The right to know for settler artists, curators, educators, and viewers is an ongoing struggle when in response to knowledge of art made by—and lived experiences of—Indigenous peoples, Black people and people of Colour. In Mi’kma’ki there is growing engagement with decolonial and unsettling art and curatorial practices as well as antiracist and anticolonial strategies. A key component to systemic change is not only the critical and radical transformation of our institutions by mobilizing Mi’kmaq sovereignty as the foundations of local cultural and educational spaces but to decolonize from every direction possible, and to bring along many folks in the process. 

This dialogue reflects our ongoing conversations about art, craft, museums, settler colonialism, resistance, pedagogies, community, care, generosity, love, food, and swimming that began several years ago. In the following conversation we discuss the ongoing role of cultural appropriation in the contemporary settler colonial project. We make connections between the act of settler appropriation of Indigenous knowledge, cultural and spiritual practices, and customary objects, among other things, to settler possession and Indigenous dispossession. The act of appropriating BIPOC cultures clearly shows a settler belief in having the right to know and to possess. Our ideas draw from Indigenous knowledge keepers, scholars, artists, and leaders such as Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Goenpul), Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngati Awa and Ngati Porou), Sherry Farrell Racette (Métis/Timiskaming Algonquin/Irish), Pamela Palmeter (Mi’kmaw), and Marie Battiste (Mi’kmaw). We have in our conversations considered and drawn on the work by late Mohawk scholar Deborah Doxtator, Ho-Chunk scholar Amy Lonetree, Cherokee scholar Adrianne Keen, and the recent collaborative essay by Aylan Couchie (Nishnaabekwe), Raven Davis (Anishinaabek), and Chief Lady Bird (Chippewa and Potawatomi), “Dirty Words: Appropriation.”

We are white-settler cis-women academics living as uninvited guests on Mi’kma’ki, the unceded, traditional and ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaq nation. We hope that our conversation here will contribute to growing conversations amongst white settlers about our individual and collective responsibility to learn, follow, and embody treaty, and to practice treaty principles ethically, generously, and reciprocally in the everyday and in our art and curatorial practices. We also recognize the necessity of settler accountability when making, writing, and curating art as well as anti-racist and anti-colonial work that always starts from the place of acknowledging Indigenous sovereignties. We acknowledge that white settler practices with the best of intentions have the risk of continuing colonial practices of harm and extraction. Our understandings and realizations brought forward here come in large part through learning and in conversation with many Indigenous artists, scholars, thinkers, and knowledge keepers. 

Carla Taunton: An ongoing commitment I have as a white-settler professor and curator is considering how to ignite opportunities for transformative and decolonial changes at the individual (myself included), collective, and institutional levels. Something I spend a lot of time thinking about is how to engage folks with unsettling and decolonizing practices and to do so as a white-settler without co-opting and appropriating Indigenous voice and perspectives but rather be led by and collaborate with. This is because of the longstanding practice of settler individuals and institutions appropriating Indigenous knowledges to include art and claiming it as their own. A good place to start when talking to a white-settler audience about cultural appropriation is contemporary and historic white possessiveness of Indigenous cultural knowledge and material culture. This reveals how cultural appropriation is an ongoing practice of settler colonialism, with deep-seated roots in the dispossession of Indigenous lands, resources, knowledge, and arts. 

In considering the act of appropriating someone’s culture as an act of settler colonial violence, it asserts cultural appropriation as a practice of dispossession that is akin to the theft of Indigenous lands. An example is the removal of customary objects from Indigenous nations and communities and putting them in museum collections directed by a paternalistic Eurocentric practice of preserving knowledge for the benefit of all Canadians. These objects become items of national public property and this claiming by settler society is observed in national/ist language, iconography, and monuments, as evident in conceptualizations of Canadian heritage. 

However, until very recently most historic Indigenous art and customary objects were not accessible to the communities to which they belonged or to the family members whose ancestors made or took care of them. There are countless articles by Indigenous academics, artists, and community leaders that discuss the harm of cultural appropriation and the role of what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has termed the “white possessive.” 

Julie Hollenbach: I’m reminded of Métis scholar David Garneau, and many others who have shown that the sense of entitlement settlers have to Indigenous culture and this extractive and exploitative attitude toward Indigenous lands and knowledge is an extension of the historical and social framework that legitimated, for Europeans, colonization and seizure of people and their culture, non-human beings, land, and water. The doctrine of discovery was a fifteenth-century concept first enacted in a papal decree that entitled European explorers to claim terra nullius—“no man’s land,” defined as any lands not occupied by Christians—for the King and his Christian god. In this worldview, Indigenous peoples were not recognized as human, and therefore did not have rights and could not possibly belong to their land. This is a form of exceptionalism and a centering of a European worldview.

Taunton: Totally, entitlement is also a key player in the construction of a settler imaginary that is grounded in white supremacy. We see this in the painterly tradition of the modern landscape brought forward by the Group of Seven that has been canonized in Canadian art history as creating a new Canadian aesthetic in the pre-war period of the early 1900s. These tableaus often showcase the settler-imagined construction of wilderness exemplify the emptying of lands of both human presence (Indigenous sovereignty) and impact (settler industrialization and commodification of land). Feeling entitled to possess lands, represent land, and to displace and dispossess Indigenous nations across what is now called Canada is key to the maintenance of settler colonial logic that is underpinned by white supremacy and Eurocentric western value systems. Cultural appropriation is tied to all this in that it shows how settler logic continues to showcase values of racial hierarchy, or rather the legacies of value systems of white supremacy: the thinking that whiteness is of more value and that white-settler society has the authority and right to possess knowledge and objects, for instance, from other cultures as its own. 

Hollenbach: Sunera Thobani wrote this amazing book, Exalted Subjects, 2007, that outlines how the construction of whiteness, which is not actually an ethnicity and isn’t tied to specific heritage, was about creating a ruling class. This ruling class received privileges as exalted subjects (citizens) and worked to discipline other ethnic and racial groups that fell outside the state-defined ideals of citizenship. Creating this ambiguous racial category of whiteness required that people would wholesale abandon their specific culture and heritage. And so, as many Indigenous and Black scholars have noted, whiteness was predicated on violence against and the dehumanization of racialized people and groups. Colonialism and white supremacy aren’t only violent to Indigenous people, Black people, and People of Colour, they are also violent to white settlers. Given this violent rending from any kind of “authentic” connection to individual heritage and ancestry, I can see the connection to why white settlers often turn to the cultural practices of colonized people for spiritual and cultural meaning. 

Taunton: Canada presents itself as a multicultural society that is about diversity, benevolence, and peacemaking, for example. These national myths are in turn ways for a national public to forget how the nation state was actually built by taking and possessing Indigenous lands and how a national identity was maintained by claiming territories, languages, art, and teachings as objects of Canadian heritage as well as areas of academic study (anthropology and art history), all the while attempting to erase Indigenous presence and sovereignties from public consciousness. 

Decolonization as a simultaneous parallel Indigenous and non-Indigenous project is for everybody, just as bell hooks argued feminism was. 

This is not to create a binary that excludes Black people and People of Colour, for example. These parallel projects have many pathways and everybody has distinct roles, responsibilities, access points, and knowledge to bring. They also bring alliances, risks, and potential harms, depending on subject positionality. Decolonizing as a verb is an active centralizing of Indigenous self-determined knowledge, histories, and stories. At the same time, it is an unearthing of invisible colonial structures that are the backbones of settler society’s institutions, such as galleries, libraries, and universities. It is an unsettling of naturalized conditions of contemporary settler colonialism that benefit white-settler communities. Part of the decolonial work for settler cultural workers is to understand how visual culture, the art industry, and the academy have influenced and played key roles in shaping settler colonial order, and how principles of settler colonialism have informed, framed, and generated a great deal of artistic, cultural, and scholarly phenomena. Currently, across Indigenous territories, a critical mass of Indigenous artists are creating resurgence-based art practices such as with beadwork Catherine Blackburn (Dene), Judy Anderson (Cree), Barry Ace (Anishnaabe-Odawa), Ruth Cuthand (Plains Cree and Scottish), and Christie Belcourt (Métis); with weaving Lisa Hageman Yahgujanaas (Haida) and Sarah Sense (Chitimacha/Choctaw); and performance-interdisciplinary artists Ursula Johnson (Mi’kmaw), Dorreen Gruben (Inuit/Inuvialuk), and Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory (Kalaaleq). These Indigenous, land-based cultural practices and knowledges have survived despite ongoing attempts by settler governments to eradicate them. Indigenous self-determination, resistance, and stewardship by historic Indigenous artists have played key roles in the intergenerational transmission and sharing of culture as well as like their ancestors, creating new dynamism by incorporating new techniques and materials.

Hollenbach: Such a crucial point. The artists you mention are great examples of how Indigenous people have always responded to shifts in their social and cultural world through their making practices. Artistic practices purely concerned with aesthetics (“Art for art’s sake”) is another European notion that has been projected onto the cultural production of non-western societies, tied in with modernist notions of “authenticity.” 

Taunton: Yes, exactly. This bringing in of new materials, of settler trade materials, was not a new cultural phenomenon, as Indigenous artists and makers have always adapted and adopted new technologies and materialities. As contemporary artists, they were responding to the influences of their daily lives. Currently, Indigenous scholars such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson speak of the act of cultural continuance as resurgence work tied to and connected to land, language, and ways of knowing and being. The work of Jordan Bennett comes to mind immediately, specifically his solo site-specific exhibition at the AGNS, Ketu’ elmita’jik, which showcased large wall murals incorporating historic quillwork seatbacks. Tepkik (2018), a 127-foot banner that is currently installed at the National Gallery of Canada as part of the international Indigenous exhibition Abadakone, illustrates the resilience of Indigenous cultures by incorporating visual language and iconographies of the Mi’kmaq living archive—petroglyphs, quillwork, beadwork, and baskets. The Mi’kmaq makers of the 18th and 19th centuries were savvy in their adaptations and engagement with the colonial market, and they were working in the ways as their ancestors and their future kin.

Hollenbach: These are important examples of Indigenous resilience and cultural continuance! 

Taunton: Indigenous resilience, and resistance! Settler colonialism has and continues to disrupt and dispossess Indigenous peoples and nations of their lands while also repetitively legitimating itself as rightful owner of the land, its resources, and, in turn, its peoples. The settler imaginary in turn feels entitled to take, to possess, and to claim markers of indigeneity as a component of settler identity. Indigenous artists, knowledge keepers, educators, leaders, and storytellers have made enormous contributions to dismantling these myths.

Hollenbach: Totally. Mi’kmaq artist Ursula Johnson’s performance “The Indian Truckhouse of Fine Art” (2011) works to subvert these projections of settler colonial fantasies about Indigeneity and authenticity. It is a performance in which Johnson exercised her treaty rights to sell her wares. Wearing the traditional dress of 19th century Mi’kmaq women, she set up and tended a stall selling items she found in souvenir shops and discount stores that she deemed to be culturally appropriative. To each of these items she affixed a piece of hand spun and dyed yarn with a tag that read “This object is 100% Authentic Indian High Art. Made in Mi’kma’ki.” On the reverse of each tag, a price between $17.20 to $17.90 was given (these prices reference the dates of the Peace and Friendship Treaties between the Mi’kmaq and the Crown).

Taunton: Yes! I love this work. Ursula Johnson’s “The Indian Truckhouse of Fine Art” subverts the colonial ideology of the salvage paradigm and the outside Eurocentric constructions of hierarchies and classifications that reflect western value systems and the longstanding longing to possess something of the other. The salvage paradigm was a late 19th and early 20th century attempt to collect and preserve Indigenous material culture; to document cultural, social, and political practice; and to create a permanent record based on the Eurocentric belief that Indigenous peoples were vanishing. Although these attitudes shifted in the academic and museological sense, Haida art historian Marcia Crosby argues that much of the Indigenous art produced in the 1980s and 1990s is an attempt to reclaim the image of Indigenous peoples from the ethnographic context of the salvage paradigm. Indigeneity was theoretically and physically collected by settler society: material and visual culture were seen as being salvaged and placed into museum collections, and artists and photographers documented and collected the images of individuals and snap shots of everyday culture.

Today’s salvage paradigm could be seen as cultural appropriation. Colonial legacies remain embedded in Canadian culture, exemplified in the misplaced yet common belief that so-called authentic Indigenous cultures were lost through contact with European society. The result of this feeling of loss in non-Indigenous consciousness was the construction of an expectation of a fixed Indigenous culture—which Indigenous peoples have resisted and subverted throughout the processes of colonization and decolonization.

