Transformative Power: Indigenous Feminisms
Transformative Power: Indigenous Feminisms
Vicki Myhren Gallery at University of Denver
2121 E. Ashbury Avenue, Denver, CO 80210
September 15-November 27, 2022
Admission: Free
Review by Mary Grace Bernard
On September 15, 2022, the Vicki Myhren Gallery at the University of Denver (DU) opened its very first exhibition focused on notions of gender and structures of power from a distinctly Indigenous perspective. Guest curated by Daina Warren, who is a member of the Akamihk Montana First Nation in Maskwacis, Alberta, Transformative Power: Indigenous Feminisms features Indigenous, female, and Queer-identifying artists who “explore and critique a variety of themes, including Native politics, economics, land-based values, language loss, the body and sexuality, historical narratives and popular culture, as well as the cosmological and relational belief systems of First Peoples, among others.” [1] The artists’ integration of intersectional identities—Indigenous, female, and/or Queer—with embodied cultural and historical traumas in performance works, photography, and videos makes visible these hidden identities and traumas while demanding that viewers pay attention to the political issues that render them invisible.
A view of the exhibition Transformative Power: Indigenous Feminisms at the Vicki Myhren Gallery at University of Denver. In the foreground: Rebecca Belmore’s Apparition, 2013, video installation. Image by DARIA.
Several artworks in the exhibition feature the artists themselves and represent examples of what art historian Amelia Jones describes as “body art.” [2] Body art is a set of performative practices which aim to connect the performer and viewer via “gestural exchange.” Gestural exchange refers to a flow “from the work of the artist, to the components of the [artwork], to the immediate response of the viewer.” [3] In other words, artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Yuki Kihara, TJ Cuthand, among others, use their own bodies as both artistic medium and subject to reveal how intersectional identities combined with embodied histories can instill empathy within viewers who might otherwise disregard or choose not to see, understand, or feel an experience or embodiment different from their own. Jones proposes the body (i.e., the body/self)—in contrast to the movements bodies make—as the site where the production and reception of art come together. [4]
A still image from Rebecca Belmore’s Apparition, 2013, video installation. Image by DARIA.
Belmore, Kihara, and Cuthand use their own bodies through a combination of video and performance to demand acknowledgement from their viewers of the hidden cultural and historical traumas that stem from colonialism and the “Vanishing Indian” narrative. Rebecca Belmore is an Anishinaabekwe, performance, and installation artist and a member of Obishikokaang. She currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In her performative video Apparition (2013), Belmore confronts the loss of Indigenous languages and the resulting loss of culture and knowledge.
A still image from Rebecca Belmore’s Apparition, 2013, video installation. Image by DARIA.
Wearing a white t-shirt and jeans, alone and centered within a blue and white backdrop, Belmore kneels with duct tape over her mouth. After a period of what seems to be forever, but is only two minutes, Belmore rips the duct tape from her mouth and sits cross-legged for the remainder of the four-minute video. These actions represent the colonial Canadian residential schools’ practice of banning Indigenous languages, forcing students to assimilate, and breaking a vital connection to community and culture. When Belmore removes the tape, she remains silent to demonstrate the legacy of harm caused by the residential schools and to perform an act of resistance by reclaiming agency. As a result, Belmore uses her own body to inform the public of these concealed traumatic histories and make visible her intersectional identities.
Performance documentation of Rebecca Belmore’s Nurturing Mother (Alma Mater), 2022, for the Transformative Power: Indigenous Feminisms exhibition at the Vicki Myhren Gallery. Image courtesy of Roddy MacInnes.
Belmore also performed a new work live called Nurturing Mother (Alma Mater) (2022) for the exhibition on DU’s campus. As a form of multiple ritualistic acts, the performance took place outside the Harper Humanities Garden in front of a decorative pond. Belmore and the Transformative Power curator, Daina Warren, repeatedly drenched several button-down, long- sleeve shirts in the pond. Next, on top of a red tarp, Belmore covered each shirt in mud-like clay and wrapped it around a rock from the pond. As Belmore continued to swathe more and more shirts around the rock, the object became larger, heavier, and more difficult to handle.
Throughout these acts, the artist’s movements became ever more aggressive and exhaustive—evidenced by her grunts and gestures of pain. As Jones’ explains, “by exaggeratingly performing the sexual, gender, ethnic, or other particularities of this body/self, the feminist or otherwise nonnormative body artist even more aggressively explodes the myths of… universality that authorize the conventional modes of evaluation.” [5] As Belmore performs the painful embodiment of a traumatic experience historically concealed from public view, she simultaneously makes apparent the destructive nature of colonialism’s repercussions while contradicting the dominate, white-male perspective. As a final act, Belmore and Warren dragged the mud-covered tarp and threw it over the Alma Mater bronze sculpture—which depicts two young women reading a text—created by Italian artist Enrico Licari in 1928.
