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Documenting over thirty years of Rebecca Belmore’s remarkable, poignant and important performance career, Wordless: The Performance Art Of Rebecca Belmore brings together essays, inquiries and personal reflections from a community of artists, scholars, writers and Indigenous thinkers. The book also features five new photographs of Belmore’s re-presented work produced by the grunt gallery.

 The role of an artist is a worker, art-making is a job.... We have the responsibility to carry the past and look towards the future.

Rebecca Belmore

As Kathleen Ritter writes, “Belmore’s work addresses some of the most challenging and urgent issues of our time—injustice, racism, violence, trauma, resilience and, ultimately, hope. Her use of voice is political inasmuch as the subjectivity of an Indigenous woman is inherently political; her work an assertion of presence in the face of society’s efforts to silence and to erase.”

Contributors

1. Rebecca Belmore

   (Lac Seul First Nation) is an interdisciplinary Anishinaabe-kwe artist known for her politically conscious and socially aware performance and installation work. She has exhibited across Canada, the US, Europe, Mexico, Cuba and Australia. Belmore was the first Indigenous woman to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale (2005) and participated in documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany (2017). In 2013, she was honoured with the Canadian Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. She holds honorary doctorates from OCAD University (2005) and Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2018).

2. Florene Belmore

   (Anishinaabe) is a writer and arts administrator from the Lac Seul First Nation and currently living in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

3. Glenn Alteen

   has played a central role within the British Columbian and Canadian arts communities. He has worked extensively in performance art and is cofounder of the LIVE Performance Art Biennale. As Director of grunt gallery in Vancouver, Alteen created sustainable administration practices through the purchase of a facility, the Blue Cabin Residency Program and the creation of the grunt gallery Legacy Fund. His writing on performance art was published in Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (MOA), Making Always War (Stride Gallery), Access All Areas (grunt), Rebecca Belmore (Sydney Biennial Catalogue), Caught in the Act (YYZ Books), La Dragu (FADO Toronto), LIVE at the End of the Century (grunt) and Locus Solus (Black Dog). In 2018 Alteen received a Governor General’s Visual and Media Arts Award for Outstanding Achievement.

4. Dr. Curtis Collins

   is Director and Chief Curator of the Audain Art Museum in (Whistler, BC). He has served as a Director and Curator for a variety of institutions across Canada including the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Algoma, Dunlop Art Gallery and Art Gallery of the South Okanagan. Dr. Collins has also been active as an educator at McEwan University, the Yukon School of Visual Arts, First Nations University of Canada and Trent University. His exhibition reviews have appeared in a range of culture‑based magazines including Parachute, Espace, Harbour and Galleries West. Curtis curated a new exhibition of Rebecca Belmore’s performance and installation work at the Audain Art Museum entitled The Uncanny (2020).

5. Richard William Hill

   is a curator, critic and art historian. He is a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design whose research focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on historical and contemporary art created by Indigenous North American artists. As a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, he oversaw the museum’s first substantial effort to include Indigenous North American art and ideas in permanent collection galleries. He also curated Kazuo Nakamura: A Human Measure at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2004), co‑curated, with Jimmie Durham, The American West at Compton Verney, UK (2005), and The World Upside Down, which originated at the Walter Philips Gallery at the Banff Centre in 2006 and toured across Canada. Hill’s essays on art have appeared internationally in numerous books, exhibition catalogues and periodicals. His regular column, Close Readings, featuring extended reviews of contemporary Indigenous art, began in FUSE Magazine in 2013 and now continues in C Magazine.

6. Jen Budney

   is a writer, independent organizer of cultural events and activities, and a PhD candidate at the Johnson‑Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, where she teaches on the social economy and researches public value creation by non‑profit organizations, including art museums. She has published her writings on art extensively in a variety of Canadian and international magazines, journals, catalogues, and books. With Richard W. Hill and Candice Hopkins, she is also co‑editing a book of essays on monuments and colonialism in the Americas.

7. Wanda Nanibush

   is an Anishinaabe‑kwe curator, image and word warrior, and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation. She is currently the inaugural curator of Indigenous Art and co‑head of the Indigenous & Canadian Art Department at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Nanibush curated the recent touring solo exhibition, Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental. Her curatorial projects include: Rita Letendre: Fire & Light (AGO, 2017), Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971-1989 (AGO, 2016), The Fifth World (Mendel Art Gallery, 2015) and the award winning KWE: The work of Rebecca Belmore (Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, 2014) among others. Nanibush has published widely on Indigenous art, politics and history as well as gender and sexuality. Her first book Violence No More was released in 2019 by Arp Press.

8. Jessica Jacobson-Konefall

   is a SSHRC postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto, Department of History of Art. She has worked as assistant and archivist for Rebecca Belmore and Osvaldo Yero since 2014.

9. Kathleen Ritter

   is an artist and writer based in Vancouver and Paris. Her art practice broadly explores questions of visibility, especially in relation to systems of power, language and technology. Ritter has also organized exhibitions in Canada and abroad, and recently was a curatorial advisor for the exhibition Where do I end and you begin, Edinburgh Art Festival (2014). Ritter was the Associate Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery until 2012, where she curated the exhibitions How Soon Is Now; Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (with Tania Willard); and Rebecca Belmore: Rising to the Occasion (with Daina Augaitis). In addition, Ritter has lectured and published on the work of artists nationally and internationally, with texts appearing in numerous catalogues and journals, including ESSE, Open Letter, C Magazine, Prefix Photo, and Fillip. She has written on the work of Mark Manders, Pierre Huyghe, Althea Thauberger, Colette Urban, Rachel Harrison, Derek Sullivan, and Ai Weiwei, to name a few, and on subjects as diverse as hip hop, precarious labour, public art, revolution and visual perception.

10. Dan Pon

    is a librarian at Langara College and the West Vancouver Memorial Library. He manages the archives at grunt gallery where he works to preserve and activate material and non‑material culture. He is interested in the practice of artists intervening in archives, liberatory community archives, and imaginative models at the intersection of visual arts and information science. His writing and work has been published by grunt gallery, Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, and UNIT/PITT Projects, and presented at the BC Libraries Association annual conference. Dan holds an MLIS from the University of British Columbia.

Co-published with grunt gallery, Vancouver Canada.

Support for this publication from New Chapter Program of the Canada Council and the Audain Museum.

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1. Wordless: The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore
   $32

   Documenting over thirty years of Rebecca Belmore’s remarkable, poignant and important performance career, Wordless brings together essays, inquiries and personal reflections from a community of artists, scholars, writers and Indigenous thinkers. The book also features five new photographs of Belmore’s re-presented work produced by the grunt gallery.

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