Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land?
with Corey Bulpitt, Roxanne Charles, Navarana Igloliorte, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Haruko Okano and Juliane Okot Bitek

July 14 to October 28, 2018
Vancouver Art Gallery
Members Opening July 14, 7pm

Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land? is a dialogue between two artists, presented via their individual and collaborative performances. Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin’s work begins with their respective positions as a Japanese diasporic woman and a Tahltan First Nation man, reflecting on the ways in which their bodies and experiences are inscribed by colonialism. Grounded in explorations related to the land, Goto and Morin ask how cultural knowledge and history inform the human experience of place and our perceptions of others.

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 marginalized. In this spirit, the exhibition also includes 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 will be activated by or respond to performances occurring over the exhibition’s duration. 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.

Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Tarah Hogue, Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art
Cover image: Cultural Graffiti in London, 2013
documentation of performance
Courtesy of the Artist
Photo: Dylan Robinson