G.4 ROUNDTABLE Sovereign Territorialities: Unperforming the Colonial in Institutions, the Land and the Settler Imaginary, Part 2
Sat Oct 17 / 11:00 – 12:30
voice_chat expiredchairs /
- Leah Decter, York University
- Rachelle Dickenson, Independent Curator, NSCAD University
- Peter Morin, OCAD University
This two-part session invites BIPOC and White Settler scholars, artists and curators into dialogue concerning the ways artistic production interjects disturbance into contemporary colonial landscapes transnationally. A geography of colonial ideology overlays all aspects of contemporary life in nations and bodies impacted by settler colonialism. This extends from normative conceptions of place and identity within the settler society to the calcified institutional administrative cultures that shape engagement with, and the production of, knowledge. The arts and cultural sector has been complicit in establishing and maintaining dominant imaginaries and structures that sustain these sometimes painful ideological landscapes. Simultaneously, cultural workers are often instrumental in subverting them. Through a discussion of specific artworks, the roundtable participants will consider how artistic interventions mobilize “radical defamiliarization” (States 2010, 35) as a strategy for disturbing colonial whiteness and asserting unremitting Indigenous sovereignties in the land, the gallery and iconic national sites.
Leah Decter is a white settler inter-media and performance artist and scholar based in Winnipeg, Canada; Treaty 1 territory. Holding a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queens University and an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute she is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at York University’s School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design/Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology. Decter’s artwork has been presented widely in Canada and internationally US, UK, Germany, Malta, Netherlands, India, and Australia. Her writing has been published in the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation, Canadian Theatre Review and Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, among other publications. Decter’s upcoming publications include a co-edited issue of Public Journal and several book chapters. Her current research-creation projects address social-spatial politics consequent to settler colonial formation and consider the ethics of being- in-relation in spaces of Indigenous sovereignty.
Rachelle Dickenson, PhD is of British, Irish, and Red River Métis ancestry through her paternal grandfather. Having learned about her Métis ancestry as an adult, she is guided by decolonial and Indigenous methodologies and the arts and academic communities of which she is a part. Rachelle is an independent curator and recently completed her PhD at Carleton University in the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies. She worked as Associate Curator with the National Gallery of Canada’s Indigenous Art Department and is co-curator of Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu Continuel (2019-20). Rachelle’s research and practice focus on relationships and distinctions between BIPOC and white settler art histories, pedagogies, and curatorial practices in Canadian exhibition and educational institutions in support of generative decolonizing and anti-racist arts collaborations.
Peter Morin is a Tahltan Nation Performance Artist, Educator, and Curator. Morin’s artworks are shaped, and reshaped by Tahltan epistemological production and often take on the form of performance interventions. Morin’s practice has spanned twenty years so far, with exhibitions in London, Berlin, Singapore, and New Zealand, as well as across Canada and the United States. In addition to his exhibition history, Morin has curated exhibitions for the Museum of Anthropology, Western Front, Bill Reid Gallery, and Burnaby Art Gallery. He was longlisted for the Brink and Sobey Awards in 2013 and 2014, respectively. In 2016, Morin received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Canadian Mid-Career Artist. Morin holds a SSHRC grant, Crossing Media, Crossing Canada: performing the land we are, which explores the meeting up of media and durational performance. Morin is an Associate professor with the Faculty of Art, at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto.
Warriors of the Rocks by Catherine Blackburn. Photo by Tenille Campbell. Image courtesy of Catherine Blackburn.
panelists /
- Deanna Bowen, Concordia University
- Nicole Neidhardt, OCAD University
- Carla Taunton, NSCAD University
- Justine Woods, OCAD University
Deanna Bowen (b. 1969, Oakland; lives in Toronto) is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. In recent years, her work has involved close examination of her family’s migration and their connections to Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley and Black Strathcona, the “All-Black” towns of Oklahoma, the Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada and the US. She is a recipient of a 2020 Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts Award, a 2018 Canada Council Research and Creation Grant, an Ontario Arts Council Media Arts Grant in 2017, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. Her writing, interviews and artworks have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives, and Transition Magazine. Bowen is editor of the 2019 publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.
Nicole Neidhardt is Diné (Navajo) of Kiiyaa'áanii Clan on her mother’s side, a blend of European ancestry on her father’s side and is from Santa Fe, NM. She has a BFA from the University of Victoria and is currently working on her MFA at OCAD University in Toronto, ON. Nicole’s Diné identity is the heart of her practice which encompasses installation, illustration, painting, and large-scale murals. Her research interests revolve around Indigenous Futurisms, Diné stories and storytelling, Resurgence, and Decolonial Aesthetics.
Dr. Carla Taunton, a white-settler scholar, is an Associate Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) and the Special Advisor to the VP Academic and Research, Social Justice and Decolonization. Her research contributes to arts-based critiques of settler colonialism, Indigenous arts and methodologies, contemporary Canadian art and activism, museum and curatorial studies, as well as theories of decolonization, anti-colonialism and settler responsibility. Her recent publications include, Unsettling Canadian Heritage: Decolonial Aesthetics in Canadian Video and Performance Art, with Sarah E.K Smith in Journal Canadian Studies (2018), Embodying Sovereignty: Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada, in Narratives Unfolding (2017), and “Performing Sovereignty: Forces to be Reckoned With” in More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (2016). She co-edited with Dr. Julie Nagam and Dr. Heather Igloliorte PUBLIC 54: Indigenous Art, the first special issue on global Indigenous new media and digital arts, and with Igloliorte RACAR: Continuities Between Eras: Indigenous Arts (2017). She is an independent curator and was a curatorial team member for Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu Continuel at the National Gallery of Canada (2019). Taunton’s recent collaborative research projects include: The GLAM Collective, The Pilimmaksarniq/Pijariuqsarniq Project: Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership and The Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s Moving Image Heritage.
Justine Woods is a Métis interdisciplinary designer based in Tkaronto, originally from the Georgian Bay Métis Community. She is a current Master of Design Candidate at OCAD University and holds a Bachelor of Design in Fashion Design from Ryerson University. Justine's design practice involves garment-based and textile-based work with focus on Indigenous clothing adornment practices. Her research and design work investigates the ways Fashion can facilitate cultural resurgence, specifically positioned through an Indigenous feminist lens. Her work is greatly informed by her identity as a Métis woman, her ancestral kinship relations and the deeply rooted relationships she has to her ancestral land and the waterways of Georgian Bay.
