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La Biennale de Québec: What Shifts When Ice Splits

The latest edition of North America’s only winter biennial considers ice as both medium and metaphor.

Ice is a charged word globally. For many Americans, it is the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that harbinger of xenophobia, along with a cold indicator of weather changes, especially as an agent of climate change. The Arctic region loses ice, and other countries find themselves having more of it than they’ve had in decades. In Québec City, at the transition from winter to spring, it is an abundant near-neutral endearing factor—the slippery ice that coats streets, icicles are a full-toothed smile off of New France-style and Châteauesque buildings and large frozen masses are pushed downstream by the St. Lawrence River. “Briser la glace/Splitting Ice,” the theme of Manif d’Art’s Biennale de Québec (the only winter biennial in North America, held in Québec City, Lévis, Baie-Saint-Paul and Joliette), has many associations: from the performance Danse dans la neige (1948) by Françoise Sullivan (who is currently 102 and a matriarch in Québec art) in the ’40s to moments of tension, the breaking from old into new and multiplicity.

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Curator of the biennial Didier Morelli’s vision positions the cold season as an active collaborator in reshaping space and perception, asking the question: what happens when art uses ice and water to dissolve borders that feel permanent? He brings his perspective as an art historian and performance historian to the fore. When asked what his starting point for the biennial was, he tells Observer, “It’s branded and put forward as this winter biennial in North America. One of the things that I really thought about was, what do we do in the northern regions of North America at the end of February? We go out with our bodies and we meet wintry landscapes. We transform them by performing on them these different gestures and actions. That’s something that’s been done for centuries on these lands. And so, there was this idea of really embracing the identity of the biennial and embracing the season, and the kind of climate in which it’s located in the city itself.” In a world as solid as ice on the exterior but as fluid as water, he adds, “I wanted things to be both poetic and political. All of the work, or at least most of it, in my mind, has a type of politics inscribed in it, even though it might not be big ‘P’ politics. It might be little ‘p’ politics. That’s because I believe that all art is political and all art is social because it’s inscribed........

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