Representing race in art

This year, artists and creators across disciplines employed representations of race to varying degrees of success. In true orientalist fashion, Opera Mcgill’s mythic Alcina had its actors don costumes and makeup inspired by various East Asian cultural artifacts, under the direction of Patrick Hansen (“Orientalism is no magic,” Carly Gordon, November 21). Likewise, Opera de Montreal makes an unfortunate mistake in letting white actors dress up to play Egyptian characters in Aida – the 1871 opera by Giuseppe Verdi that was born of a colonial legacy (“Get in loser, we’re going to Aida,” Carly Gordon, September 26).

When people of colour take control over their own representation, the result is often empowering and meaningful for those of us in the diaspora. A local screening of Deepa Mehta’s 2005 Water brought to light the traumatic memories of a generational of women in India, bearing witness to painful and complex cultural traditions (“The Goddess is half alive,” Inori Roy, January 30). Local gallery Never Apart opened its winter season with a collection of artworks from Black and Indigenous artists, their themes ranging from queerness to police brutality (“An exploration of resilience,” Sarah Shahid, February 13). Though Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden received negative attention for its apparent oversexualization of the female protagonists, much of the analysis was filtered through a white saviour complex that saw the film as inherently anti-feminist (“Cold revenge and sweet love,” Coco Zhou, September 19).