Most exhibitions of video games fail for a boring, structural reason: you cannot play thirty-five games in ninety minutes, and a gallery ticket assumes you will try.
The 8th ELEKTRA Biennial — the Biennale internationale d’art numérique, BIAN — has solved that with a line of admin rather than a line of curatorial text. Its page states that after your first visit, your ticket gives unlimited access to the exhibition, and that you can return for free. For a show offering, by the organisers’ own count, over 100 hours of gameplay, that is the most consequential decision on the page.
F(R)ICTION: Art and Games runs from 15 October to 15 November 2026 at Arsenal Contemporary Art Montreal, 2020 William St. It is curated by Lynn Hughes and Ida Toft, and ELEKTRA describes it as bringing together about 40 artists from different generations and 35 game artworks.
The title is the argument
Remove the parenthetical R and “friction” becomes “fiction”. That is not decoration. The curatorial framing on ELEKTRA’s own page is blunt about what it is pushing against: “Video games have become an increasingly common form of contemporary artistic expression,” and the biennial asks visitors to “question the stereotype of the commercial video game as mere entertainment.”
Friction, in a commercial game, is a defect — the thing playtesting exists to sand off. Treated as a medium rather than a product, friction is where the work happens: the input that resists, the rule that will not bend, the loop that refuses to resolve. A show that gives you a month of free re-entry is making a wager that its works reward the second visit, which is a very different wager from the one an immersive-projection show makes.
What else is on, and when
The biennial is not one room. ELEKTRA lists a programme around it, and several items are still ahead:
- F(R)ICTION: Art & Games — 15 Oct to 15 Nov, Arsenal
- Temporary Library of Quebec Media Arts — 15 Oct to 15 Nov, Arsenal
- Lux Æterna (Ode to Light) — 16 Oct 2026 to 1 April 2027, SonoLux Hotel
- Meet and talk with the artists, a round table with live playthroughs — Sat 17 Oct, Arsenal
- 8-bit narratives with Vanny, a game design workshop — Sat 24 Oct, Arsenal
- CTRL + AI: Creative Agency At Play, on AI and human agency — Mon 26 Oct, 4th Space, Concordia University
- Solar Power and Games with Lee Wilkins, a handcraft workshop — Sat 7 Nov, Arsenal
- Everything Heals, Even This, dark art-games — 11 Sept to 12 Dec, ELEKTRA Gallery
Three of those — the Vanny workshop, the Concordia panel and Lee Wilkins’s solar-power session — are the kind of programming that a games biennial lives or dies on, and all three are still to come. Lux Æterna runs five months past the biennial’s close, and Everything Heals, Even This opened a month before it, so the biennial is better read as the dense centre of a longer season than as a four-week window.
Where the published numbers disagree
Secondary coverage does not agree with the organiser, and it is worth knowing which number came from where before you plan a trip.
On artist count, ELEKTRA says about 40 artists and 35 game artworks. Kill Screen reports 38 artists across the venue; GameScenes cites approximately forty creators and 35 playable works. Those are compatible readings of the same show.
On dates, they are not compatible. A Bonjour Québec listing gives 8 October to 8 November. The organiser’s own page, and Kill Screen, both give 15 October to 15 November. Trust the organiser.
On price, ELEKTRA’s page does not list one at all. GameScenes gives general admission at C$25; Fugues and Kill Screen both give a C$12–25 range for students, seniors and youth, with Kill Screen adding free entry for children aged 11 and under. We have not been able to confirm any of those figures against ELEKTRA directly, so treat them as reported rather than official — and note that the free-re-entry policy, which is on the organiser’s page, changes what any of those numbers is worth.
Why this one matters
Games have been exhibited in art institutions for two decades, usually in one of two unsatisfying modes: as design history behind glass, or as a single commissioned art-game in a black box. Thirty-five playable works, four weeks, free re-entry, and a curatorial pair who come from both art school and game studies is a third mode, and a more demanding one — it asks the institution to accept that the work is not finished when the visitor leaves.
It also quietly answers a question our own coverage keeps running into: whether games belong to the art world as subject matter or as medium. A biennial that hands over a full floor of Arsenal for a month has taken a position.
Sources
- Biennale 2026 — ELEKTRA Montréal
- ELEKTRA Montréal
- Montreal’s new biennale treats games as contemporary art — Kill Screen
- F(R)ICTION: Art et jeux — GameScenes
- La Biennale ELEKTRA explore les frontières entre art contemporain et jeux vidéo — Fugues
- Biennale internationale d’art numérique — Tourisme Montréal