FUTURE TELLING
ImagineNative’s 2167 shows Indigenous artists’ VR interpretation of Canada in 150 years,
The ImagineNative festival is 18 years old this year, and though it’s an unremarkable number — neither 10 nor 25 nor anything else conveniently notable — there’s nothing offthe-rack about this year’s instalment. With the occasion being Canada 150, the festival, perhaps the world’s premiere venue for Indigenous film and video, offers up as its marquee a slate of virtual-reality projects around future nightmare dreaming.
Co-produced with the Toronto International Film Festival, the series, called 2167, casts an eye 150 years into the future, to the dubious marker of Canada 300 — as Indigenous resistance to all the Canada 150 hoopla this year made clear, such notions really depend on who’s counting — and, perhaps not surprisingly, hope is in short supply.
The Hunt, from Danis Goulet, imagines an Atwood-worthy dystopia where Indigenous people are policed on their lands by flying, weaponized metal orbs; Postcommodity, a collective, presents Each Branch Determined, a land-management scenario dominated by artificial intelligence (and void of human presence); Kent Monkman’s Honour Dance, adapted from a 2008 video piece, displays four virile warriors conjuring forth Monkman’s two-spirit avatar, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, who appears from a shroud of mist, as though the saviour of a future-world disaster.
But the best of them, to my mind, is Scott Benesiinaabandan’s Blueberry Pie Under a Martian Sky, which imagines, to dazzling effect, an escape scenario no doubt much-dreamt of by Indigenous people here over years of marginalization, abuse and endemic racism: Travel through a wormhole to a new world, not yet ruined by the ravages of destructive colonial ambitions.
Benesiinaabandan gives you a front-row seat to the enormity of the cosmos, maximizing the medium’s immersive power like no other here. More to the point, perhaps, is how small it can make you feel — a feeling entirely appropriate to both the mindset that got us here, and the blip it truly is. In the atrium of the TIFF Bell Lightbox, 350 King St. W., until Dec. 31. For more information see imaginenative.org.
ImagineNative presents a slate of exhibitions alongside its film and video presentations.
Here, a pair of highlights: Mourning and Mayhem: The Work of Adrian Stimson: Over the past 20-plus years of performance, painting, video and installation work, Stimson’s alter ego Buffalo Boy has functioned as a kind of camp spirit guide to the litany of colonialism’s ills: From residential schools to treaty swindles to the outright slaughter of Indigenous people by settlers inconvenienced by their presence. Sporting buffalo skins and fishnet stockings, Stimson, who is Blackfoot from Alberta, uses good- humoured, sometimes outrageous performance to thinly veil a staunch spirit of resistance as he looks to fashion a future different from the past: Where his people make their own rules. A survey exhibition at A Space Gallery at 401 Richmond St. continues to Oct. 28.
Skawennati: For the Ages: A timetravelling cyber-citizen of an artist, Skawennati, who is Mohawk and based in Montreal, has used powerful video-game engines like that of Second Life to craft alternative realities. She has used her work to both slip backwards, to the Oka crisis of 1990, and forward, to the 22nd century, in her series TimeTraveller, to inject the current crisis with a sliver of hope: Her traveller, an Indigenous man named Hunter, lives in 2121, and lands in 1990 perplexed and disturbed to encounter the conflict and racism with which he has no contact in his own time and place. Her work on view for ImagineNative provides more hope still: She Falls For Ages, at the core of the survey show here, uses gaming engines to re-craft the story of creation from a distinctly Indigenous point of view. Presented by V tape in the Fourth Floor Commons at 401 Richmond, the show continues to Oct. 21.