ᐊᕙᑖᓂᑦ ᑕᒪᐃᓐᓂᑦ ᓄᓇᑐᐃᓐᓇᓂᑦ
Among All These Tundras
Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
Five hand-knit wool sweaters hang near the entrance of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, opening the exhibition Among
All These Tundras curated by Dr. Heather Igloliorte, Amy Prouty and Charissa von Harringa. These garments, entitled Sámi Shelters #1–5 (2009–present) by Sámi artist and architect Joar Nango, not only welcome visitors with their vivid colours and their suggestion of warmth, but also foreground the works within that employ the body as a central device, ranging from film, video and photography to sculpture, performance and more by 12 Indigenous artists from Canada, Greenland and Northern Alaska.
Together, Nango’s traditional Norwegian sweaters represent knitted real-life scenes of modern lavvu shelters, traditional Sámi buildings that in this contemporary context combine Indigenous and Nordic architectural elements. Yet, the political dimension of these ostensibly unthreatening objects— namely, hybridity and the survival of Indigenous forms and traditions—is easily missed if viewers do not consult the accompanying brochure. With this unexpected opener, the exhibition also broadens the scope of what deserves to be studied in the context of Indigenous art and visual culture, particularly in the circumpolar North.
Like Sámi Shelters, the most effective works in the exhibition are those that employ the body, and its absence, as well as language to illuminate the politicized lived experiences of Indigenous artists and their communities. In Sonya Kelliher-Combs’s fleet of drawings Secret Portraits (2018) the artist employs ink and pencil to inscribe on beeswax-coated pieces of paper a motif that has figured again and again in her body of work. The form, which appears on both sides of each piece of paper in the series, is an amorphous pouch that resembles a tusk or a mitten. According to the artist, the motif addresses issues related to containment
and concealment—the form can therefore be read as a cloak or a safe haven. Elsewhere, Sámi photographer and filmmaker Marja Helander’s digital inkjet prints Somewhere Far Away (2018) and Night is Falling (2018) further conflate landscape and body. The images represent female subjects in snowfilled landscapes, carefully contrasted and overlaid with quarries and mines. The women move deliberately through their environment, evoking a strong sense of respect for, and familiarity with, the earth that grounds them.
Yet, it is Iqaluit-based Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory’s video Timiga, nunalu sikulu (My body, the land and the ice) (2016) that most evidently meets the curators’ goal of encouraging viewers to consider the “relationships between textual and embodied Indigenous knowledge” as well as the “collective responsibility to Arctic life and land.”¹ Featuring music by Chris Coleman, videography by Jamie Griffiths and vocals by Celina Kalluk, the video lovingly traverses the Arctic landscape, until we eventually encounter the artist, her body taking the form of a reclining nude, an image made famous by white male painters from Titian to Ingres. Voyeuristically, we approach Williamson Bathory from behind, her body stretched out in an Odalisque pose on a pelt in the middle of the tundra. When we are finally upon her, she turns to reveal her face painted with red and black, distorting her features and baring her teeth in the style of uaajeerneq (Greenlandic mask dance). Expecting a passive, consumable artistic nude, we instead come face-to-face with a strong Indigenous woman who refuses access to her body and her land. For viewers familiar with Western ar t historical conventions, such as the female nude, Williamson Bathory’s work is a striking intervention that cuts a swath through settler-colonial art history. By employing both aural elements and physical occupation of the landscape, the artist creates a multisensory experience that undermines the expected primacy of vision and its repercussion: visual possession of land and bodies.
The video Look Who’s Talking (2016) by Kittelfjäll/Malmö-based visual artist Carola Grahn is the final and arguably the most powerful work in the exhibition. The Sámi artist employs black text on a white wall to examine her own relationship with her white skin and also implicate the white settlercolonial viewer in their subject position of privilege. Written statements range from “White people don’t get it” and “You know nothing” to “I want to scream out loud but I’m too self-aware.” Though potentially offputting to some, Grahn’s work offers willing viewers an opportunity to be unsettled— emotionally, physically and empirically.
It is no accident that the strongest pieces in the exhibition are video works by female-identifying and non-binary artists. This medium allows for the use of both words and the body, sometimes, though not always, simultaneously. Although Kablusiak’s 2017 stone and tung oil sculptures Cigarettes and Lighter, Tampax® tampon and Menstrual cup demonstrate a nuanced yet compelling use of a traditional technique to counter ethnographic perspectives of the North, their deliberate silence and stillness are somewhat overshadowed in a context more suited for works that occupy space with movement, song and text. While the aesthetic beauty and critical undertones of the works are impressive, the resulting muted presence points to the potential dilemmas in combining such an expansive survey of works in a single exhibition and, indeed, in a single room, where the varied media can lead to certain voices ringing more loudly than others.
Ultimately, works like asinnajaq’s video Rock Piece (Ahuriri edition) (2016), documenting the artist’s movements on an Ahuriri (Napier) beach in Aotearoa (New Zealand), articulate the powerful entanglements between bodies, landscapes, politics and Indigenous knowledge, significantly from female perspectives. Together, the works in this exhibition create a compelling dialogue of shared lived experiences, history and relationship to the land that resonates throughout Inuit Nunangat and beyond. Making visible, as the title of Williamson Bathory’s work suggests, the indivisible connections between these many tundras.
NOTES
1 Heather Iglolior te, Amy Prouty and Charissa von Harringa, “‘At Home We Belong’: Decolonial Engagements in the Circumpolar Arctic,” Among
All These Tundras (Montreal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 2018), 2.