A Year of Relations

Cultural spheres reflected a surge of cross-cultural solidarities amongst those on the margins.

by

Even at the height of postcolonialism in the mid-20th century, when a number of nations in Asia and Africa won independence from colonial oppression, there were already people peeking out of their own enclaves to work for solidarity across cultural lines.

One of the central figures was the Martinican psychiatrist-turned-activist Frantz Fanon, who, in his canonical work, The Wretched of the Earth, put his body and ideas on the line to support the Algerian Revolution. Moving from one colonized location to another, he worked until his death in 1961 to advocate for Algerians’ right to fight against domination. Fanon’s legacy is alive today, especially in the work of Toronto-based scholar Rinaldo Walcott, who reminds us that we are living in a post-9/11 culture, and there is “worst still to come” for all of us. 

The intellectual and activist output presented by Fanon and reinvigorated by Walcott is, I’m relieved to say, channelling into dominant spheres of culture. This year, we have seen a surge in exhibitions and publications that are allowing cross-cultural and relational solidarities to emerge as the only possible route for many of us to survive and thrive. 

Rather than looking at solo exhibitions or artist practices, I want to consider curated group exhibitions and several publications that are moving beyond identity to engage with cultural encounters. By no means do I think or hope this to be the end of culturally specific and relevant projects – those living in margins know the significance of speaking in one’s own tongue and to one’s own. These joys can never be taken away. Instead, I see these cultural producers adding something more to the anti-colonial toolbox by speaking cross-culturally and with others.

One of the first major exhibitions that, for me, signalled the coming of this new wave was Transits and Returns at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The exhibition opened as the third and final iteration in the fall of 2019 and remained open until Feb. 23. It was co-curated by Biscarra Dilley, Freja Carmichael, Lana Lopesi, Léuli Eshrāghi and the Vancouver Art Gallery’s own Tarah Hogue. The exhibition featured 21 Indigenous artists from across the world, whose work is rooted in mobility within and outside their home territories. Through their collective presentation, Transits and Returns undermined the harmful and enduring fallacies that Indigenous communities are only rooted in one place and are not active participants in global movements. 

Transits and Returns included work like Magellan Doesn’t Live Here by Mariquita “Micki” Davis. A Chamoru artist from the Pacific island of Guam based in Los Angeles, she presented the construction of a sailing canoe that was a nod to traditional forms of making and the freedom of oceanic movement. The exhibition also included local artists like weaver Debra Sparrow, who produced a graphic mural for the Canada Line’s Vancouver City Centre station. Blanketing the City was an affirmation of the traditional aesthetics of Coast Salish weaving, remediated in the public sphere of the city.

Another project globalizing the reach of Indigenous politics and practices was Winnipeg-based scholar and curator Julie Nagam's publication, Becoming our Future: Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice, which she co-edited with Carly Lane and Megan Tamati-Quennell. The book, which will become a canonical text for young curators of both Indigenous and racialized backgrounds, features curatorial heavyweights, including Heather Igloliorte and Kimberly Moulton, among others. The collected volume is a dialogical reflection of the recent shifts in Indigenous exhibitions, especially seen in the emergence of Indigenous curators and curatorial alliances. 

Especially insightful is Nagam’s co-written essay with Jarita Greyeyes, Heather Igloliorte and Jaimie Isaac, which returned to the 2017 exhibition Insurgence/Resurgence at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. As the largest exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art at the gallery, both the project and this recent text remind us of the importance of the Prairies as a site for local and global decolonial action.

As with Transits and Returns, Coast Salish weavings were central to another exhibition, Weaving Cultural Identities, which opened at the Vancouver Biennale in 2019 and travelled to Winnipeg’s Urban Shaman gallery from June 19 to Aug. 1. Debra Sparrow was one of 15 artists who aimed to bridge the divide between the city’s Indigenous and Muslim populations through the creation of 10 prayer rugs. 

Curated by Zarina Laalo, the exhibition mined the repertories of Coast Salish weavings and Islamic prayer rugs. For instance, artists Ruth Scheuing, Mary Lou Trinkwon and Sholeh Mahlouji teamed up to create Celebrating Knowledge and Belief: An Intercultural Dialogue, which symbolically aligned the aesthetic differences in their cultural backgrounds to arrive at the shared goal of grasping the divine in the everyday.

Social activism, rather than divinity, was on the line for Christina Battle’s curated exhibition, Grasping at the Roots, which featured four artists at the Mitchell Art Gallery at MacEwan University in Edmonton from Jan. 17 to March 28. The curatorial premise behind this project was to highlight art practices rooted in community and activism, and collaboratively strategize ways of presenting such immaterial forms in conventional exhibition spaces, such as galleries.

Edmonton-based artist Shawn Tse’s performative work, Connecting Overseas: Safe & Secure, developed networks between local community members and loved ones feeling the effects of protests in Hong Kong. Operating through the process of gift giving, Tse worked with four participants to produce artworks that could be delivered as messages to those in the difficult zone of an emerging revolution.  

In turn, Debbie Ebanks Schlums travelled to Edmonton to initiate a five-day workshop with newcomers in the city, creating objects collectively that could then be shared in the exhibition space. The workshop built on past projects, namely The Dwelling Museum, which gave space for newcomers from Syria to create glass objects to translate their stories of movement and arrival.

The winds of this relation building moved to Winnipeg in the late summer with Sovereign Intimacies, from Sept. 26 to Dec. 20. Co-curated by Nasrin Himada and Jennifer Smith for the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art and Gallery 1C03, the exhibition was the result of their ongoing conversations about care and ethical networks in and beyond the city. It featured 13 artists and was contoured by a shared interest in process for both art making and kinship building.

An installation by American artist iris yirei hu, weaver girl limns two rainbows, featured a painted portrait of the artist stretching between two Indigenous weaving rituals, that of the Taiwanese Atayal foot loom and the Navajo foot loom. Rather than representing a final product, the work embodied the artist’s mentorship under Sayun Yuraw, an Atayal weaver, and Melissa Cody, a Navajo weaver. Like Transits and Returns as well as Becoming Our Future, this work presented a microscopic look at fragile yet vital threads being woven across and through different histories. 

For me, these various exhibitions exemplify the ways in which a number of artists and thinkers are departing the identity politics of the last few decades and seriously undertaking cross-cultural processes that can be a detour out of the brutality of the colonial present. These projects, in many ways, have modelled the future of intimacy and gathering, yet this year has also visualized  difficult and uncomfortable work that must also be done.

I want to end my reflections on this year by looking at a final example, not of an exhibition but rather a politics of refusal around it. Here, I am referring to borderLINE: 2020 Biennial of Contemporary Art, which opened last fall at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton and the Remai Modern in Saskatoon to much fanfare – and some crucial critique. 

For the first time in its history, the biennial disavowed colonial borders and instead opted to use the centrality of treaty lands to gather artists and formulate a curatorial methodology. Co-curators Sandra Fraser, Felicia Gay, Franchesca Hebert-Spence and Lindsey Sharman brought the concept of borders to the fore, unpacking colonial legacies and mapping alternative trajectories. Despite featuring the work of 34 artists, the biennial failed, as it has throughout its 24-year history, to include any Black artists from the region.

Under the decolonial promise of borderLINE, there were glaring gaps in inclusion that were, in turn, filled by refusal and review. Even before the exhibition opened on Sept. 26, Amy Malbeuf and Justin Waddell withdrew their work. This refusal pushed the Art Gallery of Alberta to release a statement that promised to embark on what was called “solution-discovery” to do better in the future. Apart from whatever solutions, discoveries or solution-discoveries might arise out of this conundrum, I feel it's not necessarily a salve that we need in this aftermath, but a more expanded understanding of history and place. 

A recent edited collection by Karina Vernon, The Black Prairie Archives, demonstrates there has been Black life, story, and culture on the Prairies for a long time. The colonial borders that have ruptured some communities also connect them and implicate them in relation with others. After all, we are all connected and responsible for one another while the colonial impulse continues to work against (and sometimes through) us.

It's my ardent hope, as a girl from Punjab and a settler on Treaty One Territory, that, as a collective, we turn to newly publicized archives, such as those presented by Vernon, to reach beyond established networks and broaden ethical horizons because, in the year 2020, I have realized the weight of Fanon’s early work and Walcott’s present insistence. 

From the start of this year, I have witnessed so much – from the rise of Hindu nationalism in my home country, to the COVID-19 crisis and the new (and old) forms of racism against East Asian peoples – as well as the acceleration of crimes against Black people across the world and the ongoing violence perpetrated against Indigenous people, particularly women in Canada. We are more than a decade away from the golden age of postcolonialism, but settler colonialism, like neocolonialism, continues to bleed into our everyday lives and ways of being together. To take decolonization seriously – for all of us – means we have to be open to the idea that relation is central to the safety of all of us living and working in the margins. ■ 

Correction 4/1/21, 6:16 p.m. An earlier version of this article incorrectly included Wanda Nanibush as a contributor to Becoming our Future: Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice. The post has been updated.

PS: Worried you missed something? See previous Galleries West stories here or sign up for our free biweekly newsletter.