Hollenbach: The salvage paradigm didn’t function only on an institutional level, with ethnographers collecting Indigenous culture for museums, but also on a personal individual level, with colonial military officers returning home to Britain with souvenirs of Indigenous culture as gifts for their wives and daughters. Those objects would be proudly displayed in the parlour as status symbols. Later, European settlers would collect Indigenous cultural objects and souvenirs for display in their own homes. Often, there’s this perception that colonialism was this masculinist pursuit enacted in the public realm through war and conflict, treaty signing, and border making. 

But colonialism also occurred through the domestic practices of white-settler women as they created homes meant to mirror the imperial centre on the empire’s periphery. Algonquin and French-Canadian artist Nadia Myre made a work providing a powerful critique of this history in 2016, called Decolonial Gestures or Doing It Wrong? Refaire le Chemin. The work drew inspiration from Victorian women’s magazines with text descriptions that guided anglophone settler women in the creation of Indigenous inspired handicrafts. Myre followed the instructions, which were read out to her, without knowing beforehand what she was making. The work unravels the violent ongoing colonial action of attempting to consume and homogenize Indigenous culture. 

Taunton: Specifically, these objects, which as you note were very important objects within white-settler domestic spaces, in many cases were made by Indigenous women using adaptations and integration of trade materials (such as glass beads, velvet, wool, silk ribbon etc.) with Indigenous iconography and materials. They are important objects of Indigenous continuity, meaning that they are vessels which hold past historical and cultural knowledge as well as familial and collective intergenerational memories.

In Mi’kmaq territory, quill pill boxes, calling card trays, pin cushions, and the backing and seat panels of chairs were actively collected and now are housed in museums such as the Natural History Museum here in Halifax as well as large holdings at the McCord Museum in Montréal among others. Many leading Indigenous thinkers explain this phenomenon as an act of cultural continuance and, in some cases, a practice of resistance during a time of heightened assimilation. So Mi’kmaq makers were creating a new economy to support their families while continuing to pass down knowledge encoded in the designs and making practices. This is all happening against the backdrop of the very aggressive assimilationist policies of cultural genocide established by the federal government and enacted through the Indian Act, such as the forced removal of children to Residential Schools and the ceremonial or potlach ban 1884-1951, which deemed ceremonies and cultural customary practices and objects illegal. 

Hollenbach: A lot of these confiscated and stolen objects were placed in provincial and federal museums for “safekeeping” and “posterity.” I see a real connection between the display practices of the museum as the state’s showroom of what the nation values—its core beliefs, outlook, and worldviews—and the displays in individual settler’s living rooms, where they proudly present handmade and mass-produced objects that signify the individual or family’s values, beliefs, and investments. Whether that’s inherited family heirlooms, personal creative projects, sports paraphernalia, spiritual icons, luxury items, souvenirs, or Indigenous-made objects, they are either presented as authentic “artifacts” or as strictly aesthetic objects.

Which goes back to that extractive and possessive colonial impulse. When we go to museums, we see stolen objects presented in a static, possessive way that is normalized. And then settlers visit museums and often take on the ideologies and values presented in the space, but also internalize the display logics of the space along with that attitude of entitlement that we talked about. The museum and other key state institutions tell us that it’s normal to collect and display objects for safekeeping for the future. (As if that’s white people’s role!) And so then the individual mirrors this attitude and activity in their own daily life and domestic space. I’ve noticed that within popular public discourse around cultural appropriation there’s an emphasis on the theft of Indigenous culture by museums, or cultural appropriation by sports teams and corporations for their branding, or the way non-Indigenous luxury fashion lines use and misuse Indigenous designs or symbols to sell fast fashion.

Carla: Yes, such as Urban Outfitters’ Navajo co-opted designs, the Canadian teams’ HBC 2010 Olympic Games–inspired Cowichan sweater, Victoria’s Secret’s use of Plains headdresses, Dsquared2’s copy of Inuit and other Indigenous cultural patterns, designs, and garments, and the list goes on and on.

Julie: These examples are harmful in many ways! Cultural appropriation of Indigenous culture and knowledge negates Indigenous sovereignty over their culture, it extracts profit without any kind of return. Indigenous people are not able to determine and control the representation of themselves and their culture, and the stereotypes and misrepresentations often perpetuate the dehumanization of Indigenous people and lead to further violence. I think consumers have an awareness of how big institutions and corporations are perpetrating harm against Indigenous communities, but there seems to be a disconnect or some cognitive dissonance when it comes to translating this understanding to individual consumer practices. I mean, it was and remains a constant practice of unlearning, for me, too—to recognize how individual consumer practices mirror those attitudes of entitlement, extraction, and possession that continue and contribute to present day colonialism.

Taunton: Decolonization is an ongoing process, and unlearning (also ongoing) is key. So many BIPOC artists, curators, and educators have brought these urgent critiques and truths forward. What I find particularly exciting right now are recent collaborations between companies and Indigenous artists, such as Christi Belcourt and Valentino (dresses and purses) or Jordan Bennett and Pendleton Blankets. Also interesting is the recent Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto and Simons collaboration, featuring 8 Indigenous artists’ designs on over 35 garments. These collaborations are Indigenous led and show a way forward that is grounded in ethics of decolonial reciprocity and shared responsibility. 

Hollenbach: Yes, exactly. So great! This brings up an important question. In thinking about Indigenous fashion, or Indigenous artists collaborating with popular brands, or Indigenous makers selling jewellery on Etsy, I often hear this question from white-settlers who are trying to engage with Indigenous culture respectfully—it’s also something I remember wondering myself: is it appropriate for settlers to buy and wear Indigenous-made jewellery and fashion, or to buy Indigenous art and live with it in their homes. What are your thoughts?

Taunton: I think it can be a key component to settler responsibility; however, for white settlers it’s imperative to ask the why questions. Is it a desire to participate in what we have explained to be as a colonial longing to own and to know? Meaning, are settlers buying Indigenous jewellery, art, and fashion to consume and co-opt for themselves some aspect of imagined notions of authentic Indigeneity, or can this transaction be situated in self-reflexivity, respectful engagement, and decolonial reciprocity? I think a lot about treaty and treaty relationships and what they could look like in 2020. Here in Mi’kma’ki, the Peace and Friendship Treaties signed in the 1700s were established to create co-existence for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. To me, the support of Indigenous art and artists is part of all cultural institutions’ treaty responsibilities, generally speaking: purchasing art and crafts from Indigenous artists is an incredibly productive way to contribute to a stronger arts community. Currently there are many Mi’kmaq and Inuk artists on Instagram and Etsy who are making absolutely brilliant work, such as Melissa Peter Paul, Nicole Traverse (Blomindon Beadwork), and Mi’kmaq Printing, Inez Shiwak, and Vanessa Flowers among others. 

