A sort of retrospective in the form of a colorful multimedia show that originated at Kling & Bang in Reykjavik before traveling to the Louisiana Museum of Art, followed by overlapping iterations in Montreal and at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Polygon Gallery in Vancouver, “Velvet Terrorism” doesn’t put much stock in subtlety or nuance either. More in the group’s style is a video installed near the exhibition’s entrance, showing a ski-masked Pussy Riot member pissing on a portrait of the Russian president; if that doesn’t make things clear enough, the title of one of the group’s early actions, Fuck You, Fucking Sexists and Fucking Putinists (2011), involved “musical occupations of glamorous venues in the capital” including “areas where wealthy Putinists gather: in Moscow boutiques, at fashion shows, in elite cars, and on the rooftops of Kremlin-affiliated bars.”

Whether or not you’re prepared to enjoy Pussy Riot’s songs as music or their actions and videos as art, though, you’d be hard put to contest their right to the third category into which their work has always been slotted: activism. And yet, after immersing myself in “Velvet Terrorism,” I had to wonder whether even that is quite the right description of what they do. Activism, as I understand it, is not action for its own sake, but is undertaken to achieve some determinate social or political goal, to change the world, or at least one’s country or community.

Is that what Pussy Riot have been up to? Note that the catalog descriptions of their actions are organized into three rubrics: Location, Context, and Reaction—and that the most common entry under Reaction is “nothing serious happened.” But when something serious does happen, it has to do with legal penalties: “Everyone was detained 3 times. Beatings, harassments, surveillance, slashed tires” or “Detention, day in police station.” And note that the actions include ones imposed on the group’s members, rather than organized by them: “140 Hours of Community Service 2018-19,” “Pyotr’s Poisoning 2018,” and so on.

As MAC director John Zeppetelli writes, Pussy Riot has “used the police state’s apparatus of repression and authoritarianism as a creative partner, engaging in an uneasy ‘dance with the devil.’” This is risky stuff. Prison time adds up, not to mention fines and extrajudicial violence. It takes incredible courage to keep exposing oneself to the wrath of a brutal regime without conscience. But while Pussy Riot’s interventions may be, as the catalog says, “desperate, sudden and joyous,” that joy seems very far away from hope. Does Pussy Riot really imagine that they can change Russia? Or even just change some minds? It doesn’t look that way. These sisters are doing it for themselves: trolling the government, the church, the oligarchs, and so on is its own reward.

Is it worth the beatings, imprisonment, and exile just to get under the skin of Russia’s rulers? The answer appears to be yes. It turns out to be a way of keeping the spirit free. And that’s why Pussy Riot’s work really does belong in an art museum. It is not performance art as activism; it is, rather, something like the performance of activism in a situation where true activist intervention has been rendered impossible. For the group’s members to have persisted in their efforts over more than a decade despite their having no realistic prospect of making a measurable impact on the reality of Russia in itself constitutes a vivid emblem of the unquenchable desire for change even in the absence of any means to satisfy such a desire. That’s the artistic core of Pussy Riot’s work. They make rebelliousness an aesthetic quality in itself—one that can move us, and that is serious in its implications.

How will this rebelliousness manifest itself now that many of Pussy Riot’s members are living outside Russia? Will they rebel against their new hosts? I hope so. One action documented here is the hanging of a banner at Trump Tower in New York in 2017 in support of Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian film director who was arrested in Crimea when Russia invaded that territory in 2014. It caused a stir, but, of course, Pussy Riot’s pro-Ukrainian anti-Putin stance is music to the ears of most of us in the West. It’s consumable at no risk. Rebelliousness is hard to maintain as it devolves into entertainment. Perhaps this problem was already inherent in Pussy Riot’s strategy of divertingly high-spirited confrontation. In a way, it mirrored too well the topsy-turvy image-world of Putin’s Russia, which maintains itself through the mere performance of law, of elections, and even (in its propaganda against Ukraine) of antifascism. Now the task should be to cultivate more deeply the inner freedom without which Pussy Riot’s opposition to Putin could not have happened, and which may be even more desperately needed in a West that is increasingly listing toward its own forms of authoritarianism.

