Reflections of neon Beothuk pendants, electric colours, and textures coalesce into the dark, marbled concrete floor of Eastern Edge Gallery. The energy of the artwork in My Cousin’s Cousin cannot be contained to just the walls of the gallery—it activates all surfaces. This exhibition highlighting the interrelatedness between all beings was created as part of the programming for Spirit Song Festival, a celebration of Indigenous Arts and Culture held annually in St. John’s, Ktaqmkuk. Through the transmission of intergenerational knowledge and reciprocity in their kinship systems, Amy Malbeuf, Jerry Evans, Jordan Bennett, and Meagan Musseau call attention to the importance of nourishing our relationships with the land, water, and animal relatives that sustain us. 

The radiating sculptures of Beothuk pendants, collectively named Re/awakening by L’nu artist Meagan Musseau, are part of her latest solo exhibition, pi’tawkewaq | our people up river. Each of these pendants is created from laser cut plexiglass, which is the same material used to encase dispossessed cultural belongings within museums and archives. The engraved designs reference drawings made by Musseau from her visits with the Beothuk belongings and caribou bone pendants held in the vault at The Rooms. In replicating and enlarging the markings by ancestor artists, Musseau transmits the intimate experiences of visiting these belongings and their embedded histories of these lands and waters, while refuting colonial narratives of erasure. 

On the opposite side of the gallery is Métis artist Amy Malbeuf’s triptych of animal kin, Woodland Caribou, Whooping Crane, and Arctic Grayling. Each image is a constellation of caribou hair tufts exploding like fireworks across the black velvet prairies. Specifically, the appliquéd strips of tarp stitched beneath each animal represent aerial views of pipelines in Northern Alberta that threaten their habitats and lifeways. By using caribou hair as a material, she honours that relationship to create the portrait. In these works, Malbeuf calls attention to the extractive and colonial environmental practices that harm her homelands, and the effects they have on these animal relatives who sustain her community, and who are integral beings of Métis kinship structures. 

Jordan Bennett, Malbeuf’s partner in life and art, was the Visual Artist-in-Residence for the duration of Spirit Song Festival. In this residency, in the days leading up to the exhibition opening, Bennett created three paintings that would become part of My Cousin’s Cousin, each one intentionally responding to lithographs made by Jerry Evans. For instance, Evan’s lithograph Mimajuaqne’kati – Place of Life depicts swirling migrations of caribou, salmon, and seal; each of these beings are sustenance and animal kin from Ktaqmkuk. Bennett drew inspiration from these cyclical movements in the creation of the painting Mechanical Medicine Wheel.

Two days before the opening, Bennett gave an artist talk to speak about his residency, and where the influences in his art practice come from. He spoke of how he was always inspired by the land and waters of Ktaqmkuk, our visual culture, and ancient histories as Mi’kmaq. Most affectingly, he also expressed the significance of Evans’ encouragement and support when he was starting as a young artist, and their reciprocal relationship in sharing their practices with each other.

It would be impossible to write about this exhibition without acknowledging how deeply important Jerry Evans is as a cultural innovator, storyteller, and community member in Ktaqmkuk and beyond. Last year, Evans was the recipient of the 2019 VANL-CARFAC Endurance Award, an accolade given to an artist in honour of their sustained and consistent dedication to their professional practice. Over decades of commitment to honouring his Mi’kmaq ancestry as a Master Printmaker, painter, filmmaker, and tattoo practitioner, Evans has also prioritized knowledge-sharing and supporting future generations of L’nu artists. Bennett described the work of Evans as “living and breathing…reaching backwards and projecting us forward.”

This gathering of works makes me think about how there is a continuum of transmitted intergenerational knowledge inherent in these artistic and cultural practices. With love, kinship, and reciprocity in the relationships between family members, My Cousin’s Cousin emphasizes our responsibilities towards each other and our territories that hold us close.

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.