Tag: Rebecca Belmore

© Rebecca Belmore, Manifesto, TIME TIME TIME, FADO, 2003. Photo Paul Couillard.

Lac Seul First Nation / Canada
www.rebeccabelmore.com

A member of the Lac Seul First Nation (Anishinaabe), Rebecca Belmore is an internationally recognized multidisciplinary artist. Rooted in the political and social realities of Indigenous communities, Belmore’s works make evocative connections between bodies, land and language. Solo exhibitions include: Facing the Monumental, Art Gallery of Ontario (2018); Rebecca Belmore: Kwe, Justina M.Barnicke Gallery (2014); The Named and The Unnamed, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, (2002). In 1991, Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother was created at the Banff Centre for the Arts with a national tour in 1992 and subsequent gatherings took place across the Canada in 1996, 2008, and 2014.

In 2017, Belmore participated in documenta 14 with Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany. In 2005, at the Venice Biennale, she exhibited Fountain in the Canadian Pavilion. Other group exhibitions include: Landmarks2017 / Reperes2017, Partners in Art (2017); Land Spirit Power, National Gallery of Canada (1992); and the IV Bienal de la Habana (1991).

Belmore received the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation’s VIVA Award (2004), the Hnatyshyn Visual Arts Award (2009), the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2013), and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize (2016). She received honourary doctorates from OCAD University (2005), Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2018), and NSCAD University (2019).

FADO is pleased to announce A Way of Making, a First Nations performance art residency project featuring artists Bently Spang and Rebecca Belmore, and curated by Reona Brass.

Audience is invited to view the artists’ creative process during daily open studio hours from March 11 to 14. The performance being created in this residency is entitled Tongue River, will take place on the evening of March 14. The artists will be available on March 15 to discuss their work. All events are free.

SCHEDULE
Open studio: March 11–14 @ 11:00am
Performance: March 14 @ 7:30pm
Artist discussion: March 15 @ 11:00am

Curator Reona Brass writes of this project:

A Way of Making brings together Northern Cheyenne artist Bently Spang and Anishnabe artist Rebecca Belmore in a residency that examines how ritual in performance art functions in fashioning a new self within the cultural body. Taking up residence in a studio at OCAD University, the artists will explore the boundary between what we understand as “authentic experience” and what is “merely performed” to discover how this practice functions in creating a cycle of cultural desire, resistance and fertility.

Sharing a desire to address several communities at once with their work, these artists maintain a delicate relationship with the world that surrounds and encroaches upon the world that they were raised in and return to frequently. For these artists, to walk between, negotiate and address these two worlds is simply a necessity they accept, balancing as they do between yesterday and tomorrow. Their interdisciplinary practices, flexible vehicles for engaging very different audiences in a dialogue about the reality of contemporary indigenous life, entail an ancient way of making that assists them in making this connection between the past and the future.

While primarily installation artists, both artists revert to the medium of performance art when the need arises, usually to address barriers and establish signposts of cultural change. Belmore and Spang use their performance work to aggressively, and sometimes humorously, move the viewer away from the defining frame of native people within the colonialist construct of North American society. Creating acts of political defiance and cultural determination with their performance work, Spang and Belmore deliberately subvert the classical values of traditional native art for the flux of contemporary reality. Striking a complicated balance between the aesthetic and the political, the monumental and the transitory, the works of these artists ultimately serve as crucial indicators in the rapid and continual renegotiation of contemporary indigenous identity.

© Rebecca Belmore & Bently Spang, Tongue River, 2003. Photo Miklos Legrady.

FADO continues its 12-month duration performance art series, TIME TIME TIME, with Manifesto, a new work by Canadian artist Rebecca Belmore.

Sitting in a storefront window where she can be viewed and heard from the street, Belmore will spend twelve hours writing and speaking. At the end of twelve hours, she will organize her writing into a neat pile and invite people to an ‘opening’—the exhibition of her writing.

Belmore says of this piece: “I do not enjoy writing about my own work. But I like writing. I speak about my work in front of others. Revisiting sites. Places. Looking again at my ideas. Hearing the sounds made by my voice trying to remember time. ‘Manifesto’ is a place to hear the sound of my own writing. It is a private inner place made public. I like writing. But never real writing like a writer. Just my hand and my head working to mark down and speak beyond my body…. I view this experience as a process where I have the time and space to make my thoughts into an object. The result of this performance work will be the writing, not to be read but to exhibited as an object.”

For the past ten years, Rebecca Belmore has been exploring issues of identity and place through installation and site-specific works as well as performance art pieces. She has performed in numerous festivals, conferences, public galleries, artist-run centres and unofficial spaces for a wide range of audiences. Some venues include the Havana Biennale (1991), two performance biennials in Québec City (Premiere biennale d’art actuel de Québec, 1990; Rencontre internationale d’art performance de Québec, 1994), the American Indian Art Institute (1995), the Banff Centre (1997), 7a*11d Performance Art Festival (1997) and a tour of Germany organized by Boris Nieslony in 1998.

Image (above) © Rebecca Belmore, Manifesto, 1999. Photo by Paul Couillard.