This Is An Emergency Broadcast connects Indigenous political advocacy with the forms of communication offered by community radio, countering power chronicles of state and corporate media and, in its self-determination, offering space for reignited narratives. A project with artist and activist Marianne Nicolson (Musga̱maḵw Dzawada̱’enux̱w), This Is An Emergency Broadcast occupies the Belkin space with audio recordings that clarify a history of Indigenous articulation, collective organization and opposition to colonial forces.

The radio is a tool. Through receptive listening and attention there is potential for the creation of a community of receivers. In the act of transmission, there is agency and responsibility that is at once collective and individual, that works with echoes, waves, reverberations, repetitions, cycles, and is only meaningful when received. This Is An Emergency Broadcast connects Indigenous political advocacy with the forms of communication offered by community radio, countering power chronicles of state and corporate media and, in its self-determination, offering space for reignited narratives.

Artist Lorna Brown will lead a collective listening experience in This Is An Emergency Broadcast, offering an opportunity for witnessing in a context of advocacy and oral tradition.

Stop by the Belkin to pick up a guide to Musqueam house posts on campus, researched and written by Jordan Wilson.

Working together at Kingcome Inlet in Summer 2018, a group of artists used film, video, social media, weaving, animation, drawing, language and song to address the urgent threats to the land and water. A manifestation of the relationships formed between the participants over this past year, Hexsa’a̱m: To Be Here Always is based on sharing knowledge and respectful collaboration. Simultaneously research, material, media, testimony and ceremony, the exhibit challenges the western concept that the power of art and culture are limited to the symbolic or metaphoric, and that the practices of First Peoples are simply part of a past heritage. As Marianne Nicolson states, “We must not seek to erase the influence of globalizing Western culture, but master its forces selectively, as part of a wider Canadian and global community, for the health of the land and the cultures it supports. The embodied practice of ceremonial knowledge relates to artistic experience – not in the aesthetic sense, but in the performative: through gestures that consolidate and enhance knowledge for positive change.” Hexsa’a̱m: To Be Here Always positions the gallery as an active location for this performance, drawing together many faculties and disciplines of the university in generative exchange.

Collective Acts taps into the generative potential of archival research by artists into experiments with collective organizing and cooperative production, presenting new work by Dana Claxton, Jeneen Frei Njootli and the ReMatriate Collective, Christine D’Onofrio and Heather Kai Smith, alongside work by Salish Weavers Guild members Mary Peters, Adeline Lorenzetto and Annabel Stewart. Beginning with the Seventies: Collective Acts is curated by Lorna Brown and is the third of four exhibitions based upon the Belkin Art Gallery’s research project investigating the 1970s, an era when social movements of all kinds – feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ rights, Indigenous rights, access to health services and housing – began to coalesce into models of self-organization that overlapped with the production of art and culture. Noting the resurgence of art practice involved with social activism and an increasing interest in the 1970s from younger producers, the Belkin has connected with diverse archives and activist networks to bring forward these histories, to commission new works of art and writing and to provide a space for discussion and debate.  

As part of Critical Image Forum's Dialogue Series, this online conversation with Althea Thauberger, Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw artist and activist Marianne Nicolson helps us understand how particular photographic acts, although initiated by Canadian colonial photographers, were used, by those depicted, as opportunities for assertions of political, cultural and territorial sovereignty during the potlatch ban in the early twentieth century.