Caroline Monnet’s Creatura Dada assembles six francophone Indigenous women around a lavish dining table, celebrating identity, resilience, and cultural heritage. Inspired by the Dada movement, the film rejects conventional storytelling, embracing collage and montage to merge Western art history with Indigenous symbols. Monnet’s work blurs reality and dreams, offering a hybrid representation of cultural memory and transformation.

Monnet’s multidisciplinary practice explores the shifting of her cultural history as an artist of both Anishinaabe and French descent. In Creatura Dada, Monnet orchestrates a powerful assembly—Alanis Obomsawin, Nadia Myre, Swaneige Bertrand, Nahka Bertrand, Émilie Monnet, and herself—in a gathering celebrating their shared Indigeneity, identity, and cultural heritage. It is a moment of recollection and conviviality, a testament to the resilience and strength of Indigenous Women.

The film’s title refers to the Dada artistic movement, which emerged during the early twentieth century. Adherents of this avant-garde movement rejected conventional aesthetics and embraced the unconscious, the irrational, the inconsistent. Monnet uses strategies inherent in Dada collage, montage, and assemblage in her film, rejecting the traditional flow of narrative storytelling and instead welcoming the unpredictability of events as they unfold. Blurring the boundaries between reality and dreams, Monnet marries Western art history with Indigenous symbols to create a new, hybrid representation.

Presented by The Image Centre in collaboration with Capture Photography Festival and in partnership with CONTACT

Curated by Emmy Lee Wall

• Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe/French) is a multidisciplinary artist from Outaouais, Quebec. At the heart of her practice is the communication of complex ideas about Aboriginal identity and bicultural life through the examination of cultural histories. Her works combine the vocabulary of popular and traditional visual cultures with the tropes of modernist abstraction to create unique hybrid forms. She studied Sociology and Communication at the University of Ottawa (Canada) and the University of Granada (Spain) before pursuing a career in visual arts and film. Her work has been programmed internationally at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Whitney Biennial (NYC), Toronto Biennale of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (Montréal), Arsenal Contemporary (NYC), Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff), and the National Art Gallery (Ottawa).

• Emmy Lee Wall is currently Executive Director and Chief Curator of Capture Photography Festival and prior to that worked at the Vancouver Art Gallery for more than a decade where she worked on numerous historical and contemporary exhibitions. Her curatorial practice has a particular focus on art in public spaces and she has worked on public art projects with a diverse range of local and international artists including Vikky Alexander, Elisabeth Belliveau, Douglas Coupland, Sara Cwynar, Moyra Davey, Christopher Lacroix, Michael Lin, Anique Jordan, Meryl McMaster, Krystle Coughlin Silverfox, Steven Shearer, Shellie Zhang, and Elizabeth Zvonar.