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Review

Genevieve Flavelle is an independent curator, writer and PhD student in the Department of Art History & Art Conservation at Queen’s University.

If you are a settler on this land, as I am, you may not have had to consider the ways in which you personally constitute and perform Canadian sovereignty. Indigenous artists however, often contend with the violent erasure of Indigenous history and culture upon which Canada’s sovereignty is founded. Focusing on performative “acts,” _Sovereign Acts II_ at Concordia University’s Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery deals with the legacy of colonial representations of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island through the work of seven contemporary artists.

_Sovereign Acts II_ is a revisiting by curator Wanda Nanibush of her 2012 exhibition _Sovereign Acts_ at the University of Toronto’s Justina M. Barnicke Gallery. Opening this iteration of the exhibition is Rebecca Belmore’s _In a Wilderness_ (2012). This three-channel video installation begins with a woman struggling in a pile of leaves in the woods, her hands bound and her feet bare. In the second frame, a person stands facing a tall manicured hedge, a patterned blanket draped over their head and body. In the third frame, someone offscreen is wielding a leaf blower in what looks to be the same environment as depicted in the first video, covering up the evidence of struggle in a seemingly benign clearing. The work conjures the many missing and murdered Indigenous women whose disappearances have failed to be investigated in Canada – a subject to which Belmore returns repeatedly in her work, as little progress is being made in addressing the crisis. In the accompanying wall text, Belmore recounts her memory of reading the story of a Mi’kmaq hunter who was made by French colonizers to perform hunting a deer for the French court, an act he completed with the addition of “easing himself” before the audience. Belmore pays tribute to this defiantly defecating Mi’kmaq man as “one of the first performance artists of the Americas to work internationally.”

In the adjoining room, a small television monitor plays a grainy 20-second loop of Sioux performers dancing an approximation of the Ghost Dance. Captured on film in 1894 by Thomas Edison, the moving snapshot depicts a version of the dance modified for the colonial audiences of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. At the time, the Sioux performers were outlawed from practising cultural dances, songs and ceremonies in their own communities. However, the demand for stereotyped performance by colonial audiences was so great that these men, imprisoned after the Battle of Wounded Knee, were released on the condition that they join the road show. Here, the capitulation to perform for demanding and deathly colonial audiences is an act of survival that can be read against the grain as an act of resistance.

James Luna, considered the godfather of Indigenous performance art, has for decades interrogated the ways in which museums depict Indigenous cultures and bodies as of the past, even when they are living. Luna has made several works that attempt to inhabit and give voice to the spirit of Ishi, a Yahi man who walked into a northern California town in 1911 and was promptly proclaimed to be the last of his tribe and given a home in the Museum of Anthropology on the University of California Berkeley’s campus. In _Ishi Speaks_ (2011), Luna performs Ishi in a series of portraits that imagine what he might have said or done, acts of protest unrecorded by his observers. Mimicking the posture and facial expression of a portrait of Ishi taken by the museum, Luna speaks back to the viewer with a knee-length t-shirt emphatically proclaiming “FUCK YoU.”

Turning the exhibition’s corner, all attention is commanded by the gazes of four larger-than-life femmes. The subjects’ tattooed bodies are visible from the chest up, yet their faces are almost entirely concealed by meticulously beaded black fetish masks. The striking photographs and masks beaded with labrys and knife motifs are by two-spirit artist Dayna Danger. Recalling Catherine Opie’s lush early portraits of unapologetically queer subjects, the work is insistent in its overt expression of sexuality, identity and kink culture. The inclusion of Danger in this second iteration of the exhibition also opens Nanibush’s curatorial premise to an expanded consideration of performativity and a promising generation of emerging Indigenous artists. The work’s placement alongside Adrian Stimson’s campy performances – as Wild West alter ego Buffalo Boy in _Buffalo Boy’s Wild West Peep Show_ (2007) and a fishnet-clad, Bible-wielding residential school priest in _Onwards and Upwards_ (2005) – suggests a strong intergenerational conversation. Creating visibly queer works for decades, Stimson continues to provoke our understanding of settler colonialism as the historical and institutional root of heteronormative binary sex/gender systems.