Hollenbach: Yes. Looking to treaty as a guide here is so helpful. Can you expand on this? 

Taunton: Living in Mi’kma’ki, we have an existing roadmap to co-existence by looking to and learning about the Peace and Friendship Treaties. These treaties show us how to move towards activating a nation to nation relationship and reciprocal responsibilities. The treaties are based on Indigenous Mi’kmaq practices and principles of shared accountability, shared respect, and friendship. And there is an expectation of living together in peace, but also of reciprocity. It’s rooted in Indigenous sovereignty, and it invites all folks who are non-indigenous—to include Black people and people of Colour, recent arrivals, and white-settlers, too—to participate in treaty-making every day. To aim to make treaty everyday can help guide us as a community of Indigenous, Black, POC and white-settlers in asking questions about stewardship, about what we purchase and how we engage with the lands we live and work on. To embody treaty for settlers means to navigate the everyday to include art making, curatorial practice, and other cultural work in a way that upholds principles of accountability and reciprocity. It also means to commit to learning and unlearning while disrupting and dismantling patterns of colonial harm, co-option, and, ultimately, possession. 

At a curatorial talk, Junaid stated that the impetus for this exhibition came from John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (also on display at The Rooms). Akomfrah’s wash of water, sound, and history takes viewers through a constantly moving ocean, asking us to consider the oceanic sublime, a space of wonder and magic, violence, destruction, and death. It’s this wash of contradiction that Junaid locates in this place now called Newfoundland and Labrador: a wash of beauty, connection, and foodways, on the one hand, and silence, violence, and haunting, on the other.

Junaid grew up in St. John’s, and she feels the city and its landscape deep in her bones. One might then reasonably expect that she would have encountered stories of Black life during her childhood. But as she observed during her curatorial talk, such stories never formed part of her girlhood education. St. John’s, and Newfoundland and Labrador more broadly speaking, have instead long been imagined as white spaces shaped by Irish and English (and to a much lesser extent French) histories.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the overarching theme of the exhibition is that of silence: the silence of forcibly suppressed stories alongside the silence of lost ones. What Carries Us includes not only a variety of works by artists based in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and the UK, but also archival materials and archaeological artifacts. Taken together, they invite us to reflect on storytelling and identity, and on how we might imagine things differently.

The theme of silence is told perhaps most hauntingly in the form of the garments worn by a man with the initials W.H., an otherwise anonymous sailor of African heritage whose grave in Labrador emerged in the 1980s as a result of coastal erosion. The garments rest alone in a darkened room, their story a reminder that twenty percent of all British and American sailors in the early nineteenth century were black men. What brought W.H. to these shores? How long was he here? Which parts of this place had he visited? Who did he encounter along the way? How did his voice sound? What were his favourite foods? What did he do in his spare time? These are silences we can’t recover; they remain only in shadows.

Meanwhile, Shelley Miller’s Trade (2020), constructed as a series of seemingly edible blue-and-white tiles made of icing sugar, gelatin, and edible inks and arranged in the form of a patchwork tile mural, offers a material commentary on the ways that the unfree labour of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Caribbean supported and sustained European wealth. I’ve seen such tiles in many Dutch museums over the years, often decorating fireplaces and kitchen walls. Here, however, they tell a very different story, drawing out the triangle trade that linked Newfoundland and Labrador with Africa and the Caribbean. Perhaps because of my own Dutch family histories on my father’s side (histories that tangle simultaneously with Dutch Caribbean colonial histories of slavery and indenture on my mother’s side), this piece stood out most to me. The stickiness. The sweetness. The sugar that binds oppression and wealth together, all of it captured in innocuous blue and white tiles that you can buy in any cheesy tourist shop in the Netherlands. What was the cost of sugar? asks the title of a novel by Surinamese author Cynthia McLeod. What, indeed.

But silence is not just grief-laden or mournful in this exhibition—it’s also pointed, political, and playful. Camille Turner, whose Afronautic Research Lab featured at the 2019 Bonavista Biennale, returns here, locating histories of enslavement not just in faraway Caribbean colonies but also right here in this place. If the island of Newfoundland is seen, today, as an isolated outpost, its history gestures towards a long imbrication in the Atlantic slave trade. Turner’s immersive research lab, which includes not only film but also a table filled with books, archival materials, and the tools of the archival researcher’s trade (pencils, blank paper, magnifying glasses), chronicles the nineteen slave ships constructed here and reminds us that it’s all too easy to separate ourselves from messy, oppressive histories. It also asks us to consider what it means to take up a violent inheritance.

The work of Sonia Boyce takes a playful carnivalesque approach. In “Crop Over” (2007), a two-channel video installation, she chronicles a Caribbean festival, with all the colours, music, and dancing so common to many Caribbean celebrations. But Boyce’s “Crop Over” is playfully—and pointedly—subversive. Her characters dance not just in the streets but also through houses and landmarks created as a result of the trade in slaves and sugar. Stilt-walking folk figures dressed in sequined outfits romp through formal gardens and clamber around staid sitting room furniture. They plant themselves on stone balconies and peer around corners, their presence a mocking reminder of the unruly, colourful bodies whose unfree labour made these great homes possible in the first place. In many ways, “Crop Over” reminded me of the spoken word poetry of El Jones (“Dear Benedict” in particular): it’s cheeky, spirited, pleasure-filled, parodic, and, at the same time, deeply political.

What Carries Us is not a large exhibition. And yet it packs a punch. Each element, from the archival materials to the archaeological artifacts to the artworks, offers an opening towards a reimagining and a retelling of Newfoundland and Labrador and the people who have visited its shores and called it home.

In the 1960s, Africville was demolished by the municipality under the pretense of urban renewal. This act of destruction and the displacement of its residents was the ultimate embodiment of generations of systemic and overt racism against Black people in Nova Scotia.

Almost twenty years after the last Africville home was demolished, Mount Saint Vincent University (MSVU) collaborated with the Africville Genealogy Society, the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, and the National Film Board to develop the exhibition and symposium Africville: A Spirit that Lives On and the NFB documentary, Remember Africville. The exhibition explores the story of Africville and toured across Canada, showing in several prominent institutions

Marking the 30th anniversary of the 1989 exhibition, the collaborators reconvened with the addition of the Africville Museum (established in 2010 following the Africville Apology), to reactivate the gallery space to remember and celebrate the vibrant community that once was

The exhibition is composed of three major components: archival materials from the original exhibition, visual artworks and literary works, and scheduled performances and presentations. The archival materials include symposium transcripts, newspaper articles, publications, and films. The artworks and literary works, some recalled from the original exhibition and others newly added, comprises photographs, paintings, mixed media works, poems, films, and media-based installations.

