Caroline Monnet: Creatura Dada

Salah J. Bachir New Media Wall
May 7–August 2, 2025

Caroline Monnet’s multidisciplinary practice explores the shifting of her cultural history as an artist of both Anishinaabe and French descent. In her film Creatura Dada, Monnet orchestrates a powerful assembly of six francophone Indigenous women—Alanis Obomsawin, Nadia Myre, Swaneige Bertrand, Nahka Bertrand, Émilie Monnet, and herself—around a lavish dining table. This gathering is a celebration of 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 artistic movement Dada, 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.

Fig.

Caroline Monnet, Creatura Dada, single-channel video (still), 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

Artist Biography

Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe/French, b. 1985) is a multidisciplinary artist from Outaouais, Quebec. She studied sociology and communications at the University of Ottawa and the University of Granada, Spain. She has had solo exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Arsenal Contemporary, New York; the Centre d’art international de Vassivière, France; and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Her work is included in numerous collections in North America and in the permanent collection of UNESCO in Paris. In 2019, Monnet was included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial of Art; in 2020, she received the Prix Pierre-Ayot and was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award. She is also a recipient of the Merata Mita Fellowship of the Sundance Institute and was named a Companion of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres du Québec. Monnet is based in Montréal and is represented by Galerie Blouin Division.