Zagreb-based artist David MaljkoviÄ? is known for regularly reconfiguring his work and reflecting on its exhibition history. Curated by VOX director Marie J. Jean, MaljkoviÄ?’s first major Canadian exhibition spanned four rooms and included 18 pieces made between 2003 and 2016, many of which have multiple past and present iterations. For instance, A Long Day for the Form, first shown at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2012, appears in two versions here. In one of these, originally conceived for Vienna’s Georg Kargl Fine Arts in 2014, a rectangular platform made of wallboard is built around one of the gallery’s square columns. (In Vienna, visitors had to walk over the platform to reach another room, but not at VOX, where it was much smaller.) A second square hole contains an open cardboard box holding a modernist bronze sculpture “protected” by green packing peanuts. The sound of crickets emitted by the work magnifies the sense of emptiness: while the packing material fills the void around the modernist sculpture (which resembles the kind produced under Yugoslav Socialism), only crickets break the silence enveloping the once-utopian form. 

Yugoslav sculptor Vojin BakiÄ?’s World War II monument on Petrova Gora, a mountain range in central Croatia, pops up frequently in MaljkoviÄ?’s work. Completed in 1981, the steel-clad architectural structure commemorates a failed anti-Fascist uprising and once housed a war museum. Today, missing panels of the curving facade reveal a derelict interior. At VOX, the slide-show work In Low Resolution (2014) offered a few glimpses of the monument. In the 80 projected photographs, pixels “redact” the main objects of interest, which may be anything from a discarded piece of furniture to an element in one of MaljkoviÄ?’s exhibitions. In several slides, the pixelated object is a model of BakiÄ?’s structure, its form so iconic that it remains identifiable. Atop the model is a silver soccer ball. The viewer familiar with MaljkoviÄ?’s work might recognize the ball as a prop from his film trilogy Scene for a New Heritage (2004-06), which imagines people from the year 2045 visiting Petrova Gora on Marshal Tito’s birthday. 

The slides were projected onto a mural-size, black-and-white inkjet print, which was titled f_l_a_u_b_e_r_t, after the Instagram user who shared the photograph. One of seven Instagram images printed on the walls throughout the exhibition, it depicted In Low Resolution as the piece was installed at Metro Pictures (the artist’s New York gallery), where the screen for the piece was an even earlier photo that the artist took of projector screens during a show of his at the Palais de Tokyo. This multiplying documentation highlights the self-reflexive character of MaljkoviÄ?’s practice, acknowledging the important role that social media plays today in constructing art’s sense of both past and present. MaljkoviÄ? remains fascinated by different modalities of time. Between the disappointments of the past and the utopian future once projected by obsolete modernism, the present exists in a kind of parallax view, a distortion produced by lines of sight that never converge.

An exhibition with four curators, an artistic director—Sylvie Fortin—who came on board relatively late, and a mission to combine local Quebec, Canadian and international artists could easily be a patchwork affair. Instead, this thoughtful, compelling exhibition constitutes a dramatic improvement for the Montreal Biennale, and compares favorably with more renowned biennials elsewhere. Titled “Looking Forward” (“L’avenir“ in French), the show takes place mostly in the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; off-site venues include Arsenal art contemporain, the Darling Foundry and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Throughout, diverse works speculate about what is to come, however alluring or unsettling that may be.

A highlight is The Prophets (2013-14), by the Canadian duo Richard Ighby and Marilou Lemmens. A long, spindly table displays miniature, seemingly abstract, minimalist sculptures made from string, wire, bamboo sticks and colored acetate. Playful and enchanting, these exceptionally un-monumental sculptures, each with a handwritten label, are based on graphs and charts in scholarly economic forecasts, such as “Four Possible Steady State Paths of Growth.” The precariousness of the mini-sculptures subtly suggests that these authoritative forecasts may prove flimsy in an unruly future. Ryan Gander’s Tomorrow’s Achievements (2014), four motorized curtains intermittently moving around a room, is comical and apt: a fluctuating system of revelation and concealment. Miami-based Jillian Mayer’s series “400 Nudes” (2014) consists of startling takeaway photos in which her face has been digitally grafted onto nude female selfies found on websites. She’s a protean figure in a burgeoning world of exhibitionism, voyeurism and self-presentation.