The performances and presentations took place on and off site, chosen and organized by the Africville Genealogy Society, the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia and the Africville Museum. MSVU deliberately extended freedom to its collaborators for agency and self-determination over the programming that would take place in the space

Through the combination of these three components and exhibition strategies, Africville: A Spirit that Lives On – A Reflection Project creates a potent space for difficult conversations and social justice

Upon entering the gallery, I was greeted with audio recitations of poetry by Martha Mutale. Her three poems set the tone for the rest of my time with the exhibition. Her words were powerful, unapologetic, thoughtful, and heartfelt

The National Film Board documentary Remember Africville was next. The film spoke to the injustice and wounds that were still open twenty years after Africville’s destruction. There was a considerable collection of archival newspaper clippings with headlines and articles, speaking to racism and oppression that could have been published today.

As I moved through the gallery, I couldn’t help but feel the outright sense of loss communicated in the works by Africville’s former residents and descendants. They spoke of stolen identity, estrangement from the past, and imposed indignity. Many of the works, however, also embodied joy

The underlying message across the entire exhibition was grounded in cultural pride and resilience. Irvine Carvey proudly states that when asked where he is from, he always answers “Africville.”

Projected on the far wall of the gallery were three short films by Cyrus Sundar Singh, highlighting the yearly Africville Reunion in connection to the yearly Owen Sound Emancipation Festival. His documentaries highlight many people working to preserve the story and legacy of where they came from

Coinciding with this exhibition in the MSVU Mezzanine Gallery was a solo painting exhibition by award-winning emerging artist Letitia Fraser. Fraser spoke on the panel of How We Build: On Craft and Blackness, one of this exhibition’s official events presented by MSVU Art Gallery, Visual Arts News, and Nocturne: Art at Night. Interdisciplinary artist NAT chantel, who also took part in the panel discussion, performed in the exhibition space in November

How We Build: On Craft and Blackness panel discussion. Left to right: Sobaz Benjamin, Letitia Fraser, Juanita Peters, NAT Chantel, moderated by Francesca Ekwuyasi

As a visitor, I found myself very moved by this exhibition. My own experiences with racism as a mixed-race African Nova Scotian were brought to the forefront of my mind. I encountered my biological surname on the list of Africville families, and I was left to wonder if there might have been a community for me there if Africville still existed.

Poet and artist Sylvia D. Hamilton’s multimedia installation of images, objects, and sound is heard and carried throughout the powerful exhibition Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, which inspired the title of the group show.

The creation of this exhibit occurred within a specific socio-cultural context that involved the Royal Ontario Museum and the Black communities of Toronto in the wake of some controversy. The exhibit’s three curators Dr. Julie Crooks, assistant curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Montreal-based independent curator, Dominique Fontaine, and Dr. Silvia Forni, Curator of African Arts and Culture at the ROM, came together in 2015 to develop a three year project with the aim of repairing the relationship between the ROM and Toronto’s Black communities. Their goal was to carve out space for Blackness in a historically colonial and anti-Black museum. Here We Are Here: Black Contemporary Art is the provocative and moving culmination and closing exhibition of the years-long project.

I am moved not only by the subject matter—Hamilton’s installation examines the histories of African Canadians from both a personal and collective lens, from the Transatlantic slave trade to Canadian slavery, to the imposed otherness and anti-Blackness African Canadians experience contemporarily—but also by the visceral experience that it provides.

On three massive swaths of fabric suspended from a wall titled “Naming Names,” is a list of three thousand African descended people, some of whom were enslaved and others free. The effect of this massive list of names is chilling. Hamilton’s voice echoes on a loop, soft with emotion as she reads the names and ages, which evokes both a sense of calm and deep sadness in me.

Saddening, as well as enraging, is the display of racist iconography, “How They See Us,” curated in the nearby display case. ‘Tar Baby’ dolls, The Story of Little Black Sambo, and a bunch of locks tied in a red ribbon which sits beside a pair of small hammered metal child shackles are disturbing. The image of the child shackles stays with me even as I write this. I don’t know that I can ever be desensitized to objects and images that speak to the plight of enslaved people, particularly children. With forthrightness and some tenderness, Hamilton’s work demands that we face this truth of history, that we sit with it.

“In The Passage” shows a poem projected against a video of the ocean, we hear Hamilton’s voice speaking to how the experience of being enslaved and taken away from home and going through the Middle Passage might have felt. As a whole, Hamilton’s piece is graceful and deeply touching. In spite of the harsh subject matter, there is an undeniable and compelling sense of pride and dignity in the manner in which she handles each aspect of this work.

Charmaine Lurch’s large-scale charcoal drawings “Cartography of Being, Belonging, and Grace,” are paper maps of a Black femme figure (her daughter), both familiar and warm. As a Black woman living in the diaspora, themes of belonging are of particular interest to me. These drawings strike an internal chord. The charcoal lines are bold and heavy-handed, and the model depicted moves between fluid and casual. In an excerpt from Katherine McKitrick’s “Dear Science and Other Stories and Demonic Grounds” she writes: “a young girl can legitimately take possession of a street, or an entire city, albeit on different terms than we may be familiar with.” Her poetics embody the bold and casual tones of the drawings and speak to the preciousness and precarity of Black girlhood.

Across from Lurch’s work, taking up the entire length of the wall, is Sandra Brewster’s “Hiking Black Creek,” who describes the larger than life photograph of the artist’s parents on a hike as a “poetic meditation on the emotional labour of belonging.” As a recent immigrant, I am intimately familiar with the emotional labour of belonging and am taken by the intimacy and simplicity of this work. Treading along familial lines, much like Lurch, Brewster subtly, yet sharply conveys a profound idea with this old photograph taken during the couple’s first year in Canada together. The large-scale image is spread over large panels and washed in warm sepia and grey tones. The colours red and yellow across their long-sleeved shirts have been added to the black and white image. The two figures in the photograph smile for the camera. Further ruminating on the theme of belonging, the work shirks ideas of Blackness and Black culture as homogenous, and the sheer size of the image (as well as the smiling faces), give me a sense of being watched over with care.

