Though the medium was invented nearly two centuries ago, photography started to be taken seriously as “fine art” only in the late 1970s, not long before MOMENTA was founded as an international photography biennial in 1989.

This year is the 30th anniversary of MOMENTA, which was previously known as le Mois de la photo à Montréal. In solo and group shows, artists of all kinds have found ways to circle around this question of things. The biennial is divided into four overlapping thematic chapters, each of which “offer different ways of imagining the relationships between human beings and objects”: (1) cultural objects and material culture (2) thingified beings or humanized objects (3) the absurd as counter-narrative of the object, and (4) still life in an age of environmental crisis. In collaboration with executive director Audrey Genois and executive and curatorial assistant Maude Johnson, MOMENTA curator María Will Londoño has brought together 39 artists at artist-run centres, university galleries and museums across the city of Montreal whose work relates to this year’s theme: “the life of things.” We are preoccupied with acquiring them, with altering them and then with getting rid of them, and just as we are getting the hang of this management, new technologies find ways to fold a variety of “things” right into our bodies. “Things” make up our lives-plants, animals and stuff stacked up and tucked away in our homes, our offices, our yards, steadily crowding our lived environments. Larivière then read from her poem “Un petit quelque chose,” from the MOMENTA catalogue: “Recognizing the ambiguity of the fate of human production, she knows very well that creating, manufacturing, reproducing, buying, stealing, possessing, appropriating, taking, organizing, processing, accumulating, throwing away, abandoning, recycling, managing, transforming are but variations on the self-same thing: the morbid spectre of hoarding.” The opening night of the 2019 MOMENTA Biennale de l’image in Montreal, in front of a packed audience at Galerie de L’UQAM, artist and author Maryse Larivière held up a small, hand-held stereo to the microphone so everyone could hear her recording of the viral 2005 post-Katrina interview in which Celine Dion defends the city’s looters: “Let them touch those things!”

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