The Canadian Guild of Crafts is happy to take part, for the first time this year, in the CONTEMPORARY NATIVE ART BIENNIAL, which is already in its third edition. For this edition, the Guild will present an exhibition entitled CULTURE SHIFT: CHALLENGING IDENTITY, from April 29 to June 18, 2016. This major exhibition questions the acquired and recognizable perceptions that inspire traditional Inuit art images, which seem to depict an idealized vision of nordicity, frozen in time and looking back nostalgically into the past. CULTURE SHIFT: CHALLENGING IDENTITY proposes, on the other hand, a more realistic vision of contemporary Inuit life, anchored in the present. Shouldered by the creations of thirteen artists living in Nunavut and in Greenland, Ningeosiaq Ashoona, Shuvinai Ashoona, Bolatta Silis-Høegh, Geronimo Inutiq, Qavavau Manumie, Ohotaq Mikkigak, Jamasee Padluq Pitseolak, Tapaungai Qatsiya, Nicotye Samayualie, Toonoo Sharky, Ningeokuluk Teevee, Jutai Toonoo and Samonie Toonoo, this multidisciplinary exhibition is comprised of sculpture, prints, drawings, paintings and video.
Northern communities have been profoundly transformed, given the notable changes that occurred successively in the second half of the twentieth century. Inuit artists’ pictorial choices have altered, and as can now be seen, they bespeak a renewed, hybrid identity, one rooted in tradition yet also resolutely turned towards the future. From April 29 to June 18, 2016, the Guild invites you to come and confront your ideas and perceptions of Inuit art by way of a transcending and innovative exhibition to be held in an environment of multicultural sharing and exchange.
CONTEMPORARY NATIVE ART BIENNIAL, 3rd Edition
Born from the need to have a recurrent event that provides long-term support to the development of a native artistic language, the Contemporary Native Art Biennial highlights, for an exponential public, indigenous and non-indigenous, the plurality of artistic practices which stem from Native North American cultures. Strengthened by the two previous editions, the third edition of the Biennial will be presented in four different Montreal venues, in the form of pavilions: Art Mûr Gallery (Central Pavilion), Stewart-Hall Museum (West Coast Pavilion), the Canadian Guild of Crafts (Northern Pavilion), and McCord Museum (Educational Pavilion). Fifty-six First Peoples artists will be represented. This year, Mike Patten, the invited curator, has chosen to underline the changes that are currently unfolding in native artistic productions and their evolution across the continent. The works gathered in Culture Shift — Une révolution culturelle bear witness to a rich native cultural heritage, in which the variety of traditional techniques and motifs used, as well as the subjects broached continue to nourish artistic productions.
