Where white pines lay over the water
Pātaka Art+Museum
2 December 2016 – 12 February 2017
Dr Julie Nagam
As artist in residence throughout November, Julie will be developing work around oral histories and knowledge systems within Porirua. Nagam’s where white pines lay over the water challenges the dominant settler account of Toronto City through the portrayal of historians, archaeologists, elders, various texts, the land, maps and archival documents.
Dr Julie Nagam is the Chair of North American art at Winnipeg University, and previously held a joint position in this role with the University of Winnipeg and the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
The following is an exert from an interview that Dr Nagam gave to the Contemporary Hum about the exhibition and related projects in Aotearoa New Zealand and Canada (sourced from: https://contemporaryhum.com/writing/charting-the-constellations-of-the-oceans-rivers-and-islands/ ):
Exert:
In 2016, I was invited to attempt to re-create a geographically specific installation from 2011, where white pines lay over the water, which was first shown at A-space gallery in Toronto, and then remounted at Pātaka Art + Museum as part of a collaboration with Urban Shaman Gallery in Winnipeg, Manitoba. As with in pursuit of Venus, [infected], my goal was to unpack concealed geographies, in this case of Toronto, and reimagine this place through a multivocal visual and sound-based narrative. My installation was part of a larger exhibition in New Zealand titled if we never met, which brought together Sonny Assu, Jordan Bennett, Maria Hupfield, Geronimo Inutiq, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Amy Malbeuf, Kevin McKenzie, Julie Nagam, Theo Pelmus, Kristin Snowbird, Adrian Stimson, and Charlene Vickers into conversation with works by Ngaahina Hohaia, James Ormsby, Wi Taepa, Le Moana, and the SaVAge K’lub.
At the same time, Pātaka hosted the second tri-nations (CAN, NZ, AUS) curators exchange. The first exchange had taken place the previous year in Brisbane, Australia, during the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT8), and in 2017 the same group of curators, scholars, and directors came to Winnipeg, Manitoba, for the third annual symposium of the Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF) titled, The Future is Indigenous. This event, which I hosted and organised, brought together a critical mass of artists, community activists, curators, and academics to present their visions of the future of Indigenous people. Over forty-five speakers from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, and the United States held multidisciplinary conversations about Indigenous art and media, scholarship, and cultural innovation.
Furthermore, Reuben Friend, director of Pātaka, and Daina Warren, director of Urban Shaman, decided to collaborate again to present the exhibition InDigiNous Aotearoa: Virtual Histories, Augmented Futures at Urban Shaman Gallery in 2017, which built on the strong digital media creation of Māori artists over the past twenty years, and more specifically on the previous digital media exhibition Techno Māori: Māori Art in the Digital Age, 2001. InDigiNous Aotearoa included seven Māori artists: Reweti Arapere, Hana Rakena, Rachael Rakena, Kereama Taepa, Suzanne Tamaki, Johnson Witehira, and Rangituhia Hollis. It ran in conjunction with the Indigenous Video Game Arcade and Virtual Reality (VR) Stations, which showcased games from the IIF Skins workshops: Dr. Elizabeth LaPensée’s Thunderbird Strikes and Upper One Games’s Never Alone, the 2167 VR projects, and the Art Alive VR experience from Pinnguaq which were in direct dialogue with the work of the Māori artists. There were hands-on makerspace activities, such as digital workshops, with over 350 attendees. These various events cultivated long-term relationships between New Zealand and Canada that have since resulted in new projects and artist collaborations, such as The Space Between Us.
