In celebration of the 2026 Polaris Festival, presented by SiriusXM Canada, Polaris presents Un/Covering Memory - Personal Reinterpretations in the Polaris Cover Sessions, an exhibition and listening experience exploring how artists use cover songs to reshape memory, identity, and the meaning of Canadian music.
The 2026 Polaris Festival is a month-long celebration of Canadian music as art, bringing together concerts, salons, listening sessions, conversations, artist development initiatives, and the Polaris Concert & Award Ceremony at Massey Hall. Through the Festival, Polaris creates space for audiences to listen differently, gather around important Canadian albums, and explore how music shapes culture, identity, memory, and belonging.
Curatorial Statement
Music functions as both a collective archive and a deeply personal artifact capable of evoking new forms of memory. As a platform, the Polaris Cover Sessions challenge pre-established narratives of Canadian music; rather than merely replicating songs, artists unsettle the boundary between origin and interpretation by asking what it means to reconstruct a track through their own lived reality. These works center on the act of translation, as these artists also explore how a song etched in public memory can become a sonically pliable tool for subjectivity and inclusivity.
Through gestures ranging from Pierre Kwenders’ electrifyingly upbeat cover of Jean-Pierre Ferland’s “It Ain’t Fair,” to the airy and intimate alterations of Kaia Kater’s take on Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” Polaris Cover Session artists imprint their own identities and histories onto public memory. Far from erasing the original compositions, and while still maintaining an act of homage to the original artists, these radical shifts and subtle distinctions enrich and transform nostalgic resonance into a living, breathing dialogue.
Un/Covering Memory - Personal Reinterpretations in the Polaris Cover Sessions asks us to consider how collective memory is negotiated, proving that a song’s meaning and produced memory is never static; they are continuously reshaped by the voices who seek to reimagine it.
