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Mackenzie

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Plural

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Workman 1

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Review

Charissa von Harringa is a contemporary art curator, arts writer, and PhD candidate (ABD, 2023) in Art History at Concordia University in Montreal, QC. She is the co-curator of the international circumpolar exhibition “Among All These Tundras” (2018), and Associate Curator for “Tusarnitut! Music Born of the Cold” (2022) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She is also a contributor and co-editor of the forthcoming publication _Arctic Prisms: Contemporary Arts from Across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi_, published by Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery.


A cozy glow, like soft blaze issuing from a hearth, infuses the entrance of “ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Vers chez soi / Towards Home” (2022). Visitors are welcomed by a replica of a northern porch, designed by Taqralik Partridge and Tiffany Shaw. Hunting, camping, and fishing gear are arranged along a makeshift divider designed with repurposed plywood and two-by-fours—everyday essentials for life and mobility on the land. The divider cleverly marks the transition between interior and exterior experiences of home and land. 

Cocurated by Joar Nango, Partridge, Jocelyn Piirainen, and Rafico Ruiz, “ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Vers chez soi / Towards Home” engages the reterritorialization of home and everyday space in creative and inventive ways, reflecting on how Arctic Indigenous communities relate to land and create empowered, self-determined spaces of home and belonging. The central premise of the Inuit and Sámi curators’ statement is that “caring for and living on the land is a way of being.” These thematics are grounded in a compelling and forward-thinking compilation of installations, video, photography, archival materials, and a delightful ad hoc library.
 
Echoing from a remixed radio program produced by DJ Geronimo Inutiq, _Uvatinni Uqaalajunga / J’appelle chez nous / I’m Calling Home_ (2022), are the beautiful sounds of kattajaq (Inuit throat-singing) in a mesmerizing rendition of _ayaya_ by Adina Tarralik Duffy, an English-Inuktitut rap song by John Awa, and a local advisory weather report by Jarvis Usuituayuk. These pieces reverberate across the galleries from a nostalgic mini boom box set within a domestic tableau, a work collectively produced in collaboration with members from Inutiq’s home community, Usuituayuk, Tommy Kingwatsiak, Annie Hickey, and Patrick Michael. Centrally placed between companion chairs, the intimacy of the spatial arrangement encourages visitors to sit and listen. The installation reinforces the notion of borderless space through radio and community broadcasting, which connects Inuit living in the South to home and family up North. 

In an adjacent gallery, visitors are greeted by the textile installation _Offernat_ (Votive Night) (2022) by Sámi artist Carola Grahn, in collaboration with master craftsman Ingemar Israelsson. A hanging neon-green printed textile piece with strung brass rings resembling the northern lights, a winding river path, or the fringe of a Sámi woman’s gákti (skirt) guide the eyes toward a ceremonial plinth bearing a beautifully crafted duodji (Sámi handicraft) piece carved from birch burl and beset with flowers and leaves. In an interview with cocurator Ruiz, the artist noted how “putting this duodji— this craft—as an altar makes it special. To have it as a centrepiece is also a gesture of saying this is something very, very important.” Grahn invokes Sámi futures through an Arctic Indigenous design ethos that emphasizes ceremony and reciprocity with the landscape. This Arctic Indigenous cosmology is cleverly reimagined as a functional design principle, much like duodji itself, where the artists conceive of the exhibited craft as a welcoming object activated by museum staff and visitors who are encouraged to add or replace the offerings. 

