Golnaz Taherian | Arts Editor
Featured Image: “Sister” represents a woman who is ready to fly. | Golnaz Taherian
Rebecca Belmore is an Anishinaabe contemporary performance artist. Her current exhibition, ‘Facing the Monumental,’ is being curated by Wanda Nanibush at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).
Drawing from the modern political zeitgeist, Belmore’s exhibition focuses on diverse topics such as violence against indigenous communities, the cultural significance of water, poverty, and the struggles of the human spirit. This exhibition employs photography, installations, videos and sculptures to paint an overall picture of these themes.
Mixing a mood of impassioned social activism with her keen, practiced aesthetic sensibility, Belmore forces us to confront Canadian colonialism. She asks us to re-examine our conception of Canadian history and turn our consciousness towards the inner cities and snow-swept reserves where Native oppression is a daily fact of life.
For example, the exhibit presents The Name and Unnamed, a video of a 2002 performance by Belmore. In the video, Belmore is in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood notorious for the murder of numerous indigenous women.
Carrying buckets, flowers, and a broom, Belmore sweeps the concrete before kneeling. Then, she scrubs the concrete clean, as though to wash away the blood of countless, unnamed Native murder victims.
Arising, Belmore gazes at a crowd of onlookers and begins screaming out the names of the murdered women, reading from her arms. Her voice is imbued with pain and rage born of the centuries of bloody colonial conquest. She bites flowers, then proceeds to nail the hem of her red dress to a telephone pole before ripping it to shreds. Finally, in view of a sympathetic audience, Belmore stares lamentfully at small flickering candles she has lit, honouring her slain brethren.
In another work entitled “Sister,” there’s a liberating photograph of a woman in a denim jacket and jeans; in it, the women’s arms are outspread, her back facing the camera. In an interview with The Agenda, Nam Kiwanuka asked Belmore about the message behind this work. Belmore replied, “‘Sister’ was made for the 2010 Olympic games in Vancouver and the work was situated in the Eastside of downtown Vancouver.
“On February 14, there was the annual women’s march, so I knew that these women would walk past this image, which was installed in the window.”
Nanibush, who curates the AGO’s entire Indigenous section, adds: “Rebecca has this presence that’s quite intense and super strong and I think that same thing translates into her photography, in terms of ‘Sister’ being this woman with her arms out and ready to fly.”
“Fountain” is another work in this exhibition. We see a seascape. The artist struggles out of the water, bearing a bucket. Finally, she manages to extricate herself. She walks towards the camera and splashes the water at the screen. Then, the water, alongside everything else, turns red. Her face now marked with this blood-like liquid, the artist turns to look at the camera, almost accusingly.
Nanibush, speaking about the role of water in “Fountain,” said: “‘Fountain’ being so much ahead of its time, in terms of thinking about water and the fact that water for me is the most important issue of our day today. Water is this resource that’s our life and to think that’s gonna be scarce, or to think that’s being polluted, and to think that’s turned into commodity, all of these things are what Rebecca was thinking about long before a lot of people were.”
