“Representation” has been a media buzzword recently, with people becoming more aware of how little Aboriginal women are depicted in movies, television, and art. Urban Shaman is currently holding an exhibit titled Memory Keepers: Methodologies of Memory, Mapping, and Gender, which spotlights exclusively female Aboriginal artists.
The project privileges indigenous knowledge and memories, and is trying to “decolonize space and histories of land and home (within the settler Canadian context) and mobilize the process of indigenization.”
Memory Keepers will also look at “the connections between women’s bodies and land and the ways in which landscape and territory are tied to the body through memory and mapping.”
Tanya Lukin Linklater is one of the artists being showcased. Her work includes experimental choreography, performance, video, and text.
Lukin Linklater’s works have been displayed at Images Festival in the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), SBC Gallery (Montreal), VI Mostra Internacional de Videodanca Sao Carlos (Brazil), and Culver Center of the Arts (California), to name a few. She’s also published poetry and essays.
Erin Sutherland and Carla Taunton are curating Memory Keepers. Lukin Linklater met Sutherland at a performance in Kingston, where Sutherland was working with Taunton.
Sutherland and Taunton contacted Lukin Linklater and asked her to be a part of Memory Keepers, which is her largest display of photography and video works to date.
Exhibits such as this are important because “major galleries, museums and institutions do not exhibit women artists in any kind of equitable way, for the most part, across North America,” says Lukin Linklater.
The margin of representation is even smaller for Aboriginal women; featuring solely female Aboriginal artists is activism.
Memory Keepers is located at the Urban Shaman main gallery and Marvin Francis media galleries until Oct. 11
