The seventh iteration of the Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone/Contemporary Native Art Biennial (BACA) spans seven exhibitions across Quebec, all centred on the eponymous theme of “Creation Stories.” In the exhibition hosted at Art Mûr, the work of 33 artists was curated by Lori Beavis, Emma Hassencahl-Perley, Jake Kimble, and Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé, each of whom approached the exhibition from the four cardinal Directions of Spirit.

Entering the gallery space, I encounter seven poraits featuring women across different generations. One of these images, Cora Kavyaktok’s Cora DeVos, Family Portrait, 2022 (2022), is a richly lit digital print that illuminates the smiling faces of three women from three different generations. Their gazes fill the space with a sense of care that makes me feel welcome, as if my presence does not carry the sense of voyeurism I often feel when looking deeply at portraits of women I do not know.

In Sandra Racine’s Basket (2024) series, three baskets are crafted from the most intricate synthesis of form and colour: black ash bark, sweetgrass, and dye all come together in an astonishing tactile composition. Flowers made of black ash bark lie gently upon the surface of the baskets, placed as if they may float away in a strong breeze. Despite the sharp curls of bark that jut outward in every direction, the baskets look inviting to touch. I had a difficult time staying within the permitted station of the viewer. Baskets are made to be touched. They were touched for countless hours during the time of their creation, and I wonder when they will get to be touched again. Racine’s Basket series prompted me to consider how creation itself is a dialectical form of Indigenous relationality. Twisting between the contours of desire and realization, creation is like a memory of a touch that was not felt on our own skin, or a memory of a language that did not even pass through our own lips. It is a language that is older than words, than time itself.

I make my way to the second floor of Art Mûr and find myself in an atmosphere filled with dreamlike sound. I soon learn that this ethereal music is emitted from Cheyenne Rain LeGrande’s ᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ Mullyanne Nîmito (2022), a video projection of the artist draped in a radiant fringed shawl constructed of pull tabs. The artist stands strongly in a pair of striking platform moccasins at the edge of a body of water. The song trickles like water in the air, setting a calm tone for the entire floor as it follows me into a large room. I am drawn to the far left corner, where a hide is placed on the floor with the fur side down. Etched onto its skin is an impression of a map, and the words “Home Some of it that I remember.” A small paper house stands upright on the hide, which is placed below a shelf that holds a series of four red walkie-talkies. This installation by seth cardinal dodginghorse, titled last night I had a dream I was home again, is a mnemonic re-enactment of the artist’s experience of forced displacement from their ancestral homelands in 2014 due to the construction of the Calgary Ring Road. In my initial encounter with dodginghorse’s piece, I was struck by the contrast between the artist’s playful approach to mapping a familiar place, and the extractivist context of Land surveying invoked by the walkie-talkies. Unlike the imperialist cartographic grid system used to measure, monitor, and control people and Land, dodginghorse’s map is etched onto the irregularly shaped hide. This is a map that cannot be divided into a collection of squares seamlessly integrated into imperialist informational systems. The topography of hide defies the grid—its skin only lends itself to the systems and practices of creation, memory, and storytelling that exist within families and their relations to homelands.

“Creation Stories” intricately folds together experiences of creation as a relational topography, with textures formed along familial and community lines. Taken together, the works in the exhibition reach far and beyond the telling of any singular genesis—these are stories that have continued since time immemorial, stories of creation that will never end, so long as there are artists who carry the desire to realize new worlds.