FollowThe Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada recently presented “Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land?”, an exhibition that bridged the experiences of artists with diverse ancestries in dialogue.
Art Radar looks at the artists and the work in the show.
Ayumi Goto, ‘Rinrigaku’, 2016, documentation of performance. Photo: Yuula Benivolski. Image courtesy the Artist.
Long-time collaborators and friends, artists Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin have created a performance art practice informed by their perspectives as a Japanese diasporic woman and Tahltan First Nations man. Together, Goto and Morin investigate their distinctive relationships to place and the ways in which their bodies and experiences are inscribed by colonialism.
The exhibition, “Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land?” recently presented at Vancouver Art Gallery was curated by Tarah Hogue, Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art, and consisted of new installations and reassembled documentation from Goto and Morin’s individual and collaborative performances over the past six years. Grounded in explorations related to the land, the artists ask how cultural knowledge and history inform the human experience of place and our perceptions of others.
Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin, ‘this is what happens when we perform the memory of the land’, 2013, documentation of performance. Photo: Dylan Robinson. Image courtesy the Artists.
Ayumi Goto is a performance artist based in Toronto, traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat. Born in Canada, she explores her Japanese heritage to question and confront notions of nation-building, cultural belonging and structural racism.
Peter Morin is a Sobey Award-nominated Tahltan Nation artist, curator and writer whose work focuses on Indigenous ways of knowing and the disruption of Western settler colonialism. His art serves as a record of his ongoing process of understanding and practicing his culture and language.
Ayumi Goto, ‘geisha gyrl: yakyuu! Let’s go!!’, 2017, documentation of performance. Photo: Brendan Yandt. Image courtesy the Artist.
The artists first began their creative partnership with the work this is what happens when we perform the memory of the land during the 2013 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada’s Quebec National Event in Montreal. Incorporating video and performance, the piece considered Indigenous and settler structures of witnessing beyond the Indigenous-to-state framework of the TRC. Both of the artists attended some of the TRC hearings but have said that they felt non-Indigenous people of colour were not properly included in the hearing’s process, and that conversations around reconciliation focus too narrowly on relations between Indigenous people and the Canadian government.
The pair have since joined forces for multiple projects and, in the process, have developed a unique methodology of collaboration centered on the interaction of bodies in space, the act of witnessing and connections to land. Their practice often involves drums, rattles, masks and other such cultural objects that document history and have the potential to be both re-activated in new contexts and in continuity with the past, thus transcending a Western concept of linear time. Merging with the Japanese/Taoist notion of inyō that conceptualises the universe as a circle, the artists’ multi-dimensional approach to space and time allows them to share their works as an enfolding of many simultaneous moments from which new meanings emerge.
Peter Morin, ‘Cultural Graffiti in London’, 2013, documentation of performance. Photo: Dylan Robinson. Image courtesy the Artist.
“The Gallery is proud to present two artists fostering important dialogue between Indigenous, racialized and diasporic communities in Canada,” said Kathleen S. Bartels, Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. She continued:
Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin compel us to think about how we relate to the land through the scope of our cultural experiences. Their work brings awareness and respect to Indigenous sovereignty while encouraging greater inclusivity.
The exhibition included a collection of gifts that the two artists have given each other over the course of their friendship, and each was accompanied by a handwritten letter explaining its cultural significance.
Ayumi Goto, Tarah Hogue and Peter Morin, ‘this is not us’, 21 July 2018. Photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery.
In an interview with Vancouver-based journalist Tessa Vikander, Morin commented that the Vancouver Art Gallery building’s colonial origin as the city’s old courthouse made it emotionally difficult to mount the exhibit in the space – but continued to note that it was his friendship with Goto that made the work possible. He says:
Luckily, I have my best friend working with me, and luckily part of my practice is about opening up space. As an Indigenous body, being here, knowing that history, knowing that Indigenous artists were tried and convicted for the crime of making Indigenous art, that’s hard; but I’m not alone.
The displays merged Japanese, Asian diasporic and Indigenous material culture. The show featured video projections and photographs of both Morin and Goto’s past works, in which they use performance art to explore the trauma of colonialism and the role of relationships in reconciliation.
In one of the videos, Morin explores the history of residential schools and re-enacts the moment at which school teachers would have cut off the long hair of Indigenous children as part of the school’s intake process.
Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin, ‘this is what happens when we perform the memory of the land’, 2013, documentation of performance. Photo: Dylan Robinson. Image courtesy the Artists.
Goto and Morin’s work is also notably created with the intention of making spaces inclusive and welcoming. Drawing on their ancestral cosmologies, Tahltan Nation knowledge and Japanese philosophy and linguistics, the artists attend to the specificities of working between cultures, across Indigenous territories and within arts institutions.
Through this work, the artists create spaces that are inclusive of their mothers, ancestors and others whose voices and presences are often marginalised. In this spirit, the exhibition also included commissioned works by several artists, including Corey Bulpitt, Roxanne Charles, Navarana Igloliorte, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Haruko Okano and Juliane Okot Bitek. Some of these works were activated by or responded to performances occurring over the exhibition’s duration.
Ayumi Goto, Tarah Hogue and Peter Morin, ‘this is not us’, 21 July 2018. Photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery.
In gathering a multiplicity of voices, Goto and Morin’s work can be seen as creative assemblages, configurations of being in relation to the world that challenge us to envision ways of building interconnected futures.
Jessica Clifford
2393
“Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land?” was on view from 14 July to 28 October 2018 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby St, Vancouver, BC V6Z 2H7, Canada
Related topics: Performance, installation, post-colonialism, museum shows, events in Vancouver
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