VALUE: Rebecca Belmore at the Museum of Anthropology

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Rebecca Belmore, “I AM WORTH MORE THAN ONE MILLION DOLLARS TO MY PEOPLE,” 2010

(Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University ofBritish Columbia, purchased with support from the Belkin Curator’s Forum, 2010) (©Rebecca Belmore)

The exhibition offers an examination of four important works from the Anishinaabe artist’s four-decade career, embodying Belmore’s persistent critique of the ongoing condition of colonialism. Through four of her large-scale installation works, Belmore challenges our notions of collective value defined by colonial institutions and contemporary social structures. The four works will be displayed throughout MOA, including in the Audain Gallery and the Great Hall.

“For more than four decades, Rebecca Belmore has been a force for change through her embodied artistic practice, critiquing the far reaching and long lasting implications of colonialism and capitalism, which continues to impact the lives of Indigenous people in Canada and around the world,” says guest curator Jeffrey Boone, a collector, former gallerist, and Master’s student in Critical and Curatorial Studies at the University of British Columbia. “This exhibition speaks to the artist’s alternative system of value within her Indigenous community, prompting visitors to reflect and, perhaps, redefine their own understanding of value in terms of our relationship to land, water, objects, and, ultimately, to one another.”

Two of Belmore’s most notable multimedia works will be exhibited at MOA’s Audain Gallery: Fountain (2005) and Wild (2001). Fountain premiered at the 2005 Venice Biennale, where Belmore was selected as Canada’s official representative at the prestigious international exhibition. A proposition to consider our relation to land and water, the installation constitutes a short video filmed on Iona Beach – not far from MOA – that shows the artist struggling in the ocean before throwing a pail of water-turned-blood at the screen. The element of water is represented both in the subject of the film, but also literally in a wall of falling water onto which the video is projected. Previously seen in a different configuration at the Vancouver Art Gallery nearly 20 years ago, the work will now be exhibited to the artist’s original installation specifications for the first time in Vancouver at MOA.

Commissioned by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Wild is a mixed media piece that includes a bedspread with human hair and beaver pelt, and references Belmore’s original performance of the installation. Through Belmore’s physical occupancy of the luxurious bed at its 2001 premiere, the artist inverts the aggressive and hostile treatment of her ancestors at the hands of European colonizers by assuming the unexpected role of unwelcome guest in the most intimate room of the house. 

In 2010, Belmore gifted Wild to the Vancouver Art Gallery, as part of a protest against a high-profile legal dispute. Her gift took the form of a performance on Labour Day weekend in 2010, in which she sat on the sidewalk in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery under a sign that read “I AM WORTH MORE THAN ONE MILLION DOLLARS TO MY PEOPLE,” asserting her understanding of intrinsic value above the capitalistic monetary value placed on her work by contemporary society. The placard used in the protest will be on display in this exhibition.

A fourth work will be on display in Vancouver for the very first time, and will be exhibited in MOA’s Great Hall as a later addition to the exhibition, in late July 2025. The piece, Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to their Mother (1991) is a two-meter-wide wooden megaphone created by Belmore in response to the 1990 Kanehsatà:ke Resistance in Oka, Quebec, in which Mohawk people and their supporters protested plans to build a golf course on sacred Indigenous land. The piece is still regularly activated in community, whereby the megaphone is carried to an outdoor location so that those who are gathered can speak to the land through the megaphone. When the megaphone arrives at MOA in July – following its activation through the SAW Gallery in Ottawa – it will be accompanied by a sound recording from an early activation of the work, with voices speaking and singing through the megaphone in various languages.

A member of the Lac Seul First Nation on traditional Anishinaabe territories in Northwestern Ontario, Belmore roots her work in the political and social realities of Indigenous communities. She lives and works in Vancouver. The artist’s work has been exhibited at the Polygon Gallery, Audain Art Museum, Grunt Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario, and National Gallery of Canada, as well as internationally in the United States, Mexico, Cuba, United Arab Emirates, Germany, Greece, Japan, and Australia. Among her many accolades, she was most recently recognized as recipient of the 2024 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts.