in patterns which we might describe as “spirit.”

Individuals originate ideas that other individuals take up and share. Together, these individuals form groups that realize ideas to a lesser or greater extent in the material and virtual world. Individual ideas alternate in impact based upon group behaviour.

The Germans, of course, have a more specific word for this phenomenon — “zeitgeist” — combining the words for time and temperament, refining the precise meaning as the spirit of the moment.

We tend to believe that any given idea’s popularity is a marker of its value. That is why we are concerned with bestsellers lists for books, and musical top ten charts, and box office figures for films. The greater number of individuals that adopt and echo an idea, the more we revere that idea and find it fascinating and might want to participate in it. This is how ideas gain momentum and become the spirit of an age, the zeitgeist of a culture.

Nonetheless, whether an idea is good or not is independent of its popularity. Some terrible ideas historically garnered immense traction, and other great ideas missed their original moment entirely. Vincent van Gogh was overlooked during his lifetime, only to be subsequently reconsidered a genius. Yet, enough Germans supported Adolph Hitler to make his ideas among the 20th century’s defining zeitgeists.

Popularity, then, is not the metric upon which history should or does evaluate ideas.

The Torlonia Collection: Masterpieces of Roman Sculpture, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Until 19 July 2026

A marble statue of a youthful male figure holding a lyre, standing on a pedestal, with a historical landscape backdrop featuring classical architecture and additional figures.
Statue of Apollo, 2nd c., Collezione Torlonia, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Politically, we are still stuck in the systems of thought of the Greek and Roman slave states, no matter how much we rant about ‘democracy.’”
—Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

There are two extremes that form the polarities of an idea’s popularity: everyone is doing it, and only one individual is doing it. Somewhere along this continuum is where most ideas are located.

The notion, however, that individuals are free to take up certain ideas or not is illusory. There comes a moment in the lifespan of any extremely popular idea in which ignoring it is no longer an option. Disregarding a big idea can have consequences that adversely affect individuals and ostracize them. There is a stigma against not going with the crowd. And nobody wants to be the only one to have missed out on a good idea.

Social status is often linked to an individual’s enactment of popular or unpopular ideas. But there is just as often an inverse correlation between status and popularity. Coca-Cola, which everyone consumes, commands a lower rank than niche, artisanal beverage brands. Until the artisanal brand gains popularity, it is associated with a sense of discernment and taste.

The margins of society are always the testing grounds for mass culture. It is popular to hold unpopular opinions. Which unpopular opinions become integral to the zeitgeist, and how, is an alternative definition of democracy.

Paola Pivi: Come check it out Lies lies lies, Centre PHI, Until 13 September 2026

A collage of various images displayed on a grid surface, featuring people, nature scenes, animals, and urban environments.
Gallery view of Paola Pivi: Come check it out Lies lies lies at Centre PHI. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Success is fatal.”
—David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd

Establishing an idea in absence of an alternative is the realist’s strategy to reinforce an idea’s popularity. Capitalism is the obvious example, the mode of economic organization proper to a monolithic spiritual culture.

However, capitalism exhibits another curious paradox: it functions on the everyone-is-doing-it extreme of the popularity spectrum, but it trades in the only-one-individual-can-do-it cachet that characterizes the egoist zeitgeist at the other end.

Capitalism masks its social construction beneath a veneer of atomized self-actualization. The second-order paradox that acts as capitalism’s failsafe is that the alternative to individual success must necessarily be collective failure.

Bizet’s Carmen, Opéra de Montréal, Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, 2-12 May 2026

A woman in a black shirt embraces a seated man in a suit, both engaged in an emotional moment during a rehearsal. The background features wooden crates and a simple stage setting.
Rihab Chaieb and Dante Mullin Santone perform at a dress rehearsal for Carmen at Place des arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Without delirium and confidence, capital could not function.”
—Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

Ideas can produce addiction as powerful as any drug. And like drugs, ideas can be synthesized and purified down to their most potent forms.

