Please note that the gallery will be closed for a gathering on Sunday, 11 August 2024

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.

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. By playing these audio recordings in the gallery – as they will be played on community radio – they are reified for audiences inside and outside remote communities. The recordings are contextualized by archival images and a reading room provides visual, audio and text sources that connect specific histories to the colonial project more widely and to a history of radio in art. In addition, Nicolson’s 2018 video installation work Hexsa’a̱m (To be there always) (with Althea Thauberger) will be installed in the gallery. Aligning with Nicolson’s concept of Ne’nakw – or coming home – the message of protecting community connection, the exhibition seeks to articulate the state of emergency which Indigenous land advocacy foretold in their critique of colonial oppression from the 1914 McKenna McBride land testimony through to today.

The medium of radio is important and vital to Indigenous communities, and is part of a larger project anchored to Ne’nakw, in which Nicolson considers the implications and meaning behind Indigenous community radio in both the set up and programming of CKYO 91.1 FM Gwa’yi Radio and other community-based Indigenous community radio stations. Through Ne’nakw, Nicolson asked that the Belkin work with her over a period of time to ask how we can support Indigenous practices in a non-extractive way. Through a process of decolonial exploration, the goal is to return cultural capacity to community through art as a form of repatriation and restitution. Tangible physical objects have a concreteness in terms of repatriation, but how can cultural returns be approached? In struggling with the intangible, radio can be a tool to share culture in and across community.

Radio has been a forum for political discussion, expression and for notification of social and political emergencies. Distinct from social media’s potential for digital social isolation and framed within the historical use of radio broadcast to coordinate and communicate Indigenous land rights, This Is An Emergency Broadcast expresses a voice from past broadcasts into the contemporary emergency of climate change and the rise of totalitarianism.

Download the exhibition brochure.

Listen to Marianne Nicolson discuss the historical photographs.

Marianne Nicolson is an artist who works as a Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw cultural researcher and historian, as well as an advocate for Indigenous land rights. Her work seeks to uphold a traditional Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw worldview through contemporary mediums and technology. Following Nicolson’s Hexsa’a̱m: To Be Here Always, a 2019 project with the Belkin that functioned as research, material, media, testimony and ceremony to challenge the western concept that the power of art is limited to the symbolic, This Is An Emergency Broadcast is another moment to amplify Indigenous tradition.

This Is An Emergency Broadcast is made possible with the generous support of the Audain Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and our Belkin Curator’s Forum members.