The Québec Triennial 2011. The Work Ahead of Us, one of the most important and highly anticipated art events of the season, was presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
For this second edition of the Triennial, the museum has put together a show on an unprecedented scale that fills all eight of its exhibition galleries and spill over into its indoor public spaces, as well as Place des Festivals in the Quartier des Spectacles and the Espace culturel Georges-Émile-Lapalme at Place des Arts.
The exhibition features works by more than fifty artists and collectives, a majority of them young, who are contributing to a renewed Québec art. A series of live performances and Friday Nocturnes round out this edition of the Triennial.
The Work Ahead of Us
The title “The Work Ahead of Us” is borrowed from an exhibition of work by Grier Edmundson, one of the artists in this Triennial. He himself took it from an essay by the Russian Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin. As the curators were discussing Edmundson’s singular, eclectic manner of juxtaposing disparate aspects of art and history, it came to them that this title was a natural choice for The Québec Triennial 2011. Indeed, The Work Ahead of Us aptly conveys the image of the vast range of artists, approaches, media and ideas that make up such an event. More concretely, the notion of work in the broad sense occurs in a number of pieces, whether in terms of research, information or data gathering, archiving, construction of pictorial, architectural or sound spaces, transformation, translation or transition from one state to another.
Image: Matthew Biederman, Guided Saccade (capture d’écran), 2011. Murale de dessins générés par ordinateur.
