Curated by Lesley Johnstone and Monika Kin Gagnon

On the occasion of Canada’s Sesquicentennial, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal will revisit Expo 67, the now-legendary centennial celebration launched in April 1967 in this Québécois city with the theme “Man and His World.” Recalled less for its universalizing humanist ideals than for its dramatic architectural structures and experimental cinematic and multimedia works, Expo 67 presented an optimistic world filled with megastructures, multiscreen environments, monorails, and other media-technical innovations whose technofetishism, like the political protests that accompanied the event (including some that erupted around the fair itself), resonates with our present moment. For “In Search of Expo 67,” sixteen contemporary Canadian artists have been invited to bridge the fifty-year span between the show’s first iteration and its revisitation, via new works developed using documentation of this extraordinary precedent. Beyond highlighting connections, by re-creating earlier works using new technologies the show and attendant catalogue will no doubt also speak compellingly to how things have changed for both “man” and “his world.”

— Felicity Scott