In 2023, BANAL was founded by Vivek Venkatesh with Annabelle Brault, José Cortés, Veronica Mockler, and Léah Snider. Through music, image, and performance art, the group questions how we tend to ignore the mundane nature of the inhumanity to which we are subjected as we face increasing political polarization on a global scale.
After years of straddling the boundaries between professional artistic practice and scholarly research within the fields of education, the fine arts, the humanities, social sciences, and music therapy, these five practitioners based in Tiohtià:ke Montréal — each recognized in their own right as artists and curators within different disciplines — decided to unite under BANAL, a collective in which they would set aside their academic moorings to collaboratively explore, through contemporary art creation, the rampant spread of extreme forms of hate speech, misinformation, and polarization experienced in present-day society.
Dedicated to public engagement, BANAL’s sonic and visual events invite different audiences to access what is publicly and banally rendered unspeakable, unseen, and unheard by our societies, using participatory artistic interventions. Using stratified, distorted yet groovy bass guitar and dogmatic synth melodies, mixed with the familiar rhythms of automated objects, such as printers and paper cutters — and against the backdrop of magnetic video projections and iconography — BANAL’s visually musical signature invites us to turn our gaze towards the murky centre of that which renders us uncomfortable, that which we don’t understand, about ourselves and 'the Other'.
BANAL’s approach to the staging of its events is based on the participatory intervention it wishes to offer its public, whether that is through remixed oral history recordings, anonymous SMS messages, or controversial surveys. As an entity equally grounded in sound and visual art, performances are conceived through a series of open conversations and rehearsals, both within the collective itself and with the spaces in which the events take place. Therefore, each performance is understood as a new piece in which specific elements (such as stage and interaction design, video projection, lighting, semi-improvised musical scores, and durational performance actions) are researched, created, and workshopped in accordance with the public engagement at stake within a given setting.
The debut performance of BANAL was held on December 8, 2023 after a week-long residency at the Montréal, Arts, Interculturels (MAI) gallery. The 75-minute performance comprised original dark-pop tracks that scored a series of interventions, including the construction of an opaque vinyl wall, the live audio remixing of an oral history sample of a healthcare system worker, and two BANAL members exposing their faces to the heat of industrial spotlights. Already having developed a reputation for its socially-charged activation of public opinion through music and visual art, BANAL was then invited by Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) to create a performance in response to Pussy Riot’s Velvet Terrorism. During the course of four months, BANAL collected museum visitors’ anonymized SMS confessions which it integrated into a uniquely unnerving karaoke session with audience members at the MAC, on February 22, 2024.
BANAL’s most recent work took place in Mexico as part of the collective’s cross-national Dark Diplomacy. During an artist residency at Mexico City’s Centro de Cultura Digital, BANAL conducted a workshop with local artists with whom it activated its street data collection methodology. Stoking some of the biases that shape Mexican-Canadian relations, politics and imaginations, the opinions of over 225 individuals were gathered across the two countries and showcased namely as part of a Dark Diplomacy performance headline by Doña Pancha Fest in the Museo de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara City.
© 2024
Contact project manager:
leah.snider@concordia.ca