A year to inhabit time
at the MMFA
Five museum exhibitions probing time, memory, and what shapes our identity
March 17, 2026
This year, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is presenting five exhibitions that engage with time, memory, and identity. Far from being a simple succession of major events, the programme weaves a narrative that runs from the marbles of ancient Rome to the thread installations of Chiharu Shiota, from Richard Avedon’s razor‑sharp portraits to Allison Katz’s playful canvases, with a modernist detour through Anne Kahane’s universe.
Each exhibition can be experienced on its own, but it takes on its full meaning when seen as a cycle to be explored over the course of the year. Here are a few ideas to help you plan your encounters with the museum… and with yourself.
Richard Avedon: facing ourselves as we age
The season opens with Richard Avedon: Immortal. Portraits of Aging, 1951–2004, a major exhibition devoted to the theme of aging that brings together decades of portraits. Although it features key figures from 20th‑century culture, its real subject remains what time does to faces, and the way Avedon transforms that reality into images of almost theatrical intensity.
From left to right: Richard Avedon (1923-2004), Gloria Swanson, Actor, New York, September 4, 1980, | William Casby, Born into Slavery, Algiers, Louisiana, March 24, 1963 | Marcel Duchamp, Artist, New York, January 31, 1958. Courtesy of Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona. Richard Avedon Archive, gift of the artist. © The Richard Avedon Foundation
Presented as a challenge to the passing of time, the exhibition emphasizes the universal nature of this confrontation with mortality, far beyond the glamour of the people portrayed. For WestmountMag.ca readers, accustomed to discovering portraits of artists, neighbours, and community leaders, this immersion in the intimacy of the human face may well become a show to revisit more than once during the season.
The Torlonia Collection: Rome in Montreal
From spring onward, the setting changes: with The Torlonia Collection: Masterpieces of Roman Sculpture, the MMFA hosts an exceptional selection of ancient marbles from one of the most important private collections in the world. Statues, busts, reliefs, and sarcophagi travel from Rome to Montreal after high‑profile stops in major European and North American museums.
From left to right: Statue of Crouching Aphrodite, 1st c., Roman, Imperial Period | Portrait of a Young Woman, known as the Maiden of Vulci, mid-1st c. BCE, Roman, late Republican Period. | Portrait of a Man, known as the Old Man of Otricoli, mid-1st c. BCE, Roman, late Republican Period. Torlonia Collection, Rome. © Fondazione Torlonia. Photos Lorenzo De Masi
Visitors will encounter portraits of emperors, mythological figures, and architectural fragments, revealing how Roman sculpture staged power, beauty, and daily life.
Chiharu Shiota: mapping invisible ties
In the fall, the museum is transformed into a woven environment by Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles, a large‑scale retrospective of the Japanese‑born, Berlin‑based artist. Her visual language is instantly recognizable: monumental webs of red, black, or white thread that seem to map the invisible connections between people, memory, loss, and our desire to be linked to others.
Chiharu Shiota, Uncertain Journey (2016–2019), in the exhibition Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2019. Photo: Sunhi Mang. Courtesy of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
Spanning more than twenty‑five years, the exhibition includes immersive installations, sculptures, drawings, performance videos, and materials from stage productions. Where the Torlonia marbles fix gestures and features in stone, Shiota gives form to the ephemeral – those threads that bind us, vibrate, and sometimes break. This is a must‑see for anyone who loves exhibitions that are as physical and spatial as they are conceptual.
Allison Katz: a game of mind and memory
Alongside Shiota, the MMFA highlights a voice rooted in Montreal with Allison Katz: Jeu d’esprit, the artist’s first solo show in a Quebec institution. Born here and educated at Concordia and Columbia, Katz has developed a painterly practice nourished by psychoanalytic theory, popular culture, and art history.
In the same spirit, the MMFA then shines a spotlight on a Montreal‑born voice with Allison Katz.
At the museum, the exhibition is conceived as a “game” for visitors to play. Moving from work to work, you piece together fragments related to the artist’s biography, memories, coincidences, and influences that collectively question what makes up an identity. It is an essential stop for those following Montreal’s contemporary scene and curious about how an artist from here situates herself on the international stage.
Anne Kahane: a modernist to rediscover
Towards the end of the year, the cycle closes with a key figure in Montreal’s artistic history: Anne Kahane: Structures. Born in Austria but a long‑time Montrealer, Kahane (1924–2023) was one of the strong voices of Canadian modernism, the first woman to represent the country at the Venice Biennale in the 1950s and the creator of many public commissions.
The exhibition sets her sculptures alongside works on paper, revealing the connections between her two‑ and three‑dimensional investigations, between drawing and volume. For visitors, it offers an opportunity to rediscover an oeuvre that explores the human condition through structure, fragmentation, and rhythm, and to appreciate the role of women artists in building the visual environment we inhabit every day.
Taken together, these five exhibitions form a constellation: Avedon’s captured faces, the idealized bodies of ancient Rome, Shiota’s vibrating networks, Katz’s narrative paintings, and Kahane’s modernist constructions. It is a year‑long exploration of how art inhabits time – from Antiquity to the present.
Images: Courtesy of Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. All rights reserved