A research station resembling a pin-up studio within the exhibition, called “Futurecasting: Indigenous-led Architecture and Design in the Arctic,” features the imaginative design productions following a series of collective conversations, seminars, and workshops. Characteristic of many of the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s (CCA) exhibitions, this research-driven gallery showcases how Arctic Indigenous designers imagine their own sovereign architectural futures. With a focus on land-based practices and Indigenous knowledges in the design process, the resulting works are based on a series of seminars and workshops coorganized by Ella den Elzen, Gunvor Guttorm, and Nicole Luke, and undertaken by Inuit and Sámi participants: Robyn Adams, Jenni Hakovirta, Berit Kristine Andersen Guvsám, Laila Susanna Kuhmunen, Andrea McIntosh, Johanna Minde, Reanna Merasty, Naomi Ratte, and Magnus Antaris Tuolja. The participating curators, designers, and photographers live or travel between the North and South. Luke, for instance, repurposes an everyday object from the Arctic: a sealskin stretcher. For _Arctic Buildings, Nunavut_ (2021) the stretcher frames a collage of photographs from the artist’s childhood, and a recent trip back to Nunavut, the artist’s homeland. 

Cocurator Nango’s _Sámi Architectural Library_ (2022) epitomizes one of the exhibition’s underlying messages: that Arctic Indigenous architecture continues to be forged in peripatetic, adaptable, resourceful, and inter-relational ways. Designed after the mobile library _Girjegumpi_ (2018), Nango’s built library, designed with wood, repurposed construction materials, books, bark, fish skin, and video, is a generous public resource and social space offering the visitor an opportunity to sit with a collection of books related to Arctic Indigenous architectures, history, theory, and criticism. _Sámi Architectural Library_ is designed by the architect to facilitate public reflection on Indigenous architectures that can displace Eurocentric approaches toward cultural, embodied, material, and socio-spatial architectural contexts. 

Through a curatorial emphasis on “the knowledge and experiences of being at home on the land,” this substantive and self-aware exhibition extends consideration toward diverse publics through its curatorial emphasis on access and inclusivity. As reflected in the entrance’s northern porch, the exhibition is structurally and symbolically emblematic of a safe and welcoming presence for Indigenous communities. “ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Vers chez soi / Towards Home” is a tremendous achievement—one that opens doors for future research and collaborative opportunities at the CCA. It is a homecoming for emerging Indigenous designers, scholars, curators, and creators. 

Writer

Gossip, as “unverified” information, has complex relations to power. As a historically maligned oral tradition, with gendered roots, it asks that we question our sources—who we trust and why—as well as who has been afforded belief or legitimization over others. In this issue, gossip takes various forms, from a mode of subversion under settler-colonial states to speculative fiction; it is revealed in the archives, in silence, and in its failures to resist authoritarian imaginings or institutional exploitation. After all, why do we gossip?


Gossip

Studio space with various storage and display areas and a bed in the corner. 

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“ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Vers chez soi / Towards Home” included work by asinnajaq, Carola Grahn and Ingemar Israelsson, Geronimo Inutiq, Joar Nango, Taqralik Partridge, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, and Futurecasting: Indigenous-led Architecture and Design in the Arctic Workshop participants, and ran from 11 June 2022 to 26 March 2023 at Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Curated by Joar Nango, Partridge, Jocelyn Piirainen, and Rafico Ruiz. 


“ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Vers chez soi / Towards Home” — asinnajaq, Carola Grahn and Ingemar Israelsson, Geronimo Inutiq, Joar Nango, Taqralik Partridge, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Futurecasting: Indigenous-led Architecture and Design in the Arctic

“ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Vers chez soi / Towards Home” — asinnajaq, Carola Grahn and Ingemar Israelsson, Geronimo Inutiq, Joar Nango, Taqralik Partridge, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Futurecasting: Indigenous-led Architecture and Design in the Arctic Workshop Participants

Aaditya Aggarwal is a writer and film curator based in Toronto and New Delhi.

Of the several mind-numbing effects of hallucinogens, tunnel vision is a common one. At once episodic and habitual, the loss of peripheral sight seemingly colours Moyra Davey’s sedating feature-length work _Horse Opera_ (2022). In isolated close-ups, Davey constructs a visual journal of her pandemic isolation: stacks of books and records; artefacts and paraphernalia littering living quarters; hilly, wintry, pastoral outdoors; a black mastiff lazily trudging through snow; and birds pecking at feeders hanging from tree branches. Reminiscent of iris shots from early silent cinema, Davey’s gaze imitates tunnel vision with indulgent candour, particularly lensing the physicality of horses. 

