The Lena Ghio Paradox/Le Paradoxe Lena Ghio: F(R)ICTION Art et Jeux 15.10

An event produced by ELEKTRA

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When the Game Becomes Art: ELEKTRA’s Radical Reimagining of Play

At Montréal’s eighth ELEKTRA International Digital Art Biennial, F(R)ICTION: Art and Games dismantles the boundaries between artistic expression and interactive experience, revealing the video game as a medium capable of confronting the deepest anxieties, exclusions, and contradictions of contemporary life.

The ARTISTS

There is something quietly revolutionary about an artwork that refuses to be admired from a distance. It demands a hand, a decision, a willingness to enter its unstable universe without the reassurance that one will understand it, much less emerge victorious. At the eighth edition of the ELEKTRA International Digital Art Biennial, F(R)ICTION: Art and Games makes this proposition the foundation of an expansive and intellectually adventurous exhibition. Bringing together approximately forty artists across four Montréal venues, the biennial confronts an art world that has too often regarded video games as commercial entertainment rather than a legitimate vehicle for serious artistic inquiry. Curated by Lynn Hughes and Ida Toft, the exhibition does more than rehabilitate a neglected medium. It challenges the very assumptions by which art is distinguished from entertainment, participation from contemplation, and cultural significance from economic value.

The stakes are considerable. As Hughes observes, the video game industry has acquired an economic and sociological importance that surpasses that of the film and music industries combined. The statement invites reflection not merely on the scale of gaming but on the changing geography of cultural production. The conventional art world, with its galleries, museums, collectors, and established systems of patronage, no longer possesses an uncontested claim to the visual imagination of the age. Games have become formidable arenas for the employment of artists, the circulation of images, and the construction of shared worlds. Yet the magnitude of the commercial industry should not be confused with the prosperity of the independent artist. The fact that gaming commands immense resources does not mean that those resources flow equitably toward experimental creators. Rather, the exhibition exposes a revealing contradiction: a medium of extraordinary cultural and financial power can still marginalize the very practices that test its imaginative limits.

In the center: curator Lynn Hughes

In the center: curator Ida Toft

At Arsenal Contemporary Art, the principal exhibition space, this contradiction becomes an invitation to reconsider what a game can be. The familiar vocabulary of the commercial product—objectives, rewards, progression, polished graphics, predictable gratification—is repeatedly unsettled. Some works offer no victory condition; others seem deliberately fragile, technically awkward, visually unremarkable, or even broken. To an audience accustomed to the seamless engineering of mainstream games, these experiences may initially appear to be failures of design. But that apparent failure is frequently the point. Toft, whose research and artistic practice have long explored experimental games, draws attention to forms that resist conventional expectations: non-games without conventional goals, fragile games that expose emotional or technical vulnerability, and trash games that use poor programming or glitches as expressive devices. Here, imperfection becomes a language. The malfunction is no longer an obstacle to meaning; it may be the means by which meaning enters.

The exhibition's most consequential achievement lies in its refusal to impose a single definition of artistic legitimacy on this unruly territory. Hughes brings decades of experience across painting, installation, photography, and interactive art, while Toft contributes a sustained engagement with experimental game-making and its international communities. Their collaboration connects two traditions that have often developed in isolation: contemporary artists who adopt games as a medium and designers who approach game-making as an artistic practice in its own right. The resulting encounter feels less like an annexation of gaming by the art establishment than an overdue recognition of a shared field. The works suggest that games need not imitate cinema, resemble painting, or justify themselves through technological sophistication. Their distinctive artistic possibility lies in the relationship they establish between a designed environment and the person who enters it.

That relationship can be playful, disorienting, intimate, or politically unsettling. Afrane Makof's VGAS-T26, which draws on the instantly recognizable logic of Tetris, turns the mechanics of mass consumption into a subject for scrutiny. The familiarity of the reference provides an accessible entrance, but recognition is only the beginning: the structure of play becomes a means of questioning the habits that organize everyday life. In orange pekoe, Vanny employs an eight-bit aesthetic to foreground Anishinaabe community, demonstrating how a visual language frequently associated with technological nostalgia can also sustain cultural affirmation. These works do not simply insert social messages into entertaining formats. They use the conventions of gaming themselves—the repetition, rules, spatial organization, and demands placed on the player—to reconsider how culture is consumed, remembered, and represented.

Elsewhere, the exhibition approaches psychological vulnerability and the contested terrain of popular culture. Works by Davey Wreden and Leo Castañeda engage depression and social anxiety, subjects whose inwardness can be difficult to convey through conventional visual representation. Laureline Chiapello reconsiders female pleasure, while A. M. Darke recruits Kanye West into a reworking of the guessing game Guess Who?, and Raphaëll Maïwen transforms the public mythology surrounding Katy Perry into the material of horror. Such gestures are potentially irreverent, but their significance extends beyond provocation. Celebrity, identity, and psychological distress become systems to be manipulated and examined rather than images passively consumed. The player is no longer merely a spectator of representation; participation makes the act of interpretation part of the artwork's unfolding.

The exhibition's more immersive works extend this inquiry into the unstable boundaries between the human and the digital. The Montréal collective aenl's /lick approaches endangered digital species through a laboratory-like aesthetic, directing attention toward forms of disappearance that exist beyond the familiar categories of ecological loss. Its subject is a digital environment that is neither immaterial nor immune to extinction. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's monumental The Rebirthing Room, meanwhile, proposes personal and social transformation through immersion, making the exhibition's concern with identity both experiential and collective. Such works are particularly effective at demonstrating that interactivity need not be synonymous with freedom. Every game establishes conditions; every system determines, at least partially, what can be seen, attempted, or achieved. By exposing those conditions, experimental games can reveal the politics embedded in seemingly neutral structures.

The inclusion of Bernie DeKoven and Jaron Lanier's Alien Garden (1982), presented on period Atari hardware, supplies an essential historical counterpoint. So does Suzanne Treister's Fictional Videogame Stills (1991–92). These works remind visitors that experimental gaming did not suddenly become artistically interesting when contemporary institutions discovered it. Its alternative histories stretch back decades, even as its visibility within contemporary art has fluctuated. The biennial therefore performs a corrective act of cultural memory, restoring a lineage that risks being obscured by an industry perpetually fascinated with novelty. What appears fashionable today has often survived through the persistence of artists working outside dominant commercial expectations.

Equally important is the exhibition's international and generational breadth, encompassing artists from South Korea, Ghana, Nigeria, Hong Kong, South America, the United States, and elsewhere, alongside Québec and Canadian practitioners, including Indigenous artists. LGBTQ+ perspectives and a range of lived experiences complicate any notion that gaming possesses a singular cultural identity. The exhibition's inclusive ambitions are not simply a matter of representation on the wall. They are connected to its insistence that the rules of participation, the possibilities of identification, and the authority to construct digital worlds remain open to challenge. Nor must every visitor become a player. Those reluctant to take control of a game can watch another person navigate it, discovering that spectatorship, too, can be a form of attention.

Across its four Montréal locations—Arsenal Contemporary Art, ELEKTRA Gallery, Concordia University's 4TH SPACE, and SONOLUX HOTEL—the biennial offers thirty-five game-artworks and more than one hundred hours of possible gameplay. No single visit can exhaust its contents, an unusual proposition in an exhibition culture often organized around the efficient consumption of objects. The invitation to return without additional admission transforms repetition into a curatorial principle: familiarity may reveal what first appeared obscure, while another player's decisions can disclose possibilities one never encountered alone. The accompanying temporary library of Québec media arts, assembled by Nathalie Bachand and Alessandro Ludovico, extends this spirit of discovery through an archive of nearly three hundred cultural magazines and exhibition programs. It situates digital experimentation within a wider ecology of documentation, criticism, and artistic memory.

F(R)ICTION is not without a productive difficulty: works that deliberately resist conventional play may frustrate visitors expecting immediate pleasure or easily decipherable meaning. But that resistance is also its argument. An artwork need not reward attention with instant comprehension, any more than a game must culminate in triumph to justify the time invested in it. The exhibition asks its audience to exchange mastery for curiosity and consumption for encounter. In doing so, ELEKTRA makes a persuasive case that the future of artistic gaming depends not on competing with the commercial industry's technical spectacle but on preserving spaces where other possibilities can be imagined. In an era when nearly every experience is pressured to become frictionless, measurable, and profitable, there is genuine radicalism in a game that hesitates, breaks, refuses to entertain, or leaves its player without an answer. Sometimes the most revealing move is the one that leads nowhere. Sometimes the game begins precisely where winning ends.

Laureline Chiapello and above her game CLTRS a game where the player travels from one luscious environment to the other while the avatar is a clitoris happily floating in pink elegance.

LENA GHIO

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