Opening Reception & Artist Talks - #callresponse

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Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory, "Timiga nunalu, sikulu (My body, the land and the ice), Native Education College," 2016

photo: Merle Addison. Courtesy of the artist.

At AKA artist run-centre (424 20th St W) and Wanuskewin Galleries (RR #4 Penner Rd), Saskatoon

Opening Reception: June 2 1-4 pm with Artist Talks Free Event! Come out and enjoy Indigenous art in Saskatchewan!

CALL To support the work of Indigenous women from across Turtle Island through art that drives dialogue and mobilizes action on the topic of reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. To stand together across sovereign territories as accomplices in awakened solidarity with all our relations both human and non.

RESPONSE To ground art in accountability, value lived experience and build upon systems of support. To enact strategies of resurgence, resilience and refusal against the ongoing multiple articulations of power and structural colonial violence of nation states.

Organized by: Tarah Hogue, Maria Hupfield, and Tania WillardArtists: Christi Belcourt, IV Castellanos, Marcia Crosby, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Isaac Murdoch, Esther Neff, Tanya Tagaq, Tania Willard and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory

AKA artist-run centre and Wanuskewin Galleries presents #callresponse, an artistic and curatorial collaboration led by Indigenous women. A touring exhibition with responsive programming, #callresponse promotes discussion and action around Indigenous cultural revitalization, land-based knowledge, and cross-cultural solidarity. Shining a light on work that is both urgent and long-term, #callresponse acts as a connective support system that begins with commissioned artworks created by five Indigenous North American women artists and their invited respondents. 

#callresponse strategically centers Indigenous women across multiple platforms, moving between specificity of Indigenous nations, site, online space, and the gallery. The project focuses on forms of performance, process, and translation that incite dialogue and catalyze action across borders between individuals, communities, territories and institutions. An online platform using the hashtag #callresponse on social media connects the geographically diverse sites and provides opportunities for networked exchanges. #callresponse aims to promote visibility, populate as many spaces, and media, to broadcast the message and to catalyze bodies.

#callresponse is grounded in discussions about the importance of Indigenous Feminisms in grounding our lives and work in reciprocal relations, while critiquing and refusing the intersections of colonialism and patriarchy. The project reorients the vital presence of Indigenous women—their work and their embodied experiences—as central, as defining, and as pre-existing current appeals for a reconcilable future.