KWE: Photography, Sculpture, Video and Performance by Rebecca Belmore

KWE delves into the complicated and fertile relationship between Indigeneity, art, and colonization. Kwe is the Anishinaabe word for woman and is a term of respect and is used to mark out a deeply personal exhibition. Rebecca Belmore’s artistic practice engages the question of what it is to be an Anishinaabe-kwe artist working today through photography, sculptures, videos, and performances. Belmore works toward creating art that functions as a poetic political intervention for her people and all the anonymous dispossessed. In her fierce, beautiful objects and images, Belmore transforms victimization and the seemingly unchanging nature of domination into an act of resistance and resurgence. Belmore’s work is beautiful but radically so because it resists both commodification and edification. The work she creates out of her deeply intuitive process taps into the precariousness of life.

This exhibition is produced in partnership with Scotiabank CONTACT photography Festival who has commissioned a new public installation of billboards at the NE corner of Spadina Ave. and Front St. Belmore will also produce a new performance on May 23. We will close the exhibition with a performance of Belmore’s large megaphone, Speaking to their Mother, which will be marched from the gallery to the waterfront where it will be installed to allow people to speak to the spirit of the water, repurposing it for the politics of today.