MONTREAL.- MOMENTA | Biennale de l'image presents, in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Alinka Echeverría: Simulacra. A Quebec premiere, this exhibition features two installations by the Mexican-British artist Alinka Echeverría that take a critical look at issues related to the representation of women in the field of photography.

An artist and social anthropologist, Alinka Echeverría focuses on the philosophical, psychological and sociocultural relationships between image and belief by exploring the representational codes of our societies. With Simulacra, Echeverría revisits her Nicephora project, developed as part of the BMW research residency at the Nicéphore Niépce Museum (Chalon-sur-Saône, France) in 2015.

Based on the colonial archives of the French museum, Fieldnotes for Nicephora reframes the male white legacy of the pioneering photographer Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) from a feminist point of view. Composed of images of women, this corpus revisits the male colonialist gazes that shaped history and reveals the illusion or fantasy conveyed by the images.

Precession of the Feminine – 10 Simulacra presents three-dimensional simulations of vases with images of women enlarged to the point of being illegible and printed on glass plates. The references to the body are thus perceptible in the shape of the vase. Examining the relationship between ceramics and photography, two utilitarian mediums that have become cultural vehicles, Echeverría creates tension between the ways in which women are represented.

"The object becomes infused with a metaphorical dimension that evokes the feminine through its form and use. It also has a critical edge creating tension between the various roles of pottery, (container, commercial exchange currency, etc.) and the ways in which women are objectified," explains María Wills Londoño, Guest Curator of the 16th edition of MOMENTA

"The MMFA has had the great pleasure of collaborating with MOMENTA for several years. The themes presented are always rich and thought provoking, and the one chosen for this year’s edition, The Life of Things, is no exception. Alinka Echeverría's still and moving images clearly illustrate the complexity of our relationships with objects," adds Diane Charbonneau, Photography Guest Curator, MMFA.

Alinka Echeverría (b. in 1981) is a Mexican British artist. Her projects have been presented in various venues and biennales across the globe, such as the Benaki Museum, Athens; Preus Museum, Horten, Norway; Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne; Foam Museum, Amsterdam; and Les Rencontres d’Arles. She is a grantee of the MAST Foundation, Bologna, where she will have an exhibition in 2020. A finalist of the Prix Élysée (2018) and Aesthetica Art Prize (2017), her honours include: the Foam Talent (2017), BMW Residency (2015), Lucie Foundation’s International Photographer of the Year (2012), and Prix HSBC pour la photographie (2011).