With artists including Shirin Neshat (who exhibits the sumptuous 2013 video Illusions & Mirrors, starring Natalie Portman) and Thomas Hirschhorn (whose hard-hitting 2012 video Touching Reality shows gruesome scenes of war and carnage), the Biennale has ample star power. Captivating works by less familiar artists, however, make for abundant discoveries. In Canadian Lynne Marsh’s enthralling video Anna and the Tower (2014), a young woman, recently trained as an air traffic controller, crisply directs phantom airplanes to imaginary destinations from the control tower of an empty airport in Magdeburg, Germany. Shots of the woman, the silent airport and the sublime landscape meld in scenes of anticipation and desolation. In Egyptian artist Basim Magdy’s neighboring film The Dent (2014), an enigmatic text hinting at what life was like in an indeterminate place and era—perhaps located in the past, or perhaps in the future, when big dreams have decisively faltered—is superimposed on images of a military parade, an elephant, a town seen from an airplane high above it, a caged bird and many other subjects.

Time is a recurring motif. Anton Vidokle and Pelin Tan’s three-channel video installation 2084: a science fiction show (2012-14) portrays an advanced era in which telepathic conversation can occur between entities like a donkey and a plant; and in Norwegian Ann Lislegaard’s Time Machine (2011), an animated, nervous, talking fox, projected onto a mirror structure, stutters and grasps for language while recounting its visit to a remote future. New Zealander Simon Denny’s colorful, digitally printed canvases, many attached to metal railings channeling visitors through multiple corridors, refer to a 2012 Munich conference of digital-era bigwigs. You are inundated with images, quotes and ideologies of fabulously wealthy leaders busily devising our future. The Montreal-based Mohawk artist Skawennati offers the tremendous “TimeTraveller^TM” (2008-13)—nine machinimas (films made by using computer graphics engines) featuring two smart, sexy and utterly cool Mohawks who use magical glasses and computers to visit often harrowing past events (including an Aztec sacrificial ceremony and the violent 1862 conflict between Dakota Sioux and white Minnesota settlers). Ultimately, they relocate to a spectacular future in 2121.

Water is another motif throughout the Biennale. In Swiss artist Ursula Biemann’s searing video Deep Weather (2013), a whispering female voice speaks of fossil fuel consumption and drastic climate change as you see bleak tar pits in Alberta, smoking factories and hundreds of brightly clad Bangladeshis sandbagging their coast, trying to keep the rising sea at bay.

Time and water converge in Berlin-based Czech artist Klara Hobza’s wonderful 10-channel video and sound installation lining two walls of a stairway (Diving Through Europe-Immersion Series, 2014). Hobza is carrying out a years-long scuba-diving journey—illegally and in multiple stages—through bodies of water across Europe, including the North Sea, the Rhine River and, finally, the Black Sea. The monitors show short excerpts: Hobza plunging into canals, inching her way past swans and container ships, threatened by a passing ship, seeking solace in a chapel and propelling herself through powerful, murky waters. She’s an antic, vulnerable, charismatic explorer navigating with difficulty toward an uncertain future.

It was difficult not to find reflections of that contemplative hour, when inherent absurdity brings renewed perspectives, in Montreal artist Pascal Grandmaison’s recent exhibition “La limite de l’écho” (The Limit of the Echo). Comprising an assortment of new works—two video pieces, a series of 12 photographs and five plaster sculptures (all 2013)—the exhibition was a study of rational thought turned on end by a poetic reversal of the way we see and experience the lived world.

The opening work was Nostalgia #1, which directly draws on the story of Sisyphus. Displayed on a vertical plasma screen, the 10-minute video tracks a rock tied with rope as it moves across stone-pocked pavement. The tightly framed footage, shot at a crystal clear 230 frames per second and running in slow motion, offers fantastically surreal detail, made all the more strange once you realize that it is playing in reverse. Here, it is the rock that seems to pull the rope, the sequence defying the fundamental order of things and questioning the gravity of a Sisyphean fate.

