By Anaïs Castro
Anaïs Castro is a curator and writer based in New York and Montreal. Over the past fifteen years, she has held positions at various institutions, including Arsenal Contemporary Art, Art Mûr, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and Stills - Scotland’s Centre for Photography. She worked alongside Gaëtane Verna as an Assistant Curator on Kapwani Kiwanga’s project for the Canada Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.
Montreal's Grand Quay stands as a foundational site in the history of Montreal, where layers of time and memory converge. It was here that the first encounters between Indigenous peoples and Europeans unfolded, and where, in the years that followed, goods, materials, and waves of immigrants arrived, shaping the evolving fabric of the city. Yet, long before colonization, the St. Lawrence River was already a vital artery of movement, lined with spaces of exchange, negotiation, and coexistence—its significance firmly rooted in Indigenous presence. Today, the Grand Quay remains a palimpsest of maritime, industrial, and Indigenous histories. Reimagined as a cultural and civic space, it remains a symbol of the migration paths, sharing of knowledge, and profound economic transformations that have shaped Montreal across centuries.
It is within this layered historical context that the exhibition unfolds, exploring the inextricable relationship between memory and contemporary art. Conceived as mnemonic devices, artworks function as vessels of both personal and collective memory. As a physical manifestation of thought and experience, the works brought together for this project tap into personal narratives, collective history, and shared trauma. The exhibition highlights how memory is fluid, fragmented, constantly shifting within cultural and political landscapes. It is an act of reimagining, a perpetual recontextualization of our experience. Some artists recover forgotten voices, revisiting historical moments through acts of speculative remembrance, while others engage with intimate gestures of care and transmission—embodied in the preparation of food, the braiding of hair, or the rituals of mourning. The use of metal, wood, and textiles across multiple works is far from incidental; these materials echo the architecture of our built environments, the spaces that anchor our most cherished memories. of our built environments, the spaces that anchor our most cherished memories.
In this way, The past tense is always longer unfolds as a weaving of narratives and materials, where each work inscribes memory into form, gesture, and gaze. Moving between what was and what remains to be reimagined, the exhibition reveals how memory is not only preserved but also continuously reshaped—tracing the sensitive imprints of histories in perpetual transformation.
The exhibition features works by the following artists:
