Arctic Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity brings together 17 Indigenous artists from the circumpolar North and the global South, specifically from several of the nine countries that share the Amazon rain forest. The artists, despite their extreme geographic separation from each other, share common challenges and concerns, most notably around their languages and cultures, and the growing environmental crises that threaten their home territories.
Co-curated by noted Plains Cree curator and scholar Gerald McMaster and Nina Vincent, a Brazilian curator and anthropologist, Arctic Amazon, which features artists from eight countries across three continents, is now touring Canada, following its launch last year at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto. The current iteration, on view until Sept. 17 at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, is a uniformly excellent show.
Couzyn van Heuvelen, “Qamutiik,” 2019
soapstone sled and rope, detail of installation at Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax (photo by Raw Photography)
A qamutiik is an Inuit wooden sled built using traditional designs, but Couzyn van Heuvelen’s Qamutiik, while an expected size, is crafted from an unexpected material: soapstone. Van Heuvelen is an Inuit artist who was born in Iqaluit and now lives in southern Ontario, and this powerful sculpture combines a keen sense of contemporary art with a respectful homage to the traditions of Inuit carving. Displayed on a series of sharp-edged white forms that evoke shards of ice, the sled seems trapped in a melting ice field, graphically reflecting the effects of climate change on traditional hunting grounds.
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Sonya Kelliher-Combs, “Idiot Strings,” 2022
printed fabric, wool, steel wire, nylon thread and glass beads, detail of installation (courtesy the artist)
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STEVE FARMER
Sonya Kelliher-Combs, “Idiot Strings,” 2022
printed fabric, wool, steel wire, nylon thread and glass beads, installation view at Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax (courtesy the artist, photo by Raw Photography)
Sonya Kelliher-Combs’ sculpture Idiot Strings: Credible addresses the historical abuse of Inuit children in schools run by the Catholic church in Alaska. Each of 35 pouches is printed with maps of a community with a credible claim of abuse by church members, as defined by the legal system. The pouches are connected one to another, representing the “idiot strings” attached to mittens so they will not be lost. The work insists the truth of the abuses – sexual and otherwise – suffered by generations of young Inuit will not be lost.
Biret Haarla, Gáddjá Haarla and Outi Pieski, “Guhte gullá / Here to Hear,” 2021
multi-channel video installation, 8:30 min. (courtesy the artist; photo by Mauri Lähdesmäki)
Sámi artist Outi Pieski’s Guhte gullá / Here to Hear is a multi-channel video projection made in collaboration with her daughters, dancers Biret and Gáddjá Haarla Pieski. Comprising dance, electronic music and traditional Sámi singing, the work evokes Sámi earth deities to assuage ecological angst. As Pieski writes in the catalogue, “It is time for us to reconnect with the sacredness deep within the earth.”
Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe
“Kamie ya uriji pi jami Parawa ujame theperekui uriji ter- imi thepe komi kua (Where I live in my jungle and in the Orinoco river all these animals also live),” detail, 2018, acrylic on 79 sheets of cane fibre paper, 14" x 20" each (courtesy Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros)
Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, a Yanomami artist from Venezuela, makes drawings that evoke traditional culture and the environment that sustains it. His abstract forms, summoning plant and animal life though representations of their cycles of growth and transformation, act as a visual language rooted in cues drawn from stories and traditional knowledge as much as from observation. At once delicate and robust, Hakihiiwe’s drawings are executed on papers he makes from natural fibres, such as banana leaf and sugar cane. Through his work, cultural memory, filtered through one sensibility, takes on new force as artistic expression.
The ways various works in this exhibition reflect common concerns about cultural and physical survival make visible the networks of global Indigeneity referenced in the exhibition’s subtitle. We live in a time of mounting anxiety about the climate crisis. Amazonia is burning and the Arctic is melting in a catastrophe caused by humans. What would happen, McMaster wonders, “if our starting point were within the philosophical or intellectual traditions of Indigenous communities?” The artists in Arctic Amazon offer an answer – if only we would listen. ■
Arctic Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax from May 11 to Sept. 17, 2023. Originated by the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto. Future venues not yet announced.
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