“So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our own fantasies. But once having exposed them, having named them, having proclaimed them, we’re now tied up with human beings, tied to you, and forced to go on with this adventure according to the laws of visibility.” When a confrontation with consequence reaches your door do you cloister yourself in safety, cower in fear, enter the fray, or resist that reality altogether? These are among the options presented to the characters of Jean Genet’s play The Balcony, an incendiary critique of power that has lost none of its urgency since its premiere in 1957. The name of the besieged brothel at the center of Genet’s play doubles as the title of the current edition of La Biennale de Montréal. More than just the title, The Balcony lends its ethics of eroticism to the proposition of biennale curator Philippe Pirotte and his team of advisers (Corey McCorkle, Aseman Sabet, and Kitty Scott): an emphasis upon the materiality artists engage with and in turn invite us to encounter, as well as a resistance to the kind of singular political proclamations that biennials often attempt to make. These …