In fact, simplicity is the hallmark of many of the world’s most addictive ideas. High-concept narratives and three-chord pop songs tend to resonate most deeply in the subconscious, as infectious as nursery rhymes, encouraging repetition and positioning themselves perfectly for mass approval. As the center reinforces itself and self-organizes, the margins are cleaved away like corn husks, exposing the chaotic uniformity of the kernels.

Art Souterrain, Place Ville Marie, Until 10 May 2026

A man stands in a room filled with yellow decor, gesturing towards a table while another man in a virtual reality headset interacts with the environment.
Gilles Tarabiscuité demonstrates Réalité dés/augmentée 2.0 (2025) at Art Souterrain. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I could leave you, say goodbye
Or I could love you, if I tried
And I could
And left to my own devices, I probably would.”
—Pet Shop Boys, “Left to My Own Devices”

Virality in our era is synonymous with zeitgeist. Memes today, more than any other medium, capture the spirit of the moment.

In January 2026, a clip from Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World went improbably viral. The scene depicts what Herzog describes as a “deranged penguin” running away from the colony and apparently towards certain death. The clip became a meme and was shared on social media by the Trump administration in the context of the U.S. president’s threats to annex Greenland.

The impetus to defy acceptable behaviour exemplified by this meme is portrayed as simultaneously admirable and suicidal. And yet, the nature of mimesis is a kind of mob mentality, the fuel of smouldering populist movements that are perennially in danger of igniting into fascism.

What would happen if everyone went in their own direction, like so many deranged penguins, heading toward an uncertain future, but certain that the popularly prescribed future is untenable? Some adherence to the crowd ensures our collective survival. Too much can doom us en masse. But not enough could doom us individually.

Perhaps a clue emerges in the maturity of ideas. In addition to their popularity, we are inclined to give more symbolic weight to progressive ideas over traditional ones. Novelty and contemporaneity are prized as innocent and original and uncorrupted by time.

A “progressive” polity, writes Richard Sennet in The Culture of the New Capitalism, “is one in which all citizens believe they are bound together in a common project.” Sennet elaborates: “The new institutional order eschews responsibility, labelling its own indifference as freedom for individuals or groups on the periphery.”

The truth is, there are no peripheral groups or individuals. There are only black polka dots or white stripes.◼︎

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: Angine de Poitrine perform at Club Soda 18 April 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Standard
Play Recent

Desire

Lèche-vitrine, Art Dressé, Espace Transmission, 8-18 April 2026

Catherine Machado performs The Maintenance Worker at Espace Transmission, 8 April 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL

The fear of the wicked, it shall come upon him, but the desire of the righteous shall be granted.
—Proverbs 10:24

The British slang “window-licker” is a derogatory term for a person with diminished mental capacities. It is akin in meaning to the “R” word and considerably more offensive. It indicates the propensity of mentally handicapped people to do foolish things, like, for instance, lick windows.

Since the release of the 1999 Aphex Twin single “Windowlicker,” however, the expression has taken on another connotation: unconsummated desire. The song’s video, which has not aged well, especially presents overt themes of longing which suggest a covert toxicity that accompanies objects of desire. There is an implication as well that desire itself is mindless, that wanting is a form of weakness, ripe for control.

“Window licking” in the 21st century has come to signify still another type of desire — the desire for the representation of an object. “Windows,” after the Microsoft operating system, are what we commonly refer to in the act of looking-through onscreen. Window shopping and window dressing are no longer practices reserved for meatspace. And what appears within the digital window can be infinitely adjusted, altered, augmented, or may in reality not even exist.

The digital world, among other dubious consequences, has exponentially multiplied and convoluted “window licking,” not only in meaning. Nonetheless, the variation of sense in the circuits and wires and distributed networks of interconnected machines always has real-world consequences.

Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disrupter, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, Mount Royal Center, 10 April 2026

Panel discussion titled 'Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disrupter' at Centre Mont-Royal, featuring four speakers seated on stage with a large screen displaying event details.
From left: Cory Doctorow, Astra Taylor, Yoshua Bengio, and Nahlah Ayed. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I don’t need anything. I want.”
—Mr. C., Twin Peaks: The Return

At a recent conference on A.I., Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada Daniel Béland identified two categories of power: power over and power to.