Portrayed with gratuitous, matter-of-fact _tendresse_, circular frames capture equine genitalia—peeing, pulsating—mostly vaginal. Scoring this fixation is a parallel fictional account. In Davey’s signature torpid drawl, she recites her writings on Elle, the protagonist of her diaristic text. Narrated in third person throughout the course of her film, Davey juxtaposes her own ailing solitude with the character’s experiences of raving sociality. 

Elle seems attuned to her own tunnel vision. She is described by Davey as a single mother who self-medicates and frequents loft parties in New York City. “Elle is happy when her head is ripped,” Davey narrates, “but by the end of the night when the lights come on and they stand around chatting, she can’t bear it.” Using psychoactives like LSD, cocaine, and crystal, she keenly observes the sartorial choreographies and comportments of party guests. When alone, Elle reads the writings of essayists like Hilton Als, Anne Boyer, and Elizabeth Hardwick. She registers her ageing body, with its insomnia and medicinal dependencies. “Thinking about the infusion that would soon be administered to her, Elle is hit with a surge of guilt for submitting to such experiences,” Davey writes of the character waiting at the doctor’s office, seemingly familiar with the dual sensations of drug use—ecstasy and dissatisfaction—both in undergoing treatment and as recreational habit. 

The artist sutures Elle’s narcotized stream of consciousness with documentarian, candid shots of foals, mares, and surrounding fauna, evoking the trippy circularity and telescopic inertia of Virginia Woolf’s “tunnelling process.” In a diary entry from August 30, 1923, Woolf—who Davey recalls Als referring to as “suicide bitch” in the latter’s collection of essays _White Girls_ (2013)—writes: “How I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment.” 

Music, punctuating in interludes, appears to be Davey’s tunnel, activating the inner lives of _Horse Opera_. Entwining Elle’s liquor-laced delirium against the artist’s own agrarian remove in the country, beloved radio and vinyl tunes consistently cascade in and out of her hour-long, autofictional cinema. From Leon “Ndugu” Chancler’s underheard, disco-hued R&B cover of Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing,” to The Edwin Hawkins Singers’ ecstatic version of the Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child,” tracks from Davey’s personal collection inflect her narration of Elle’s inebriated, dissociated interiority. 

An orchestra of the outdoors also apostrophizes these narrative threads. While walking her dog late one evening, Elle is “surprised to hear how many birds sing after dusk.” Music similarly pairs with the ambient chorus of daily life that surrounds Davey— neighing ponies and stallions, pouring rain clouds, or hands rummaging through kitchen items and barn supplies. In a few instances, moody ballads, LSD-inspired rhythms, and dance hits anticipate detailed captures of horse privates. The artist’s care for the barn creature crescendos in such iris shots of its cavernous mouth, trotting hoof, and languid flank. In a memorable sequence, the symphonic motions of her hands clean a saddle before carefully wrapping red cloth around a horse’s front leg. 

One then wonders: how entangled are Davey’s horses with her imaginary Elle, and with Davey herself? Pronounced by the artist’s fish-eyed attention to animalia, this query echoes throughout the multispectral universe of _Horse Opera_. At one point, Davey is seen lying supine like a corpse, covered by a blanket that reads “prochaine station,” inside what appears to be a basement. For the first time in the film, a body assumes the state of complete, staged stillness—not pacing, nor tending to domestic tasks or farm chores. Not prancing, not chewing, nor yawning, nor urinating, as in the case of her horses. Revealing the falsity of a singular protagonist, her brief enactment of death, with its liveable likeness and campy stagnation, oddly grounds the artist’s biodiverse autofictions. Maybe this is the elegiac, primal state that Davey’s zooted, infirm bibliophile Elle has only ever felt in fragments, but perhaps longs for in perpetuity. 


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A woman is looking at herself in in multiple mirrors while speaking into corded headphones.

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