Dexter Barker-Glenn, First Water, Centre CLARK Room 2, 16 January – 28 February 2026

“It is all the more necessary to talk about art now that there is nothing to say about it.”
—Jean Baudrillard, “Art… Contemporary of Itself.” (2003)

In the 2016 BBC documentary film HyperNormalization, director Adam Curtis profiles the businessman and performance artist Vladislav Surkov, who between 2013 and 2020 acted as something of a mafia consigliere to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Curtis notes that Surkov’s tactics were designed to deceive and inveigle western leaders and even Russian citizens into questioning their veracity.

Surkov “will fuel conspiracy theories,” suggests Curtis in an interview with The Guardian, “but that’s not new. His particular genius has been to let people know that is what he is doing. So, whatever you see in the news: you just don’t know if it is ‘true’ or not.”

In an era characterized by an insatiable appetite for information, it is important to underline that information and truth are not commensurate.

The cynical endgame of Surkov’s strategy was to sow the seeds of confusion and engender a feeling of fragility both abroad and at home. A populace that doesn’t know what their government is doing, the logic goes, still possesses more agency than a population that does but doesn’t understand how or why. Disorientation as state policy is a more effective social control mechanism than repression by force.

Emanuel Ax Plays Beethoven, Maison Symphonique, 15 January 2025

« Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible »
—Attributed to Bernard Cousin, 1968.

When François Legault this week announced his resignation as leader of the political party he founded, observers quickly pointed out that the timing of the move, but not the move itself, was the surprise. With approval ratings hovering below 25 percent — less than half of Justin Trudeau’s when he resigned as Canadian Prime Minster — Legault was widely expected to concede the race before October’s Provincial elections. But as recently as 10 January, four days before he abdicated the throne, The Montreal Gazette’s Robert Libman reported that Legault insisted that he planned to remain.

It may be a stretch to envision Legault taking a page from Surkov’s playbook. Likely it was more Legault himself and not the general public of Quebec that was unsure of his next moves. But the results are the same. Saying one thing and doing the exact opposite disorients us and undermines public trust in our leaders and institutions. It also allows Legault himself to spin the narrative around his legacy in his favour.

Rather than accept a democratic loss, Legault has engineered a despotic sacrifice, falling on his proverbial sword, a victim rather than the perpetrator of circumstance. History favours the winners. But it also looks more generously upon those who didn’t lose.

Paul Nadeau, Like You, 5455 av. De Gaspé, 16-18 January 2026

“It is precisely when nature philosophy becomes politically useful that it ceases to be itself.”
—Brian Massumi, “Too-Blue: Color-Patch for an Expanded Empiricism.”

The 1982 cult comedy short entitled King of the ‘Z’s, written and directed by NYU students Karl Tiedemann and Stephen Winer and starring Calvert “Larry ‘Bud’ Melman” DeForest, who would all go on to work for the late night talk show host David Letterman, was a mockumentary predating Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap that depicted Vespucci Pictures, a fictious Hollywood movie studio that succeeded in making the best worst movies. In the tradition of The Producers, Vespucci turned a profit from making flops. Some of the film’s classic adages include, “Save a buck, make a buck,” and “Where money is king and art is no object.”

There is perverse virtue in setting a goal to fail and achieving it.

Quinton Barnes with Fiver, Casa del Popolo, 10 January 2026

It matters less to powerful actors who is really in charge than to be reassured that power always is. Political leaders are like gun parts — interchangeable and infinitely replicable and deadly when assembled.

Not Conformed: Four Women Carving Time, SBC Gallery, 15 January – 7 March 2026

“Nothing haunts this eternal instant, no ghosts rattle their chains.”
—Grafton Tanner, Foreverism

The mood of a post-modernity governed by machines is several orders beyond the dystopian sense that no alternative exists to the neoliberal socioeconomic order. Capitalist realism has given way to capitalist surrealism, capitalist horror, capitalist absurdity, capitalist tragedy, and paint-by-numbers-capitalism, among other subdivisions of genre.

The notion that collective control trumps individual intervention seems quaint in today’s world where we have acknowledged that Artificial Intelligence has assumed command of vast and sweeping decision-making processes. A sensation of powerlessness ensues as we witness the human agents to whom we have entrusted power handing what remains over to fad gadgets.

This has happened before. In 1940, IBM, an American company that ostensibly opposed the fascist rise taking place across Europe, established a subsidiary in Holland called Watson Bedrijfsmachine Maatschappij. In 1941, IBM in America sent Holland 132 million punch cards. In a Hollerith facility, those cards were punched and sorted, effectively condemning Dutch Jews to deportation, and ultimately, for extermination. The subsidiary’s expenditures, according to IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black, amounted to $522,709.03, nearly $11.5 million in today’s dollars, and was merged into the company’s New York ledger under the heading of “Other.”

The contemporary opening of A.I. to military applications reiterates this history and is the subject of a new book by Nick Srnicek called Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI. “Our period is characterized by competing hegemonic visions between a neoliberal globalization on the one hand and Manichean visions of the global order on the other hand,” writes Srnicek, “and we are in desperate need of alternatives.”

However, our imaginings of what those alternatives might look like have been systematically suppressed — not least by a retreat into immersive entertainment. It is easier to imagine the finnisage than the end of capitalism.

The bureaucratic banality of genocide obscures its shock value. But its rebranding as art aestheticizes it.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Gallery view, Dexter Barker-Glenn, First Water, Centre CLARK.}