Power over, Béland loosely defined in the negative as the power of one person or group or nation to subjugate and control another. Power to, he described in the positive as the power to assist or overcome or empower another subject.

Judging by the standing-room only crowd, the potentials and perils of A.I. are of immediate interest and acute concern to a broad swath of luminaries across the disciplinary spectrum. I was seated between a retired McGill Engineering professor and the head of a public relations team from a Montreal-based startup, and each of these individuals listened with discernable alarm, as if there were some secret code to be cracked in the participants’ responses.

Artificial Intelligence, like any technology, has the potential to demonstrate, and the capacity to exert, both types of power. In the hands of some users, A.I. could be a force for capital ‘C’ Control in the Burroughsian or Deleuzian sense — protocological, algorithmic, inhuman domination that subjugates us through a series of automated if-then propositions. In other hands, A.I. possesses the power to ease the burden of impossibly tedious or time-consuming labour, to liberate us from work that has always posed an obstacle to progress and growth.

The problem is that human beings designed and implemented A.I. in our own image, so to speak, and as such it aims to satiate our wants more than our needs. A.I. has its own essential desire. It desires to satisfy our desires — if you like this, then you’ll love that — and inoculate us in doing so against the virus of dissatisfaction.

The Intense Leningrad Symphony by Shostakovich, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 15 April 2026

A full orchestra performing on stage, featuring musicians playing violins, cellos, and other instruments, with sheet music on stands and a conductor directing the performance.
Rafael Payare conducts the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal at Maison Symphonique, 15 April 2026. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

Over the counter, with a shotgun,
Pretty soon, everybody’s got one.
—U2, “Desire”

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government made headlines this week by being the first in Canadian history to secure a majority outside of a general election. Through a series of floor-crossings and byelections, the Liberals now occupy 174 out of a possible 343 seats and can operate until October 2029 without facing the threat of a no confidence vote.

Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre described the Liberal mandate as undemocratic, accusing the party of coordinating “dirty backroom deals.” According to Poilievre, Carney orchestrated his majority by force, using vaguely anti-revolutionary coded rhetoric: “Mark Carney is saying to Canadians: ‘Your vote does not count,’” Poilievre declared on 9 April in Richmond, B.C.

The Liberals’ byelection sweep recalls the famous anecdote about the conversation between Lenin and Trotsky on the eve of the October Revolution in November 1917. According to legend, Lenin, in a fit of uncertainty, asked Trotsky, “What will happen to us if we fail?” To which Trotsky was said to reply, “What will happen to us if we succeed?”

“An act proper is not just a strategic intervention into a situation, bound by its conditions,” writes Slavoj Žižek in Living in the End Times, “it retroactively creates its conditions.” Carney is in the process of performing a similar soft socialist revolution in Canada and, given the populist surges underway in Alberta and Quebec, I for one reluctantly have to admit that I don’t hate it.

Quatuor Molinari : Musique à voir, Fondation Molinari, 29 March 2026

A string quartet performs in front of an audience in an art gallery, with red abstract paintings in the background.
Quatuor Molinari performs at Fondation Molinari, 29 March 2026. Tomas Dessureault for NicheMTL.

“The Buddhist will tell you: ‘All life is pain.’ Pain comes from always wanting things.”
—‘Sally’ Moltisanti, The Many Saints of Newark

We are under the impression, mistaken in my opinion, that if we were only to consume the correct media, desire the proper commodities, collect the right art, listen to the authority-approved music, watch the acceptable films, belong to the prestigious clubs, trust the most reliable experts, keep the most important company, and engage in the most sophisticated sexual escapades, our wanting would be absolved and our suffering effaced. Because if we only want the righteous things, we shall receive them.

Still, it’s not the things that we desire that make us righteous or not; it’s the wanting.

Plural : Foire d’art contemporain à Montréal, Grand Quai du Port de Montréal, 10-12 April 2026

A woman stands beside a large mural depicting a blue depanneur storefront covered in graffiti, with rain falling down.
Gallery view, Jasmin Bilodeau, Dépanneur 2025, photograph printed on polypropylene. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Happy are those who have what they need and no more.”
—Saul Ha-Levi Morteira

The old “wheelbarrow” joke, which I have told many times, hits different in the age of ICE and bears repeating.

A man crosses the border every day carrying a wheelbarrow full of sand. And every day, the crossing guard at his checkpoint dutifully sifts through every grain of that sand and finds nothing.

Day after day, month after month, year after year, the same man transports his wheelbarrow full of sand over the border, in the face of the same increasingly confounded crossing guard, sifting to no avail, evermore certain that he is being deceived by some ingenious smuggling scheme.

Finally, the crossing guard reaches his last day on the job and implores the man with the wheelbarrow: “Please, I’m retiring tomorrow. You must tell me what it is that you have been smuggling through my checkpoint!”

To which the man replies, “I thought it was obvious. I’ve been smuggling wheelbarrows.”◼︎

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: Fatine-Violette Sabiri, Portrait d’une chambre orientale, 2022, Édition 2/3 + 1AP, inkjet printing on archival paper, 24 x 36,” Galerie Eli Kerr, acquired by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Standard
Play Recent

Graceland

Feu St-Antoine with Solitary Dancer and Tony Price, Le Système, 26 March 2026

A DJ setup featuring various electronic music equipment in a dimly lit venue with red lighting and a crowd dancing in the background.
Tony Price performs at Le Système. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“For reasons I cannot explain
There’s some part of me wants to see
Graceland.”
—Paul Simon, “Graceland”

We don’t much imagine today that people come back to life after death. But in Biblical times it happened with alarming regularity. Everyone knows the story about Jesus. Then, Lazarus is probably a close second in terms of resurrection notoriety.

Lazarus was laying lifeless for four days when Jesus commanded him to rise from the tomb. His family even warned Jesus that he was starting to stink. Coming back from the dead was a miracle. It was God’s will. But God doesn’t seem to will it lately.

If it were God’s will, who should be resurrected today? All politicians must be disqualified out of hand. All religious leaders have had their day. It should be people who had a lot of life yet left to live, people who died well before their time.

I would bring back Ian Curtis and Amy Winehouse, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Sylvia Plath, Nina Simone and Prince, Sharon Tate and John Lennon. Give them all a hot shower and then throw a dinner party. Ask them what the other side was really like.

Wayfinders: au gré des sens, Montréal, arts interculturels, 2 April – 16 May 2026

Colorful wall projection of a person's neck and mouth in various hues, showcasing different angles and expressions.
Marelke Yee-Yin Lee & Marc Sabat, HANDS to MOUTHS (2018), Montréal, arts interculturels. Photographed for NicheMTL.

And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?
And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled.
—Revelation 6:10-11

On 11 April 2020, shortly after the Coronavirus crisis had shut down nearly every aspect of public life around the world, the Montreal Gazette reported that 31 people had died in Dorval at a long-term care home known as Résidence Herron. Staff fled the facility in droves at the onset of the pandemic and Quebec’s premier, François Legault, vowed that a criminal investigation should take place and sent in the military to clear the dead.

Legault prohibited all Easter-related celebrations the following day and proclaimed that Quebec would experience a “rebirth.” At that time, Legault, Quebec’s Minister of Health Danielle McCann, and public health director Dr. Horacio Arruda took to television for a daily news conference informing the public of the death toll and ever-evolving restrictions that Le Droit called “La messe Legault.”

On Easter Monday 2023, Legault again found himself amidst scandal when he retweeted a column penned by Journal de Montréal opinion writer Mathieu Bock-Cote suggesting that Catholicism to a large extent defines Quebec’s distinct “heritage.” Those critical of Legault maintained that the tweet was hypocritical in the context of Bill 21, the CAQ’s signature secularism legislation.  

On 2 April 2026, Bill 9, titled “An Act respecting the reinforcement of laicity in Quebec,” passed with the Parti Québécois’s support at the National Assembly. That same day, Legault delivered his final official address as Premier, wishing optimism for the next generation, saying: “We must hope that Quebec remains Quebec.”

