A biennale gives experimental games a month in Montreal

From Oct. 15 to Nov. 15, Arsenal Contemporary Art in Montreal belongs to experimental games. ELEKTRA has themed its 2026 biennale F(R)ICTION: Art & Games: 38 artists across the venue, curated by Lynn Hughes and Ida Toft, who frame friction "as a condition for movement and change" rather than a flaw to design away.

The roster reads like a Killscreen index. Anna Anthropy, Pippin Barr, Robert Yang, Liz Ryerson, Davey Wreden and Jaron Lanier are all in. Ayoung Kim brings Delivery Dancer Simulation, Mélanie Courtinat Indulto, Kara Stone Known Mysteries, Chapter 1, and the Paris studio Medulla the perfectly titled Where Do Dead Malls Go?. Studio Oleomingus, whose impossible colonial architectures we covered in 2020, shows The Indifferent Wonder of Edible Places, and Dominik Konečný's Hadr, a meditation on a floating sheet of cloth, is in the mix too.

What makes this more than a very good group show is the curatorial wager. Hughes and Toft put contemporary artists who use games next to the experimental game-making communities that have been at this since the 1980s, and decline to treat the two as different species. Galleries and games keep borrowing each other's rooms at small scale, like the unplayable games that filled a Peckham gallery in August; a biennale handing the form a full month at Arsenal is commitment of a different order.

Word came through the Distraction collective's announcement, three of whose members have work in the show. It opens Oct. 15 and closes Nov. 15, so a fall trip to Montreal is a must!