Manif d’art 12: Splitting Ice
The Québec City Biennial
The ILULIAQ installation by Jessie Kleemann © Photo: Anne MieBak
Splitting Ice: The Only Winter Biennial of Contemporary Art in North America
February 28 – April 19, 2026 | Québec City
Manif d’art 12 – The Québec City Biennial stands as a singular event on the international contemporary art scene. As the only winter art biennial in North America, it transforms winter—often perceived as a constraint—into a site of artistic experimentation and critical inquiry.
From February 28 to April 19, 2026, more than 60 artists from Québec, Canada, and around the world will gather in Québec City for a bold edition that examines territory, the body, and climate transformation through a distinctly northern lens.
A Powerful Theme: Splitting Ice / Briser la glace
Manif d’art 12 explores Splitting Ice / Briser la glace as both a poetic and political gesture. This edition reflects on winter not as a backdrop, but as an active material—where snow, ice, thaw, and blizzard become forces to create with, perform through, question, and reimagine.
At a time of accelerating climate disruption, northern landscapes are revealed as fragile, shifting, and deeply political. Water, in its many states, emerges as a recurring motif—symbolizing fragility, resistance, memory, and transformation. Artists engage with winter as a lived condition, one that shapes bodies, movement, and ways of inhabiting space.
The Biennial also draws inspiration from historic artistic gestures rooted in the Québec context, notably Danse dans la neige (1948) by Françoise Sullivan. This iconic performance, created in direct dialogue with the winter landscape, underscores an intergenerational lineage of embodied practices that continue to resonate today.
Through exhibitions, performances, installations, storytelling, and public art, Manif d’art 12 offers a sensory and reflective experience—connecting contemporary art, Québec territory, and global ecological urgencies. It is an invitation to slow down, to feel, and to imagine new ways of inhabiting a warming world.
Details of L’arrêt / Promenade parmi les raffineries de pétrole (1973) by Françoise Sullivan. Photo: Alex Neumann
Curator: Didier Morelli
The Biennial is curated by Didier Morelli, an art historian, critic, and interdisciplinary artist based between Montréal and Toronto. A FRQSC postdoctoral fellow affiliated with Concordia University and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Morelli’s research focuses on second-wave feminist performance and its subversion of urban space in the 1970s.
His writing has appeared in Art Journal, C Magazine, Esse, CBC Arts, and The Drama Review (TDR), among others. At Manif d’art 12, he brings together practices that are situated, embodied, and deeply attentive to questions of territory and climate.
A Human-Scale Biennial Rooted in Place
Manif d’art 12 unfolds across more than 40 venues throughout Québec City and neighbouring regions, from Saint-Roch to Montcalm, from Wendake to Lévis, and extending as far as Joliette. Museums, galleries, artist-run centres, libraries, and community spaces host exhibitions and projects developed specifically for the Biennial.
This distributed format reflects a strong commitment to accessibility, cultural mediation, and territorial collaboration. Rather than concentrating art in a single site, the Biennial invites audiences to experience contemporary art in close dialogue with local communities and everyday urban spaces.
Central Exhibition: Splitting Ice / Briser la glace
Dates: February 28 – April 19, 2026
Location: Espace Quatre Cents, Old Port of Québec
At the heart of the Biennial, the central exhibition takes place at Espace Quatre Cents, located in Québec City’s Old Port. Under Didier Morelli’s curatorship, the space becomes a luminous laboratory for installations, video works, sculpture, and immersive environments exploring winter, climate, and the body.
Discover the central exhibition
Public Art, Emerging Voices, and Satellite Projects
Beyond gallery walls, Manif d’art 12 extends into the public realm. Outdoor installations, site-specific gestures, moving performances, and poetic interventions invite visitors to traverse the city differently—even in the heart of winter. Québec itself becomes an open-air exhibition space.
The Young Curators Program, presented by Commission de la capitale nationale du Québec, highlights emerging curatorial practices, offering a vital platform for new voices. In parallel, numerous satellite activities—including exhibitions, screenings, workshops, and public programs—are presented in collaboration with partner galleries, artist-run centres, museums, and cultural institutions.
An Invitation to Experience Winter Otherwise
More than a major contemporary art event, Manif d’art 12 proposes a shared experience of winter as a living, evolving condition. By embracing cold, slowness, and transformation, the Biennial invites audiences to rethink their relationship to northern environments—and to one another.
In a world shaped by climate change, Splitting Ice / Briser la glace asks how we might inhabit our territories with greater care, attention, and imagination.
Manif d’art
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