The sounds of Michèle Pearson Clarke’s video installation, “Suck Teeth Compilation” meets me before I see it, offering a sense of utter glee. The video compilation depicts Black people of varying ages, genders, sizes, and sexes, staring into the camera head-on and sucking their teeth. The familiar hiss indicates disgust, annoyance, anger, and frustration, as their faces are filled with contempt and the void left by patience long lost.

The people in the video are also incredibly beautiful—some are relentlessly cool, and others have an idiosyncratic aesthetic. The hissing sound of teeth sucking and their accompanying sighs create a chorus of dismissive waves, disinterested glares, and bored eye rolls that create a choreographed expression of disdain at the state of anti-Blackness in Canada. These are gestures that I know well—gestures that I and millions of brown people across the globe employ as modest tools of resistance. In the final scene, instead of teeth sucking, a woman kisses the toddler she holds in her arms, as well as the little girl sitting on a stool beside her. She kisses the children and they all smile.

From a distance, Chantal Gibson’s “Souvenir,” which features two walls of spray-painted collector spoons, looks like massive swaths of black eyelet lace, which are elegant and intricately detailed. “Souvenir” illustrates the erasure of the distinct histories and identities of Black people in Canada. At a closer look, it is clear that each spoon is shaped differently and varies in size, yet the artist’s choice to spray paint them all black and arrange them uniformly provides a striking visual representation of forced sameness.

Accompanying Gibson’s “Souvenir” is a video and photobook portraying ghost-like impressions leftover from spray painting 2,000 souvenir spoons. This work provides a sharp juxtaposition between “Souvenir,” and the diversity of Blackness displayed in Michèle Pearson Clarke’s video “Suck Teeth Compilation.”

Bushra Junaid’s “Sweet Childhood” creates a stunning and sophisticated portrait of Black children by overlaying period ads for sugar and molasses on a stereoview of children in a Caribbean sugarcane field from 1903, which draws attention to the trade between Newfoundland and the Caribbean, a history that I only learned of through this piece. Junaid deftly weaves together layers of history that point to the dynamic of producer and consumer—producer being the Global South/historically marginalized peoples, and consumer being the Global North/historically colonizer—that still exists today.

From Gordon Shadrach’s life-size painting depicting the multiple facets and identities of a contemporary Black Canadian woman, to Esmaa Mohamoud’s sculpture titled “Untitled (No Fields),” examining the commodification of Black male bodies in North American sports culture, this exhibit touches on a multitude of aspects of Blackness. It speaks from the history of enslaved people, to slavery’s afterlife of anti-blackness, immigration narratives, and the desire for belonging.

Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art’s scope is far-reaching, ranging from deep sadness to lighthearted. Many pieces share themes of commodification, a longing for belonging, shedding light on history, and resistance against erasure.

This is merely the beginning.

There needs to be more room for Black narratives in the art world. Yes, it’s a great step for the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia to have an entire exhibit dedicated to Black contemporary art, yet this as an exception needs to change. It is imperative that showing the work of BIPOC artists, historic and contemporary, becomes the norm, particularly in a city like Halifax, with its history of Black resilience.

Indigenous art challenges and overthrows colonial expectations. It combats shame. It pushes beyond prejudice, shimmers with resilience, and counteracts art history’s Eurocentric mythology.

First Nations Cree artist and curator, Kent Monkman’s exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience responds to the Canada 150 celebrations through the subversive lens of his gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.

Monkman frames the exhibition akin to Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice through narrator Miss Chief, whose voice guides viewers through didactic panels, and is equally part trickster, part truth-teller. Miss Chief is cocky, coy, and brilliant in her re-telling of Canada’s colonial history. You can’t help but want to have a cocktail with her, kick out Trudeau, and give her the title of Prime Minister.

In this queer re-mapping of Canadian art via the lens of his drag alter-ego, Monkman, both as curator and artist, critiques and Indigenizes the last 150 years of genocide via Miss Chief, my new favourite badass sassy narrator. Monkman’s masterwork addresses the dark and challenging aspects of Canada’s history.

Through positioning his own paintings, sculptures, and drawings in relationship to artifacts and artworks borrowed from national museums and private collections, Miss Chief time-travels and re-stories Canada’s history, which begins in present day, and circles back to Confederation.

Monkman’s paintings depict images of police and priests taking Indigenous youth from their parents, the signing of the Treaties, the horrifying realities of Residential Schools, and through his fabulous alter ego continuously combats homophobia. Miss Chief subverts the heteronormative/patriarchal gaze as she speaks to two-spirited sexuality, and two-spirited people, a third gender that’s always existed in Indigenous nations.

The touring exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience asks viewers to acknowledge the experience of Indigenous peoples, and re-frame the fundamental mythology of Canada’s history. Monkman’s art challenges a national narrative, and takes viewers to harrowing places as the work reflects on the effects of colonization in Indigenous communities, and addresses the ongoing effects of intergenerational trauma.

His “Urban Rez,” series looks at how Indigenous women are preyed upon, violated and murdered in a reflection on the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls through the Cubist female nude. Monkman aims to bring attention to this violence, and depicts the tensions of Indigenous spirituality in an urban environment, and the Christianity that has institutionalized Indigenous people.

In the exhibition’s eloquently written and stylized brochure, Monkman’s introduction speaks to how he didn’t see the Indigenous experience of the last nineteenth century represented in the canon. He wondered: could his paintings reach across a hundred-and-fifty years to convey the colonial history of Indigenous people? Through the lens of Miss Chief’s “cunning use of runny mascara,” who artfully embodies the past, present and future, and his own interest in art history, Monkman has developed his own visual language. He confronts “the devastation of colonialism while celebrating the plural sexualities present in pre-contact Indigenous North America.”

Monkman’s mission is to “authorize Indigenous experience in the canon of art history that has heretofore erased us from view.” At the core of his work is an unabashed ability to visually depict trauma—violence, poverty, illness, the `60s scoop, the reserve system, residential schools, and ongoing racism—with heart, honesty, and intellectual zeal.
Yet, he doesn’t leave Indigenous people in the trauma, his work and Miss Chief illustrates a larger arc of survival, and power. He continues to assure viewers, “The fact that Indigenous people continue to survive all of this is a testament to our resiliency and strength.” Miss Chief’s ability to see the past, present, and future dismantles the Euro-centric idealism, and revises the canon.

As animals are central to Indigenous understandings, spirituality, and Traditional Knowledge systems, Monkman uses images of the bear and the beaver as the fur trade’s currency and emblem of colonial Canada. Christianized beavers pray to the heavens on the cover of the exhibition’s bible-esque brochure, making me wish every dodgy motel and hotel room was stocked with his text.

