MONTREAL.- MOMENTA Biennale d’art contemporain announced the appointment of Toleen Touq as curator for its 20th edition, titled The Long Now, which will take place in 2027. The Long Now proposes a biennale structured by duration, where time becomes both medium and method. Unfolding through 2027, it interrogates our present—the temporal logics that organize it, the affects through which it is lived, and its mediation through cultural and visual politics. Rather than accepting the present as given, the biennale approaches it as structured, contested, and unevenly lived, inviting duration as a means of keeping time open and unresolved.

For the next edition of MOMENTA Biennale, exhibitions unfold as a field of ongoing encounters in which meaning forms gradually. Artistic practice is approached as temporal and spatial: works evolve through addition, revision, and afterlife rather than resolving at the moment of display. Artworks drift, transform, and disclose themselves. Projects are conceived not as fixed monuments but as arrangements—scores, protocols, living situations—that take shape with their publics.

Starting from the understanding that time is lived qualitatively rather than sequentially, the biennale turns from linear progression toward serpentine and relational thinking. It considers how a biennale might operate as a durational field rather than a punctual event—gathering practices and people, allowing meaning to precipitate, and acknowledging lived subjectivity. Duration is not an aesthetic of slowness but a condition of encounter and reconfiguration of tempo that resists the extractive rhythms of productivity and spectacle.

Within this framework, the present emerges as a thickened field where memory, urgency, and imagination coexist. Beginnings, endings, and middles remain unsettled—what precedes, what remains, and the choreographies in between. Duration becomes a way of staying with the present without collapsing it into premature resolution or instant legibility. By extending the present, the biennale holds overlapping temporalities in tension: settler time and Indigenous futurity; ruptured rhythms of resistance; suspended time in exile, diaspora, and occupation; ecological and extractive temporalities; the growth and decay of materials; and polyphonic temporalities that refuse singular narration.

Yet duration is neither innocent nor inherently resistant. It can function as tactic or imposition. In political suspension, the drawn-out time of waiting is rarely passive; it is shaped by refusal, constraint, and uneven agency. If cultural practice is treated not as a reflection of the present but as one of the arenas in which it is produced, then it exposes uneven rhythms of encounter—urgency, cycles of visibility, demands for immediacy. Thus, what is at stake is not only the temporality of artistic practice and exhibition-making, but the logic through which the present is enacted and experienced. By reorganizing these rhythms, the biennale asks how exhibitions and public projects might hold space for forms of time that resist culmination and turn toward return and relation.

In this way, The Long Now approaches the present not as a fleeting moment to capture, but as a structure to inhabit and work within. The long now is understood as historically produced, differentially lived, and continuously distributed—thick with the simultaneous presence of past and future, shaped by both catastrophe and beauty, haunted by spectres of violence. It asks what images require lingering, what practices demand return, what struggles call for endurance. The next edition of MOMENTA proposes duration as an institutional commitment: redistributing attention, extending encounters, valuing recurrence over novelty. It seeks to build conditions for sustained relation—between artworks and audiences, histories and urgencies, artistic labor and collective time. Its task is not to conclude, but to remain with these tensions long enough for other ways of gathering, attending, and inhabiting time to take shape.

Toleen Touq is a curator and educator working between Amman, Jordan, and Toronto, Canada. From 2018 to 2022, she was artistic director of SAVAC, a nomadic artist-run centre in Toronto, where she curated numerous exhibitions and spearheaded the pedagogical and research platform Missed Connections and the food sovereignty initiative Ishtar’s International Network of Feral Gardens. She is the co-founding director of Spring Sessions (2014–ongoing), an experiential arts residency and collective study programme usually based in Amman, the latest edition of which took place at the Wonder Cabinet in Bethlehem (2025). Recent projects include Palestine All The Time, a 24-hour performance, film, and music program at Gallery TPW, Toronto (2025), Notations for Living, a series of listening sessions at Darat Al-Funun, Amman (2025), the triennial exhibition GTA24 at MOCA, Toronto (2024), and film programming at Images Festival, Toronto (2024). Her writings have been published with the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas Journal, Ibraaz Publishing, Sternberg Press, A Prior, Manifesta Journal, and other independent publications. She holds an MA in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University, where her research explored the potentials of artist residencies and gathering spaces to compose relational, autonomous temporalities.