Black Transnational Biennale | Eddy Firmin (MTL)

Launch of the biennale: September 11th
Performance Festival at articule : November 14th

articule is pleased to announce its participation as a host for this first edition of the Black Transnational Biennale. We will be hosting artists Anna Jane McIntyre, Ngemba and dana michel for a performance festival on November 14th!

Synonymous of bodies overexploitation, the Bossale, slave born in Africa, is one of the fertilizing figures at the foundation of our globalized world.

The bossale, and therefore the black body, signals a nomadic figure that participates to define the first transnational identities of our globalized world. For the 1st edition of AF-FLUX, 24 artists address significant issues:
As bossale descendants, how do we articulate the world? What kind of decolonial dialogue arises from the encounter of artists from here and elsewhere? Moreover, how do these artists invest the contemporary art field ? What are their roots?

dana michel is a live artist. She is currently touring three solo performance works: YELLOW TOWEL, MERCURIAL GEORGE and CUTLASS SPRING. In 2014, she was awarded the newly created ImPulsTanz Award (Vienna) in recognition for outstanding artistic accomplishments, and was highlighted among notable female choreographers of the year by the New-York Times. In 2017, she was awarded the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance at the Venice Biennale. In 2018, she became the first ever dance artist in residence at the National Arts Centre, Canada. In 2019, she was awarded the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art (Kuopio, Finland). Based in Montreal, she is an artist supported by Parbleux.

Ngemba Mpondani is a canadian visual artist born in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Ngemba studied at Concordia University in Cultural Programming, then, as of 2018, at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) in Visual Arts and then lastly in Museology certificate. Mpondani fluidly navigates photography, film, sound, installation, performance and sculpture to manufacture both reflections on the body, identity and self-representation. Her work has been presented at the Darling Foundry in Montreal and at the Centre de Diffusion et d'Expérimentation des étudiant.e.s de la maîtrise en arts visuels et médiatiques (CDEx) at UQAM. In parallel to her artistic practice, she has set up a book club "Book and Brunch" paying tribute to authors of the African diaspora of yesterday and today. A platform currently active between Montreal, Paris and Guadeloupe.

Anna Jane McIntyre is a visual artist-parent with a practice combining shape-shifting, mark-making, thinking, doing, looking, breathing, $5-improv-benevolent-capitalism and microactivism. Anna's work investigates how people perceive, create and maintain their notions-of-self, belonging and culture through behaviour and visual cues. Projects may incorporate giant emojis, feminist-foosball-tables, community workshops, parade floats, commercial signage, thinking forests, urban ecology forest-school cahiers prioritising BIPOC kids, time-travelling-soundscapes-mapping-abstract-narratives, Speaker's corners, love-letter-services and homages-for-the-forgotten. Anna's projects are an expression of Afropresentism that combine her cultural influences (Trinidadian, British, adoptive-Canadian) through the juxtaposition of familiar materials in novel contexts. Her work acknowledges the past and present, imagining a surreal dream of what is to come.

Eddy Firmin is an artist-researcher with a doctorate in art studies and practices (UQAM). He holds a master's degree from the School of Visual Art at ESADHaR du Havre-Rouen (France). Since 2017, he directs the decolonial research journal Minorit'Art. In 2019, he has been an expert advisor to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in the redeployment of the Cultures du Monde collections. Recently, he curated Vitrine sur l'art and was a visiting professor at the Laval University School of Art. In his research, Firmin is interested in the politics of knowledge sharing as well as the epistemic conflicts they generate in the colonized artist.

The practical concerns that connection demands can be incongruous, tongue-twisting, shifting perceptions of interpreted freedoms, assumed responsibilities and rough-shod stereotypes. Rolling through an altered alphabet and abecedarium of mixed-up-foggy-feelings-and-memories. I am I. You are You. We. Visual vistas, What ifs, Remember whens. A voiceless bodyfull performance with colour and sound. We play games. We dress up. Many lingos hint at slivers of sense. The dice is rolled, steps are taken and consequences revealed. Come as you are or don't come at all. For sure, there will be too many props and costume changes. Possible participation.

"How did black bodies become a problem in the first place?" DuBois, 1903 DuBois asks, "What does it feel like to be a problem?" Socially, the black body is a historical enigma with multiple origins, two of which are the institutions of slavery and the mass media. These racial projections have materialized while reinforcing racial ideologies throughout history that have gradually developed their own body politics.

"Emphasize" is a non-mute of DuBois's response to the question "What does it feel like to be a problem?" The work recycles the European and American imaginary that the Black body is a new discovery.

While it is clear, the connections between past and present representations are made to draw a prophecy that Black bodies are irreversibly trapped. I think that contemporary situations will allow us to resist scripts by reappropriating our bodies.

how can they have full faith in themselves if they can’t even float in the stuff that they’re made of? gotta deal with the fear factors first. to be able to be better at knowing what is best. gotta build and harvest and maintain them trust muscles. have to keep on keeping up with... there is no end. if they can show themselves…if they can walk themselves into overcoming the big one - THE LETTING GO, THE BEING WET - then perhaps a bettering. perhaps then a deciphering of what really good from what really bad. normal to not trust right now. the bodies they have been informed by very dubious sources indeed.

Exhibition text

The Origin and its Sum

by Victoria Platel

Feeling lucky? Anna Jane McIntyre invites us to participate in a carnival where the present and the familiar are found in a new context. The bossal is a pawn in a board game where moves are determined by a wheel of fortune or a roll of dice. McIntyre demonstrates that every action in the present is a future realized. She embodies the character of the jester to challenge the suspicious gaze cast on the bossal. "I'm black," McIntyre declares in letters written in tar with a paintbrush. It is a phrase that articulates both the obvious and what is about to be revealed.

In Emphasize, Ngemba and two other performers draw the line between here and elsewhere, and between yesterday and today. The black body: how and to what extent has it become a problem? It is a question that seeks to decipher the enigma of bossal identities. Ngemba's work is a series of videos projected on three beings weaving a double consciousness that resists binary identity constructions. The videos tell a non-exhaustive chronology of a body treated as property, an anthropological discovery and a hypersexualized object. On the other hand, there are clips that bring to life some of the key events in Afro-descendant histories that are, despite their singularities, contemporary and transnational. Here, the body defines itself as much as it undergoes.

dana michel, on the other hand, makes us live through a capitalist nightmare in SOME ARBITRARY SAFE. michel goes outside the space with a desk and, undecided, we see her change position several times through the window. Finally, she settles inside near her makeshift shelter (a tent) to which she is attached at the arm. A complex parody of the workplace is enacted. For example, a volleyball becomes an ergonomic office chair and vibrator. She places a keyboard, lamp and mouse on the desk and adjusts a headset on her head. This image recalls the work from home set up; a respite and a trap that blurs the line between personal life and work. We transition to an all-too-familiar pandemic ritual: keyboard and mouse are stubbornly disinfected with mouthwash. We live through this nine-to-five hell having confronted our alienating work habits.

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Af-Flux Monde Bossale

Black Transnational Biennale | Eddy Firmin (MTL)

The Origin and its Sum

Fall General Assembly

The Sisterhood at articule