At the heart of his exhibition is the resiliency of Indigenous peoples, and the artist dedicates the exhibition to his grandmother Elizabeth Monkman, who “was shamed into silence in the face of extreme prejudice.”

I’ve descended into a dark room with a large video projection of what looks like a tropical jungle. The camera moves slowly and deliberately through rich vegetation while the narrator— New Zealand artist Mark Harvey—gently talks to you about Schrödinger’s Cat. Mark explains how plants absorb energy from other nearby plants, and the research suggesting this applies to people too. He talks about quantum entanglement. The whole thing is quite hypnotic. And sitting on the floor in the far corner of the room, is a small video monitor showing the artist wrestling with a young tree, yanking and pulling, trying to rip it out of the ground with his hands.

Mark visited Halifax’s Anna Leonowens Gallery this summer, presenting a video installation, Drop Point, alongside a series of daily public performances, titled Free Hand. I spoke with Mark over lunch about his work, colonialism, caring for plants, religion, quantum physics (some real, some not), optimism, and life advice from our grandmothers.

DANIEL HIGHAM: I found that small video of you wrestling the tree really interesting because it was just so violent compared to the rest of the work.

MARK HARVEY: It’s interesting to hear you say that. It seems a lot of people don’t notice the tree being pulled out in the corner. So the forest in the main video is, you could argue, “pure” New Zealand forest—all endemic and rare species—and it’s actually my back yard. We live out in the rain forest, and I do a lot of caring for it, and I look after other people’s land in the area as a hobby. I get rid of invasive weeds and replant native species.

DANIEL: You could tell by the way the camera moved through the space, that you really knew the land. It was almost intimate, very slow and considered.

MARK: Yeah, I did. I also filmed it with a Steadicam. I wanted to seduce or hypnotize the viewer. Some of my earlier background is in contemporary dance, holistic contemporary dance, conditioning your body, often touching on the New Age kind of thing. So there is that, but I’m also interested in the politics of the space—art galleries—and also the psychology of it. For this work, I collaborated partly with a physicist, Shaun Hendy. So some of the quantum physics that’s coming into the video is coming from him, but some of it is spoof physics—it’s not actually scientific.

DANIEL: But it’s presented in this authoritative sort of way, with a lot of seemingly factual information.

MARK: I was worried it might be a bit naughty to do it.

DANIEL: It is! At one point you say, “We’re all matter extending out into space,” and that we all contain lead.

MARK: Yeah! Apparently we do! That’s from Shaun.

DANIEL: So that part is real.

MARK: That part is, yeah.

DANIEL: It reminds me of something I read recently that said we’re actually all experiencing the Big Bang right now, that in this very moment it’s still happening.

MARK: It’s still resonating.

DANIEL: And we’re part of it—it’s what we are.

MARK: You know there’s an ongoing earthquake going on back home? It’s been going on for I don’t know how many years—five years, six years?—but it’s very slow and subtle, and there’s constant shifting going on.

DANIEL: And it’s always changing.

MARK: A teacher of mine years ago used to say that the landscape really affects and influences what you do on it, when you make stuff. I definitely think that’s true for what I do even if I don’t mean it to. And going back to the video off to the side, I wasn’t sure  at first if I would include that or not. All the species that you see in that are invasive weeds.

DANIEL: See, I wouldn’t have known that because I don’t recognize any of those plants.

MARK: It actually is a problematic tree and it’s really futile to try and pull it out with bare hands. It’s a work in itself that I’ve shown elsewhere, but I felt like bringing it back in as part of a conversation, so the New Age sort of experience doesn’t seem all too dominant—although people can relax, it’s not as simple as that. We often relax and accept our role as colonizers, we kind of take it for granted. Despite being half Scottish and English, there’s also Maori in my ancestry, so that does influence how I’m thinking about politics. But I don’t want to say it too directly. And it’s only recently that we’ve clarified in my family that ancestry. Years ago when I did a PhD, I was very interested in critiquing the position of White Man through being a white man.

DANIEL: I was watching that video, going along with it, feeling comfortable, relaxed. Then there’s a point in the video where you keep repeating the word “whiteness.” That really unsettled me.

MARK: Yeah.

DANIEL: And then you talk about the colour Alabaster White, and the history of the “white cube,” which may have been started in Nazi Germany, where they began painting the walls of museums white. You say something in the video like, “Whiteness… whiteness, and darkness.”

MARK: Yeah. “Colonizer and colonized. Breathe in. Now breathe out.” The landscape painting, going back to the nineteenth century, it’s often landscapes done by people from colonizing cultures representing land that was there to be conquered or taken over. Empty space ready to be tamed and pastoralised. I think there’s that kind of tension in the work as well.

DANIEL: That reminds me of the “Doctrine of Discovery,” where Pope Nicholas V basically said, go out into the world and take everything that isn’t Christian and make it ours.

MARK: Exactly. And then in the video I start going on about Roman arches, to reference that and all of the things we associate with Roman culture, patriarchal culture, colonization, all of these things.

DANIEL: You mentioned that you started in contemporary dance. How did you end up in performance art?

MARK: Yeah. I started in contemporary dance and very quickly moved toward performance art. You know, twenty years ago—I can’t believe it was twenty years ago, 1998—I was being told not to do that stuff by a lot of people in that community, that I would alienate people, so I moved into visual arts.

DANIEL: What kind of stuff?

MARK: I was doing these great big actions with very simple… for instance, I had my uncle’s drag racing videos—he was into drag racing, hot rods and things—and I had a friend on a reverb pedal playing the sound from the video of the revving engines, looking like a rock star. It was this white man thing I was looking at. It was quite theatrical. I called it HEMI 265, which was the name of an engine in these iconic Australian cars that were big back home, associated with masculinity, macho-ness, and tradesmen—guys who vote for the Tories, that kind of thing.

DANIEL: Toxic masculinity.

MARK: Exactly. And group-think. My first degree was in psychology, and a big thread in all of my work is: what decisions do people make, and why do they make those decisions? There’s a psychologist, Niki Harré, who’s written some books recently that look at why, in relation to sustainability and social justice, people make the decisions they do, and why they often don’t go near this stuff.

DANIEL: Why people avoid it?

MARK: Yeah, it’s fascinating to me. We are in a bubble in the art world, and that is a risk. Some of my works, I definitely try to do out in the public. The first performance I did here last week, I had this huge plastic container—made in Canada—filled with dirty oil, which was made in Canada too, and I was asking people, bystanders, to give me a hand and asking them what they liked about Canada.