Sarah Sense, Cowgirls and Their Guns, 2018, woven archival inkjet prints on bamboo and rice paper, wax, and tape. Image by DARIA.
Yuki Kihara is an interdisciplinary, Japanese and Samoan artist whose work seeks to highlight complex postcolonial histories in the Pacific islands through visual arts, dance, and curatorial practice. She interrogates Western misinterpretations from the perspective of Fa’afafine, the community which she belongs to in Samoa. [6] Fa’afafine is Samoan for “in the manner of a woman,” broadly understood as LGBTQ+ in a Western context.
A still image from Yuki Kihara’s Taualuga: The Last Dance, 2006, single-channel digital video. Image by DARIA.
In her performance Taualuga: The Last Dance (2006), the artist performs the Taualuga—a traditional dance central to Samoan culture—in a black Victorian mourning gown. She performs in a stage-like setting highlighted by a strong sidelight that translates her movements into a dramatic shadow dancing on the wall behind her, representing the drastic shadow cast by colonialism. As she performs, a recording of a chant sung by Samoan village elders plays in the background. The dress, which restricts Kihara’s movements, serves as a compelling symbol of the control which European colonialists exerted over Samoan peoples. [7] In response to the violence, pain, and trauma caused by colonialism, the artist finds freedom in the creation of a new dance language in this state of colonialist bondage, symbolized by the Victorian mourning dress.
A still image from TJ Cuthand’s Boi oh Boi, 2012, digital video. Image by DARIA.
TJ Cuthand is an experimental filmmaker who was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada in 1978, and grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995, he has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity, Queer love, and Indigeneity. [8] In the artist’s short video Boi oh Boi (2012), Cuthand recites an intimate voiceover narrative of his experiences with gender fluidity, including identifying as a butch lesbian while considering transitioning to male. Throughout the nine minute, thirty-three second video, the artist reveals personal clips of himself dressing like a man, putting on a mustache, and taking his pants off to expose and grab his silicone penis. He intersperses these scenes with clips of watering his garden, checking his car’s oil level, grooming his hair, and riding back and forth on the U-Bahn subway in Hamburg, Germany. Toward the end of the video, the artist questions whether he would have experienced such gender confusion had colonialism never happened.
Erica Lord, Untitled (I Tan to Look More Native) from The Tanning Project, 2006, inkjet print. Image by DARIA.
It is crucial to discuss these artists’ works using the lens of Jones’ definition of “body art,” for it is through these performative acts that Belmore, Kihara, and Cuthand expose embodied traumatic histories to the public. And as a result, there is a demand “for the spectator’s own self-conscious relation to the (re)presentation, and the acknowledgement of [their] own embodiment as a performative presence in the moment of witnessing” the performer’s trauma and pain. [9] In effect, the audience can see one body respond to another as the performer is able to induce some type of emotion, mood, feeling, or bodily experience in the spectator.
Mary Grace Bernard (MG, she/her) is a transmedia and performance artist, educator, advocate, and crip witch. Her practice finds itself at the intersection of performance art, transmedia installation art, art scholarship, art writing, curation, and activism.
[1] Daina Warren, curatorial statement for Transformative Power: Indigenous Feminisms exhibition, Vicki Myhren Gallery, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, September 15-November 27, 2022.
[2] Amelia Jones, Body Art Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 5.
[3] Erin Brannigan, “Dancefilm as Gestural Exchange,” Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4.
[4] Jayne Wark, RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne / Canadian Art Review 24, no. 2 (1997), 75, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42631159, accessed October 14, 2022.
[5] Amelia Jones, Body Art Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 5.
[6] “Yuki Kihara,” Ocula Magazine, https://ocula.com/artists/yuki-kihara/, accessed October 14, 2022.
[7] Samoa was a colony of the German Empire from 1899 to 1915, then it came under rule by a joint British and New Zealander colonial administration until 1962, when it became independent.
[8] TJ Cuthand, “Biography,” Artist Website, https://www.tjcuthand.com/biography/, accessed October 14, 2022.
[9] Sophie Anne Oliver, “Trauma, bodies, and performance art: Towards an embodied ethics of seeing,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24, no. 1(2010), 125.
