About — BANAL ART

Set against the backdrop of intensifying global polarization, Annabelle Brault, José Cortés, Veronica Mockler, Léah Snider and Vivek Venkatesh co-found BANAL,
a collective working through music, image, and performance art. Staging an inquiry into the spectacle of the everyday, BANAL asks how we come to banalize the inhumanity to which we are subjected to.

After years of straddling the boundaries between academia and professional practice—with research in the social sciences, education, fine arts, and the creative arts therapies—these five Montréal-based practitioners decided to unite under BANAL, setting aside their academic moorings to freely explore the rampant spread of extreme hate speech, misinformation, and polarization in present-day society.

Already having developed a reputation for its socially-charged activation of public opinion BANAL was then invited by Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACM) to create a performance in response to Pussy Riot’s Velvet Terrorism. During the course of four months, BANAL collected museum visitors’ anonymized SMS confessions which it integrated into a uniquely unnerving karaoke session with audience members at the MACM, on February 22, 2024.

Dedicated to public engagement, BANAL’s sonic and visual events invite different audiences to access what our societies routinely render unseen, unheard, and unspeakable. Deliberately pitting spectatorship against participation, BANAL uses stratified, distorted, vibey bass and synth with the bureaucratic hymns of approval stamping, form printing, and ribbon cutting. Against a backdrop of dogmatic video and action iconography, the collective invites you to confront the morally murky middle of what renders you uncomfortable; of what you don’t understand about yourselves and the Other.

BANAL’s approach to the staging of its events is based on the participatory intervention it wishes to offer its public, whether that is through remixed oral history recordings, anonymous SMS messages, or controversial surveys. As an entity equally grounded in sound and visual art, performances are conceived through a series of open conversations and rehearsals, both within the collective itself and with invited collaborators. Each performance is understood as a new piece in which stage and interaction design, video projection, lighting, music scores and durational performance are researched, created, and workshopped in response to the public engagement at stake in the given locale.

The debut performance of BANAL was held on December 8, 2023 after a week-long residency at the Montréal, Arts, Interculturels (MAI) gallery.

The 75-minute performance comprised original dark-pop tracks that scored a series of interventions, including the construction of an opaque vinyl wall, the live mix of an oral history sample from a healthcare Québec worker, and two BANAL members exposing their faces to the heat of industrial spotlights until they could no longer endure it.

BANAL’s most recent work took place in Mexico as part of the collective’s cross-national project titled Dark Diplomacy. During a first artist residency in Mexico City’s Centro de Cultura Digital (CCD) in the summer of 2024, BANAL conducted a workshop with local artists with whom it activated its street data collection methodology rooted in musical performance.

Stoking some of the biases that shape Mexican-Canadian relations, the opinions of over 225 individuals were gathered across the two countries and was showcased later that summer in Museo de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara City as the headline for Doña Pancha Fest.

In 2025, taking their exploration of international relations to another level, BANAL worked over the course of 10 days in Guadalajara’s Iglesia Primitiva Studio—known for radical critical art and parties—in close collaboration with local artists Cristian Franco, Mónica Leyva, and Diego Orendain. The residency culminated in a studio performance, where dozens of Guadalajara locals packed into this cathedral-like industrial studio to witness a heightened unravelling of Québec’s secular crusade: Mexican, Jewish, and Indian vernaculars—among others—were interwoven throughout, with moments such as a jukebox interrupting the performance with a ranchera and a live Spanish pronunciation drill.