This perceptual disorientation continued in “Second regard,” a series of photographs taken at the Grutas de Cacahuamilpa Caverns in Guerrero, Mexico. It is only in glimpsing what seem like toy-size tourist walkways that the viewer discerns the alien proportions of the stalactite- and stalagmite-filled caves. For Grandmaison, though, the absurdity of these images pivots on darkness and light. First explored by torchlight, where impressions of the space were necessarily assembled in the viewer’s mind, these caves are now sites of theatrical tourism where perspective is dramatically staged in spotlit mise-en-scènes. Therein lie the work’s central concerns: How does the contrast between imagination and spectacle affect reality? And what does it mean to illuminate the unseen?

Grandmaison’s considerations of the natural order inverted and in flux culminate in his La main du rêve (The Hand of the Dream). The large-scale video projection takes viewers on a 45-minute ramble through the wilds of Quebec’s Laurentian region. As in Nostalgia #1, Grandmaison has slowed and reversed his high-definition footage to surreal effect. Shattered trunks of moss-covered trees reassemble; turbulent surfaces of lakes calm and eject previously submerged rocks; dead leaves and sticks float back into the air. There is a scientific precision to it all, a naturalist’s fantasy of the forest regenerating itself. Though tinged with melancholy, Grandmaison’s focused subversion suggests a hopeful vision of renewal. It’s a view that returns to Sisyphus and Camus. “Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world,” Camus writes at the end of his closing chapter. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

There’s a dizzy logic to the work of Montreal artist Michel de Broin. Take, for instance, his sculpture Révolution, a maquette version of which opened his recent survey exhibition at the MACM. Commissioned in 2010 for the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes, France, the massive work (which remains in France) features a knotted, 100-foot-long steel staircase designed to confound notions of beginning and end. As viewers mount and descend the looping, five-story-high construction, there is, as de Broin explains it, a progressive sense not only of physical but also of psychological disorientation, a liminal confusion that disrupts the expected linear trajectory of progress. The work’s path ends where it begins: a perpetual return to the realization that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

That illusion of progress—both personal and collective—was just as palpable in the 18½-inch-high model (2010) of Révolution on view at the MACM. Here in its prototype form, the work took on a broader critical measure of failed utopias with obvious formal ties to Tatlin’s unrealized Monument to the Third International. Shown alongside de Broin’s 16mm-film loop One Hundred Paces (2010)—which tracks convent security guards silently pacing the sculpture’s stairs in a kind of absurdist performance, neatly set to the clicking rhythm in the gallery of 100 feet of black-and-white film through the projector—the works established a complex back and forth between form and function, action and reaction, idea and object, all framed in the seemingly mundane routine of walking up and down stairs.

A mainstay on the Canadian contemporary art scene for more than two decades, de Broin’s work has long hovered around these sorts of oppositional concerns in a heady mix of philosophical conundrums, rigorous mechanical curiosity and the unexpected conceptual dynamics of everyday life. The exhibition, which marked a homecoming of sorts for the 43-year-old artist, who spent the better part of the last 10 years living and working in Paris and Berlin, gathered these forces together in a selection of 30 pieces that unfolded not as finite set pieces, but rather as spiraling experiments in residual meaning and understanding.

Some works in the show did carry a wry political edge. For Keep on Smoking (2005), de Broin “reverse-engineered” a 10-speed bicycle into a pedal-powered smoke generator in an ironic turn on “greenwashing” ideology. His Blue Monochrome (2003) transformed a found Dumpster into a fully functioning personal whirlpool hot tub. In The Abyss of Liberty (2013), a bronze-cast model of the Statue of Liberty is upturned, its torch embedded in the gallery floor and its iconic form revealed as a hollow shell. And in Blowback (2013), a pair of 105mm Howitzer field cannons, custom-built by de Broin, have been rendered impotent, or explosively self-destructive, joined at the nozzles by an arching extension.

Indeed, for all of the technical wit and potential irreverence in de Broin’s diverse practice, its common thread remains an overriding impetus to rethink, and challenge, the absurdities and anxieties of the status quo. It’s a strategy of perceptual reversal summed up in a work like Stick to Resist (2013), a group of sculptures modeled after improvised explosive devices with digital counters. The pieces were only powerful magnets fixed to leaning metal supports, immovable until the countdown ended. The minute the exhibition closed, the provocative sculptures, instead of detonating,  dropped inert to the gallery floor—but they continued to explode in the mind.