Gabriel Nuraki Koperqualuk

b. 1986 Montreal, QC —

Multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Gabriel Nuraki Koperqualuk has spent his career connecting to his Nunavimmiut identity while living and producing art in an urban centre. “What does it mean to be an Inuk?” he asks me over the phone from his home in Montreal, QC. “I try to integrate that into my work as much as possible.” Koperqualuk is known for co-directing 2018’s The 5th Region, a documentary that explores what it means to be among the 30 per cent of Inuit now living in the South as an emerging “fifth region” of Inuit Nunangat. The film focuses on the lives and careers of artist Niap (Nancy Saunders) and educator and community organizer Joshua Stribbell, detailing their experiences with community, belonging and identity formation in the city. By day, Koperqualuk is a journalist for the radio program Nipivut, and notes that his role has given him the opportunity to connect with and interview artists, musicians and politicians that have since influenced his own practice.

Trained in commercial photography at Dawson College, Koperqualuk now explores other avenues of image-making by transforming photographs into shifting, geometric and psychedelic worlds in the experimental series that populate his social media accounts. Using his own images as well as archival photographs of the Arctic, the artist sees his work as a contemporary nod to the adaptability of traditional ways of life. “In my digital work I’m taking a photograph and transforming it into something completely new,” Koperqualuk says of these stills and animations. “To me, it resonates with our traditional way of being in the North—taking what we have in front of us and using it in our own creative ways to help us survive.” – Emily Henderson