Viva Arte Viva
57th Venice Biennale
Kananginak Pootoogook, RCA (1935–2010) is the first Inuit artist to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale, regarded as the most prestigious international art exhibition. As a catalyst moment, the inclusion of Pootoogook’s powerful and pertinent work as part of Centre Pompidou Chief Curator Christine Macel’s Viva Arte Viva exposes the global arts community to the aesthetic legacies of Kinngait (Cape Dorset), NU, and the ways in which Pootoogook’s art practice visually documented the profound changes to Inuit ways of life. Pootoogook’s ten ink and coloured pencil drawings are installed in the Pavilion of the Earth at the Biennale’s Arsenale, which is one of nine guiding thematic group installations, or what Macel has described as Trans-Pavilions (referencing the transnational identities of the 120 artist participants). Macel’s centring of this pavilion on “environmental, animal and planetary utopias, observations and dreams” raises questions about Pootoogook’s inclusion in relation to the Biennale and, more specifically, this thematic pavilion. The drawings were produced in the later part of Pootoogook’s career between 2006 and 2010. They highlight the artist’s commitment to social commentary as well as foreground historic and contemporary Inuit lived experiences, including family histories and relations, living on and with the land, the legacies of colonial trauma in the Canadian Arctic and climate change. Scenes from the everyday in his community, such as Untitled (He thinks he has run out of gas, but the engine is shot) (2009) as well as collective community experiences of hunting, life on the land, and colonial history, illustrated in Untitled (Successful walrus hunt) (2009), invite a global audience to witness snapshot moments of Inuit life from the artist’s perspective. While it is clear that Pootoogook’s work centralizes the Nunavut territory and Inuit ways of engaging with the land, Macel’s notion of “observations and dreams” runs the risk of dismissing thousands of years of Inuit presence, intergenerational knowledge and ongoing commitment to what is now termed environmentalism. Troublingly, the pavilion does little to critically engage with global settler colonialism and the ways in which Indigenous