Àbadakone / Continuous Fire / Feu continuel National Gallery of Canada
This much-anticipated follow-up to the 2013 landmark exhibition Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art will take over the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) in Ottawa, ON, from this fall until spring of next year. Àbadakone / Continuous Fire / Feu continuel is curated by NGC’s Greg A. Hill, Christine Lalonde and Rachelle Dickenson with the assistance of three guest curators: Ariel Smith, Carla Taunton and Candice Hopkins. With the work of some 70 Indigenous artists from almost 40 nations, including the circumpolar North, pieces by Maureen Gruben, Joar Nango, Evgeniy Salinder and Shuvinai Ashoona, RCA, will join those of numerous international artists, addressing themes of resource extraction, climate change, relationship to land, personal histories and more. We caught up with ceramicist Pierre Aupilardjuk, who is also included in the major survey, to learn about the powerful stories captured in two of his works on view:
When I was making Giving Without Receiving (2016), I was thinking of my parents. They had a qulliq they were using before I was born, when they lived in an igloo. The qulliq was taken, and my parents told me that they did not know how they survived that winter as they had no light, no heat and nothing to cook with. Somehow, they survived that winter. When my father told me that story,
I was touched. I was hurt, and my mother was almost in tears. The hand is the person taking the qulliq without giving anything, that’s why it is beneath and the palm is facing forward. The figure on top is my father giving the qulliq without receiving anything.
The other piece in the exhibition is
Facing Forward (2016), which I made with Shary Boyle. It is about a mother teaching and talking to her children. They are facing forward and she is saying, “That’s your future over there, look at that future of yours. Be good and you will achieve the goal that you want.” I did some of these pieces to show stories from my father, my mother and some from my uncles. In the future, I would like to get more clay and make something that my father has told me: an ayaya song.