MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image presents, in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), Simulacra: Alinka Echeverría. 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 focusses 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 musée Nicéphore Niépce Museum (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 more perceptible than the shape of the vase. Echeverría analyses the relationship between ceramics and photography, two practices that have become cultural vehicles.

Mexican and British by birth, Alinka Echeverría combines anthropology and photography in finely critical works. Her projects have been presented in various venues and events around the world, including at the Benaki Museum (Athens), Preus Museum: Norwegian National Museum of Photography (Horten), Musée de l’Elysée (Lausanne), FOAM Museum (Amsterdam), and Les Rencontres d’Arles.