Iaohontso’ktá:tie / To Move Across the Land: Fashion and the Body

April 18 to June 21, 2026
Opening reception: April 18, 2026 – 2 p.m.

Iaohontso’ktá:tie / To Move Across the Land: Fashion and the Body
Curators: Armando Perla & Michael Patten
La Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA), 8th edition
DRAC – Art actuel Drummondville
175 Rue Ringuet, Drummondville, QC, J2C 2P7

Opening Performance: Aicha Bastien-N’Diaye (Canada)

Melanie Monique Rose (Canada), Jeanine Clarkin (Aotearoa / Nouvelle-Zélande), Arla Lucia (États-Unis), Omar Monroy (États-Unis, Mexique), Porfirio Gutiérrez (Mexique, États-Unis), Taalrumiq (Canada), Isaac Te Awa (Aotearoa / Nouvelle-Zélande), ARIA XYX (Kuskatan / El Salvador), Tekaronhiahkhwa Standup (Canada), Aicha Bastien-N’Diaye (Canada), Feliciana Baustista (Mexique), Renati Waaka (Aotearoa / Nouvelle-Zélande)

This exhibition gathers Indigenous and diasporic artists who work with fashion, adornment, performance, and the body as sites of sovereignty, memory, and refusal. Across garments, beadwork, jewelry, clay, and textile practices, the body emerges not as a neutral surface, but as a territory shaped by colonial violence, gender regulation, displacement, and survival. Rather than treating fashion as trend or ornament, the artists in this exhibition approach it as a technology of care and resistance: clothing as protection, adornment as archive, performance as authorship, and making as a way of restoring relational ties between body, land, and community. Together, these practices insist that the dressed, adorned, and performed body is a living archive, one that carries Indigenous knowledge forward while refusing assimilation and erasure. The exhibition is structured around four interrelated thematic areas that articulate how fashion and the body operate as cultural, political, and relational sites.

A free shuttle service will be provided for the opening at DRAC – Art actuel Drummondville. As places are limited, please do book your seat in advance