Battements, Emmanuel Lacopo with Alexandre Amat and Geneviève Ackerman, Chapelle Saint-Louis – Le Saint-Jean-Baptiste, 23 March 2026

A performer singing passionately in front of an ornate altar with a guitarist seated nearby, surrounded by dim lighting and decorative architecture.
Geneviève Ackerman performs at Chapelle Saint-Louis. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The myth of international solidarity is dead. God is a ghost!”
Carsten Regild & Rolf Börjlind, Occupy the Brain!

Arrythmia characterizes our current age.

In politics, this manifests in incompatible international governments vying for superiority, oscillating wildly between extremes of diplomacy and violence. In culture, arrythmia manifests in off-kilter rhythms and microtonal harmonies. From Jonny Greenwood’s Bodysong to Black MIDI to Angine de Poitrine, we can trace the recent lineage of asynchronous life in new patterns of chaos.

Mediaeval, Simon S. Belleau, Galerie Eli Kerr, 26 March – 16 May 2026

A person with wavy hair is viewing a small mirror mounted on a wooden wall, wearing a red jacket.
Gallery view of Mediaeval by Simon S. Belleau at Galerie Eli Kerr. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The project is to theorize a kind of geoaffect or material vitality, a theory born of a methodological commitment to avoid anthropocentrism and biocentrism.”
—Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things

One way to think about reincarnation that does not necessitate irrational leaps of faith or imaginings of being born again as a cat is through vital materialism. This hybrid philosophy also allows for the agentic potential of non-human actants exerting force upon the ecosystem. Indeed, the first law of thermodynamics could be described as the second coming for energy.

When living matter dies, its energy does not. It only changes into different forms of matter and energy — decomposing, becoming food, becoming fertilizer. The Christian concept of transubstantiation — bread becoming flesh; wine becoming blood — is rooted in a fundamental understanding that matter is always bristling with life and potential for new lines of flight.

St. John Passion, BWV 245, J.S. Bach, Chœur A&P with Ensemble Caprice, The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, 3 April 2026

A choir in red robes performs in an ornate church with a high vaulted ceiling and stained glass windows, while the audience faces the stage, some clapping.
Patrons applaud the choir of The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions,
Won’t be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore.
—Leonard Cohen, “The Future”

In September 1752, Britain transitioned from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and lost 11 days in the process. The Julian calendar miscalculated the solar year by 11 minutes and therefore slid off by one full day every 128 years. This affected Easter celebrations which eventually moved further away from the beginning of astronomical spring.

Western churches commemorate Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon nearest the March equinox. The Eastern Orthodox Church, however, continues to follow the Julian calendar. So, Catholic and Orthodox Easter celebrations often fall on different dates, with the Orthodox iteration occurring this year on 12 April.

Passover generally falls on the first full moon after the vernal equinox. But due to the Metonic cycle, about 6939 days, it will arrive on the second full moon three times every 19 years.

If time wobbles rather than ticking by predictably as current re-evaluations of quantum spacetime suggest, there may be no faithful chronological measurement. The technics of civilization are breaking down. We might have more time than we thought.◼︎

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: The disco ball at Le Système. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Standard
Play Recent

The Problem of Pain

Viktor, dir. Olivier Sarbil, Cinémathèque Québécoise, 17 March 2026

The Wall Street Journal on 7 March reported that Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence had threatened social media users with harsh penalties under the country’s anti-espionage laws for making and sharing images or video documenting U.S. and Israeli strikes and their aftermath in the Republic. The Ministry characterized such prospective posters as a “fifth column,” or the enemy within. War photography, once universally understood as a reliable method of unshrouding the true faces and victims of conflict, has become suspect in its ubiquity, its susceptibility to disinformation, and its vulnerability to A.I. and deep-fake manipulation.

Images have the power to produce consensus and encourage something resembling collective memory. Especially single images that proliferate widely shape our impressions and recollection of events, particularly when we did not witness them ourselves. Think of the depiction of Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing a napalm attack in South Vietnam, or more recently, Thomas E. Franklin’s photograph “Firemen Raising the Flag at Ground Zero.” Like a tuning fork, seeing the second plane strike the World Trade Center’s South Tower on live television resonated with everyone in unison. These images immediately implant a sense of recognition in viewers.

