Catriona Jeffries

We’ve all experienced that gap between who we think we are and how others perceive us. We’ve all felt the friction between the identity assigned to us and the one we construct for ourselves. We: that is, you and me—as well as others, human or not. Starting from this premise, MOMENTA 2023 will explore the dynamics of visibility and invisibility that shape representations of the self and the other. Individuals are constantly recorded, formatted, fixed as same and identical, so here’s the urgent question: how do we (re)set in motion our understanding of identities and differences in the social space and in intimate experiences of otherness?

The notion of mimicry serves as the main driving force for developing the biennale. Mimicry designates the aptitude to “do as if”: to imitate (do the same), which involves first and foremost the capacity to transform (unmake) oneself by blurring the borders that define the edges of beings and things. Transversally, mimicry concerns human behaviour, the experience of all living things (animal and plant mimicry), and technological modelling (machine-learning mimicry). It situates us in the interstice between the self and the other, linking them and leading them to melt into one another. It is precisely the potential for metamorphoses inscribed in this interstice that MOMENTA 2023 wishes to embrace with the title Masquerades: Drawn to Metamorphosis.

The image has a decisive role to play in these operations of mutation, of exposure and concealment, of separation and fusion. It is an ideal tool for seeing, experiencing, and testing perceptions of the self. The theme of mimicry thus calls for an exploration of the theatricality and virtuality of the mask, whose performance is facilitated and stimulated by technical images. In this sense, the biennale will pay particular attention to the moving lines that today are redefining gestures of appropriation and disguise: how are identities played and outwitted? And who can make light of the spectacle of identity?

Valérie Blass’s exhibition, This Is Not a Metaphor at the Fonderie Darling, explores the erotic tension that drives our desire to see, in which our recognition of a familiar object is therefore constantly vexed—excited—by an eruption of the unusual, a visual anomaly, an ambivalence between resemblance and dissemblance. Blass has deepened her interest in the sculptural potential of the photographic image, therefore her exhibition suggests a journey through the metamorphosis of the image as a sculptural skin.

Masquerades: Drawn to Metamorphosis is curated by Ji-Yoon Han. Documentation by Mike Patten and Simon S. Belleau.