Revolutionaries and Ghosts: Memory, Witness, and Justice in a Global Canadian Context

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Zhong-Yang Huang, Who Decides Who Rises and Falls?, 2011

oil on canvas, 81.1 x 102 cm, (MacKenzie Art Gallery, University of Regina Collection, 2011, purchased with the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program)

Works from the Collections of the MacKenzie Art Gallery and University of Regina

In her award winning novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Canadian author Madeleine Thien uses the figure of a book within a book to gently assert the power of stories to preserve memories even as changing political tides threaten to sweep them away. By hiding the true names of lost loved ones within the fictional Book of Records, her protagonists keep alive the dream of art, beauty, and freedom amidst China’s repressive political regimes. Thien’s novel demonstrates the important role that Canadian authors have played in recent years in attesting to violence on the world stage while exploring its impacts at home. The presence created by the names of lost loved ones are, in the words of one of her characters, “as dangerous as revolutionaries but as intangible as ghosts.”

Similarly, the twelve Canadian artists in this exhibition – Ed Burtynsky, Ruth Cuthand, Wally Dion, Sherry Farrell-Racette, Huang Zhong-Yang, Marie Lannoo, Grant McConnell, Gerald McMaster, Ann Newdigate, Ed Pien, William J. Rodgers, and Jeff Wall – embed memories that connect the present to the past, and trouble the narratives of erasure and injustice which have marked the histories that tie Canada to the wider world. Curated by Timothy Long, Head Curator of the MacKenzie Art Gallery.