“There is no such thing as collective memory,” writes Susan Sontag in her 2003 book, Regarding the Pain of Others. “But there is collective instruction.”

Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore with Myriam Gendron, Le Gesù, 18 March 2026

There are generally two types of pain: physical and emotional. It is impossible to feel another person’s pain, and so we are condemned to describe our pains using the best communication tools in our toolkits. We might tell the dentist that our toothache is a throbbing or a stabbing pain. Or we could draw lightning bolts shooting into aching shoulders on a diagram of the human body in advance of a massage.

Images might be the proper medium for conveying physical pain. Everyone visually recognizes an injury, a wound, or a scar, and empathizes using their own familiarities to conjure the memories of past distress. Sound, though, and music, specifically, is arguably the vehicle best suited to communicate emotional pain — the pain of mourning, of love lost, of failure, of separation from self and from God.

A singing voice invokes the universal truth of emotional pain and exorcises it.

Jean Cocteau, dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Cinéma du Musée, 15 March 2026

“Hunger and force can never be conditions of productive activity. On the contrary, freedom, economic security, and an organization of society in which work can be the meaningful expression of man’s faculties are the factors conducive to the expression of man’s natural tendency to make productive use of his powers.”
—Erich Fromm, Man for Himself

Pain is a productive energy.

Physical pain prompts the body to identify its source and repair it. Emotional pain spurs action, too, to ameliorate the conditions which initiated the anguish. Analgesics can effectively blunt physical pain, but numbness is antithetical to the productivity that emotional pain potentially stimulates. Rather, it is necessary to feel emotional pain in its entirety — not to induce it, but neither to detach oneself from it — in order to make it useful.

The greatest artists didn’t thrive under conditions in which their basic needs went unmet. The notion of the “starving artist” is unproductive and anti-romantic. Art is unavoidably work and workers work best when they are fed and clothed, sheltered and rested. But a claim can be made for microdosing emotional pain in pursuit of creative productivity. Enduring emotional pain produces faith, and humanity cannot survive without faith.

Not an irrational faith in ideology, or technology, or capital, but a radical faith in the prevalence of goodness, beauty, and truth.

Champs de fracture, Bradley Ertaskiran, 19 March 2026

An industrial wall with a textured surface features four rectangular panels that resemble light-colored stone, arranged horizontally. Above them is a large blank area framed by the wall.
Gallery view, Dawit L. Petros, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Is the absence of a meaningful Self traumatic only when we expect its presence?”
—Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times

“…there is a destructive force that is in love or attaches itself to love—one that moves human creatures toward destruction and self-destruction, including the destruction of that which they most love.”
—Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence

Among life’s inexplicable paradoxes is that love is a source of pain. That emotion which should provide the utmost pleasure, that virtue which Jesus commanded of his disciples, contains within it the seed for immense suffering.

This is why love is a commandment and not just a suggestion — because none of us would do it willingly. And this is why true love is selfless — because the persistence of love’s subjective experience discourages it.

The Designer is Dead, dir. Gonzalo Hergueta, Cinémathèque Québécoise, 19 March 2026

“Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God’s, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it.”
—C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

One of the defining characteristics that sets us apart from beasts is the human search for meaning. We comfort ourselves with sayings like “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” and “everything happens for a reason.” And yet, reason in terms of rational thought cannot possibly justify or defend violence. Reasons are not inherently morally sound. The reasons for international wars, or for interpersonal conflict, are most frequently amoral and unethical — ego, greed, avarice, hatred, ignorance, shame.

Some things are fundamentally meaningless, and it is a fool’s errand to search for meaning in them. Moral deformity cannot be explained spiritually or scientifically. There is no lesson in birth, life, and death. These things exist independent of our inclinations to interpret them. Man’s search for meaning is entirely contextual and relative and contingent.

We have all experienced a child’s game of repeatedly asking “why?” Eventually, every adult on the receiving end of this perpetual question arrives at the ultimate answer: “just because.”

The painful truth is that there is no meaning; there is only understanding. Most of life passes us by misunderstood. Understanding this is the first step towards a state of grace.◼︎

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: Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore perform at Le Gesù 18 March 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Standard