There is a phenomenon when an iceberg, after breaking off from a glacier and its weight is unbalanced, flips over. It is a process that reveals what had been submerged, bringing a completely new glacial landscape to the surface.
It’s a process that Inuit photographer Robert Kautuk thought he captured in Ice breakersays Rebecca Basciano, curator of Dark ice, a new collaborative exhibition of the works of Kautuk and Ottawa artist Leslie Reid now at the Ottawa Art Gallery. The phenomenon is a metaphor for the exhibition itself.
Reid, a settler artist from Ottawa, began working up north to retrace her pilot father’s flight paths through arctic landscapes. Reid’s father flew for the Canadian Air Force and spent nearly half the year flying photographers across the territories to map the Arctic during the Cold War, she said. Canadian National Observer.
Reid returned to the Arctic nearly a decade ago to retrace his travels. As a participant in the Canadian Forces Artists Program and Canada’s C3 expedition through the Northwest Passage, Reid did his own mapping of a changing arctic climate.
Kautuk is a photographer based on Kangiqtugaapik (River Clyde) in Nunavut. Kautuk did not intend to exhibit the photographs of him. He saw photography as a kind of mapping, a way to serve his community and document the landscape and traditional practices of his nation.
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The collaboration between settlers and Inuit began after Reid witnessed the ravages of colonialism and climate change in the Arctic. He saw the changes in the landscape by comparing his travels to similar Cold War-era photographs that his father would have taken part in.
From his travels, Reid produced a video that is shown in the exhibition entitled Uluriak, named for its subject, Uluriak Amarualik, a Canadian Ranger (military reservists from the North). In the video, Amarualik describes how his grandparents were forcibly relocated from their home communities in Hudson Bay and Baffin Island to Resolved, one of the northernmost communities in Nunavut. Images captured in the video show the same route Amarualik’s family took when they were relocated by the Canadian government.
“He said he joined the rangers to thank his grandparents for surviving,” says Reid, noting that his motivation was to protect his ancestors’ lands.
There is a phenomenon when an iceberg, after breaking off from a glacier and its weight is unbalanced, flips over. It is a process that reveals what had been submerged, bringing a completely new glacial landscape to the surface. #Dark ice
Reid says that when Amarualik told the personal story of her ancestors in the north, it made her reflect on her own work in the Arctic and question her reasons for working there. That reflection deepened her need to collaborate with the Inuit, instead of seeing a settler.
Reid knew if Dark ice If it were a solo show, it wouldn’t tell the whole truth about the Arctic. She says that she had to collaborate with an Inuit artist, and Kautuk’s unreserved care for her own culture and community drew her to her work and started the dialogue.
When Kautuk agreed to exhibit his work for the first time for Dark icethe iceberg capsized and an Inuit perspective from the north entered into dialogue with the settler witnesses.
The exhibition is translated into Inuktitut syllabic as well as English and French. For the Arctic story to come close to the truth, all perspectives must be included, Reid said.
“It’s like a flip, in a way,” says Reid. “For me, it’s not supposed to be pictorial, nor is it my narrative. It’s about a much bigger narrative.”
That larger narrative is shown in the exhibition’s interlocking themes: light and dark (like Arctic cycles, says Basciano), settlers and Inuit, ice and ocean, far and near (Ottawa to Kangiqtugaapik/ground and drone photography ). ).
“They are saying that the Earth is getting warmer. But I think it feels like a cycle,” Kautuk said in an art gallery news release.
It refers to cyclical forces impacted by an Anthropocene that unleashed the climate crisis and colonial violence. And led to the name of the exhibition, Dark icea play with a geological phenomenon where carbon-based soot accumulates in the ice and accelerates the heating of ice formations.
There is an urgency in this exhibition. The urgency of the climate crisis, Inuit self-determination, and nation-to-nation collaboration to reconcile past injustices, which are reflections of cycles of recovery, healing, and landscape.
In Dark icean iceberg has capsized.
ᓯᑯ ᕿᕐᓂᖅᓯᓯᒪᔪᖅ | Dark ice
ᓕᐊᔅᓕ ᕇᑦ ᐊᒻᒪ ᕌᕗᑦ ᑲᐅᑐᖅ | Leslie Reid and Robert Kautuk
April 23, 2022 to February 26, 2023
ᐸ. Curator: Rebecca Basciano
Dark Ice will tour in Iqaluit, Winnipeg and Sarnia after exhibiting in Ottawa