Lori Blondeau collaborates with Stimson in revisiting the forced performances of the Sioux dancers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, through the gay spectacle of _Putting the Wild back into the West_ (2004–2010). Reinserting Indigenous women into the fabled Wild West and grand narrative of Western history, Blondeau transforms herself into “Indian cowgirl” Belle Sauvage. Buffalo Boy and Belle Sauvage invite would-be spectators to join them in a romp through a culture-appropriating, colonial fantasy exploiting, drag-favouring tickle trunk. The series of black-and- white studio portraits from various public performances of _Putting the Wild back into the West_ illustrate the artists’ career-length investigations of colonial representations of Indigenous identity using humour and camp as strategies of subversion. The photos hang counter to painter Robert Houle’s series of solemnly rendered shamans. Houle’s distinctive visual style has long been challenging the erasure of living Indigenous artists. The inclusion of Houle’s work is not thematically obvious but illustrates Nanibush’s wide-reaching consideration of what constitutes performative acts.

There is a difference in tone between many of the works and some have been placed in direct contrast to each other, seemingly to provoke purposeful tension between their different strategies of representation. Additionally, the works in the exhibition are situated outside of the usual parameters of performance art and its various forms of documentation, encompassing an expansive scale of gestures that examine the role of performativity in constituting culture and identity. Sovereignty in this exhibition does not look like crest-adorned documents and high-flying flags, nor does it look like a return to pre-contact “authenticity.” Instead, the exhibition carves out space to explore what acting through self-determined agency can look like.

Writer

Land

issue-134-p66-68.pdf

This is a review of “Sovereign Acts II”, an exhibition featuring work by Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, Dayna Danger, Robert Houle, James Luna, Shelley Niro, Adrian Stomson, and Jeff Thomas. It took place at Concordia University’s Leonard & Ellen Bina Art Gallery in Montreal, and ran from January 21 to April 1, 2017.

Sovereign Acts II: Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, Dayna Danger, Robert Houle, James Luna, Shelley Niro, Adrian Stimson, Jeff Thomas

presence implicates that 

absence is channelling 

the ephemeral 

_all our days are full of breath: a record of momentum_ was an exhibition of performance-installations at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery curated by Jenn Goodwin in collaboration with artists Jessica Karuhanga and Brandy Leary. Pairing a visual and dance artist, the evolving exhibition hosted and unseated the temporary togetherness of the performing and witnessing bodies through a refracting query of what is traced/traceable in the tasks of living and processing embodiment. Tapping into the etymological origins of curating (_curatus_ Latin, “caring for” or “curing”), Goodwin chose to work with artists whose sculptural/choreographic art practices varyingly position the body as a site for creating knowledge and surfacing history from the place of being a living, breathing trans-temporal archive. In doing so, the exhibition importantly reified discourse about the marginalized “object” of dance-performance and the “othered” body as a critical site for the transmission of knowledge through form, movement, presence and gesture. 

Skipping the shorter performances at the opening reception, I arrived on March 25 to bear witness to the first of a rotating series of three-hour simultaneous live activations in each of Karuhanga and Leary’s porously sonic and sculptural spaces.

Mafa Makhubalo, a Toronto-based South African photographer and dance artist Leary previously spotlighted at the launch of _Contemporaneity_ (“a multidisciplinary series Leary curates that seeks to re-centre understandings of the contemporary away from European or white American assumptions”) sat, paced, gumboot-danced and spoke in his native tongue from within an installation composed of 578 metal bells imported from Kerala, Gujarat and Rajasthan provinces in India. Suspended in mid-air, and intoning sounds reminiscent of the vibration of “Om,” the installation sculpturally dimensioned positive and negative space, sonically and visually presencing the architecture of an imaginary temple. A ghostly score by Nick Storring, incorporating a subtle soundscape remixing recordings of all five solos that are part of Leary’s _Ephemeral Artifacts_, added a seemingly randomized delay effect to the gumboot stomping. In this context, as I witnessed opaquely evident embodied investigations, I came into an awareness of my own thinking: of the presenting cage of the body as “layered artifact” (of not only human cultural and historical output but scientific investigation); of the loud performative Black body as an object for display/containment and the English/ unilingual-centric boredom and impatience with things it can’t understand. In midst of this, Mafa suddenly made eye contact with someone who has just entered. His warm greeting and humourous verbal engagement (in English) opened my mental gaze from passive viewer into that of a welcomed guest. 

