Opening Reception - Bridget Reweti, Debra Sparrow, Shannon Te Ao, Kamala Todd: Being in Place

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Briget Reweti, “Irihanga,” 2017

installation detail

Reception May 11, 8:00 PM  

Curated by Paula Booker 

Being in Place brings together four artists from territories an ocean apart who tell stories about place. Installations by Māori artists Shannon Te Ao (Ngāti Tuwharetoa) and Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) unravel colonial histories and express guardianship using performance and experimental moving image. The works of these artists from across the Pacific, from Aotearoa New Zealand, will be seen through and alongside the local voices, images and narratives of xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) artist Debra Sparrow and Vancouver-born Métis/Cree/German filmmaker, Kamala Todd. What is generated by bringing together the work of artists from two distinct places and putting them in dialogue? How do we relate to land and place as both a host and a guest? Common visual languages and approaches emerge as the exhibition loosely weaves together these common threads of relationships to place.

Stories contain – and storytelling expresses – Indigenous knowledge. These stories are not simply representative of, but constitutive of relationships between peoples and places. As such, they express Indigenous ways of being and offer powerful commentary for considering a variety of relationships to our environment.

In this exhibition, the artists and their contextual relations to place are activated through a variety of narrative and graphic methods that evoke context and relationships, among and between people and space. Each of these artists make work not just about place, but in dialogue with specific sites and their cultural histories.

As Altamirano-Jimenez and Parker write: “place is defined not merely by physical location but also by a sense of belonging to that place and by the practices that shape people’s livelihoods and social relations.”

The artists Reweti, Sparrow, Te Ao and Todd use storytelling to manifest visual sovereignty.