DANIEL: I really liked how precarious that performance seemed at times. I was watching the oil slosh around in the bucket as people helped you carry it, wondering if it would spill. I think that’s a good metaphor for the situation that we live in: we’re moving around all this oil, always on the brink of some catastrophe, not really thinking about it. It was also interesting to see people react—they seemed scared of it, as if they’ve never actually seen oil before. But all of the lights in here are on because of oil.

MARK: And because of my accent, I could play the tourist. But I don’t want to take advantage of people, there’s a risk of that too, you know being patronizing.

DANIEL: Or tricking them into something they might not agree to.

MARK: Yeah. I did a work last year, where for five hours I was pulling things around this city precinct. Mostly it was wreckage left over from the earthquake. There’s still bits of wreckage. I would go from one place to another, but always towing something around, trying to look useful. And sometimes people would come up to me and ask what I was doing, so I’d ask them “do you wanna give me a hand?” It was really fun. I was also pushing a van sometimes, and that especially got people involved. I’d say, “Yeah, this is an artwork! I’m doing this for an artwork, do you want to give me a hand?”

DANIEL: I like that you tell people it’s art.

MARK: I believe in being up-front with people, and not taking advantage of them. I believe that art hopefully can be educational for people. One common response from people was, “Oh, I don’t think it’s art. But I still really enjoy it. I do really like it.”

DANIEL: [laughs]

MARK: While I’ve been here, in Halifax, I’ve been taking time to talk to people outside of the works, and I went and visited the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre and accidentally got myself invited into a language class. So I joined in! It was fantastic, I loved it because it was like an exchange, lots of conversations. In return I shared lots of the Maori language, Te Reo.

DANIEL: Is it spoken much?

MARK: We use Maori words all the time in New Zealand, I think four percent of our population are fluent, and there’s a lot of us, at least half of us, that understand quite a bit. They’re trying to make it compulsory. The Maori population is 15 percent, but it’s more like 25 for people who have Maori ancestry.

DANIEL: That’s great, that it’s being recognized at that level.

MARK: It’s an official language. We have three: English, Maori, and sign language.

DANIEL: Unfortunately Indigenous languages in Canada are at risk of dying out, because of the residential school system and many years of systematic cultural genocide. There’s a whole generation who were violently cut off from their language.

MARK: It happened too in New Zealand, but there was a bit of a renaissance in the ‘80s.

DANIEL: I’m excited about the new Friendship Centre. It will be this beautiful space right across the street from the Halifax Police headquarters, which is this really oppressive sort of building.

MARK: I know, I observed it while I was crawling around the Citadel. I was trying to listen to the power here.

DANIEL: Did the public interact with you while you did that performance?

MARK: A little bit, yeah. I had a whole bus load of tourists that were calling out to me and cheering me on.

DANIEL: What did they say?

MARK: People were yelling out, “WHY ARE YOU CRAWLING?” And it was the only work where I wasn’t talking to people. But it felt like a silent crawl might be the right thing. It was the day after I went to the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre. The Citadel is a place I know where people do drugs, and also a cruising place, but what it meant historically: the British colony, and because of my family, I felt like doing a listening performance. Just listen. It took nearly two hours.

DANIEL: Why were you crawling?

MARK: This idea of submission, submissiveness. Sometimes invaders might crawl before an attack, but in this case I wanted to put myself below, below them, below this place. It’s interesting because on the one hand, I come from colonizers, but on the other hand I don’t, I come from the opposite.

DANIEL: I think there’s important work to be done—by white men, like me—looking at what it means to be a white man, in what was the British Empire. That I need to figure out for myself who I am and how I want to participate in society. That we can’t just blindly follow along with how things are. Which reminds me of the performance you did today, Thought Leader, I think you called it? You put on a blindfold and asked people to guide you around Parade Square, but also to think for you. I feel like a lot of people unwillingly or unknowingly give away their agency. And I think a lot of people just want someone else to make decisions for them.

MARK: Yeaaaaah. I’ve been so wound up and bothered that we give all this power to the same, really powerful, usually white men, and follow what they say.

DANIEL: I’ve noticed in your performances, where religion comes up, a lot of participants are very anti-religion. And I think that’s sad in some ways. Obviously the church has done a lot of harm, and that needs to be acknowledged and repaired. But it seems like we’ve almost given up entirely on moral decision making, so that at the government level we purely rely on statistics or economic factors. And somehow we’ve come to accept that. Like trying to do good is too hard, so we gave up altogether.

MARK: I’ll go back to Niki Harré’s book. What I read from her writing, is that what influences people around big political issues—things like poverty, climate change, equality—is what’s sacred to people, what is going on for people at a spiritual level. And it’s only connecting people with that that moves people to make these deeper commitments or changes. It’s very hard to do. I’ve got this conservation buzz going, I guess that’s probably my religion. I go out into the bush and get really excited learning about different plant species, helping neighbours with them, it’s really wonderful. That for me is a big driving thing. Definitely. And I’m optimistic about it. I’ve got two kids, two daughters, and want them to be better people than we are, if I can help it. If my work can contribute to conversation about these things, that would be nice.

DANIEL: I think conversation is the only way to really make positive change, conversation in whatever form it might take. I really appreciate how some of your performances are actually just frameworks to have pointed conversations with the public. Like with Life Advice, there was this whole setup—you’re doing this workout routine, there’s free fish and chips—but really you’re just asking people for advice.

MARK: Life tips! We got a few too, didn’t we? It was really nice.

DANIEL: And most of the advice that people shared came from their grandmother.

MARK: You’re right! It really shows how important grandmothers are. How underrated they are.

DANIEL: One more question, on the theme of life advice. What advice do you have for someone early in their career in the arts doing something like performance art?

MARK: Keep trying stuff out, especially if others around you are not doing it. And definitely don’t feel like you have to follow the norms—performance has been around long enough now that it has its norms. That’s really important. There are friends of mine in Germany who say there are a lot of young artists that have been taught to do performance art and it all looks kind of the same, often just standing there and dropping things.

DANIEL: I think sometimes just trying to challenge the norm becomes the norm.

MARK: Exactly. Like the idea that all performance art should be about pulling apart things—that in itself is like a cat chasing its tail. That can undo the very essence of the work, if it has that potential. It’s like, when you try to fall over, you never are falling over because you’re conscious of doing it. Stick with concepts rather than trying to constantly pull apart things. And don’t listen to me about things. Or older people. Unless you really think they should be listened to.