Curious about the sense of the liveness in the solos of _Ephemeral Artifacts_, I returned a few days later for the activations of Travis Knights, a charismatic tap dancer who engaged in a speaking practice (while vacillating between tap dancing and standing), that included reminiscing and entertaining us about his embarrassing and redeeming teenage encounter with American tap idol Gregory Hines on a film set. Surmising that he had arrived at a point of active stillness and de-theatricalization, I passed him my iPhone and watched him privately enjoy the video of dance clips from TV series _Will and Grace_ (including cameos by an older Gregory Hines). Witnessing bodies waited behind lines of private curiosity. An intimate (but public) disclosure transpires between Travis and I after I speak of the death of a dear friend’s sister who passed that morning, someone who had fought and lived with cancer and who I openly honoured for choosing the path of doctor-assisted dying. In return, Travis spoke about the love for his mother who continues to battle illness. It is an unexpected moment for both of us – shared and momentary intimacy between strangers. I am grateful for the connection and for the porous structure that managed to hold these unplanned but linking threads of interaction. In hindsight, this social experience also left me yearning for the space between the artifact and the container for artifacts such as a gallery or Hindu temple, a place where the arts, economy and community can intermingle and where the secular and the sacred do not have a dividing line. 

Recentring power and community within the ethos of artistic collaboration, healing and collective embodiment forms bridges between Leary’s _Ephemeral Artifacts_ and Karuhanga’s _through a brass channel_. 

Jessica Karuhanga’s live art practice synthesized and aestheticized the performative image as a repositioning of tender vulnerability and resilience as acts of time-folding spiritual resistance. She and her collaborators sculpted time and space through the induction of simple rituals and slowly moving bodies. 

In reference to the West African Griots that recall and recount a family’s history through song, poetry and storytelling (serving as a living archive of a people’s history), _through a brass channel_’s performance rituals and shifting multivalent installation employed contemporary form to house contemporary content. The “sculpted breathing space,” performances and installations evoked both a marked symbolic sensibility as well as a zigzagging geo-logic of millennial Afro-Diasporic alterity. 

“\_…perceiving directly acts upon the present, but with one foot firmly planted in the future. Experience, on the other hand, does the contrary: you are in the present, but with one foot in the past\_” – Eduardo Chillida 

Referencing Octavia Butler’s novel _Kindred_ and the installation “\_Untitled (Night Train)\_” by David Hammons, a rope and coal installation visibly linked to the main installation: a projected cluster of self-affirming YouTube videos of diverse Afro-Diasporic women projected onto hanging cloth “sails,” evocative of cloth brought as goods to West Africa in trade for slaves. The installation created a techno-portal “black hole,” ritually contained by a ring of salt, in the centre of the East Gallery. 

In tandem with a sound installation that documented diverse Black voices speaking to yearning for escape through memory or fantasy, I read this as a spatialized inference to the construction of virtual identity, arguably prefigured upon a “master/slave” relationship, as a contemporary form of the Middle Passage. 

Taking a page from Martine Syms’ _Afrofuturist Manifesto_, Karuhanga cumulatively proposed time- travel as separable from nostalgia. In one spellbinding evening, she jointly improvised with Caribbean- Canadian writer-activist M. NourbeSe Phillip to presence the transgenerational colonial archive. Through an amplifying, echoing and embodying of words from Phillip’s book _Zong!_, they uncovered the fluidity of what Katherine McKittrick names as the “past/ present, archives/fiction, theory/everyday” as a way of corporeally accessing Black resilience. 

Examining how live performance predicates both presence and absence of the body, Goodwin alludes to a quickening conversation with Francisco-Fernando Granados by citing “how performance comes off the body.” By setting the performing and palimpsestic body as a respective filter for questions of mundane perception and intellection, both Leary and Karuhanga propose that in tracing the ephemeral, choreographing the time-body is as important as performative liveness, maybe even more important. Like breath, the transmuting body is dense and rarified with knowing and unknowing. Experiencing time is not what is left of the work, it’s the work itself. 

issue-134-p64-66.pdf

This is a review of “all our days are full of breath: a record of momentum” which was an exhibition of performance-installations curated by Jenn Goodwin in collaboration with artists Jessica Karuhanga and Brandy Leary. The exhibition took place at Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Toronto, and ran from March 24 to April 8, 2017.

all our days are full of breath: a record of momentum

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