Arctic/Amazon exhibition at The Power Plant

Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity explores the ways in which Indigenous contemporary artists ​and collaborators take on issues of climate change, globalized Indigeneity, and contact zones in and about the Arctic and the Amazon during a time of crisis. The featured artists have their origins or are connected to these places, and their works embody a politics of resistance, resurgence, and ways of knowing and being in relation to the lands that are the source of their knowledge and creativity.

A constellation of new and past works by artists Pia Arke (Greenland/Denmark), Sonya Kelliher-Combs (United States), Tanya Lukin Linklater (United States/Canada), Couzyn van Heuvelen (Canada), Máret Ánne Sara (Norway), Uýra (Indigenous in diaspora), Olinda Reshijabe Silvano (Peru), Morzaniel Iramari (Brazil), Leandro Lima & Gisela Motta (Brazil), Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe (Venezuela), and Outi Pieski (Finland) will be featured in Arctic/Amazon. Encompassing a range of media, including paintings, drawings, sculpture, installation, video, and performance, this exhibition seeks to shed light on current geopolitical and environmental sustainability issues that inform artistic practices in these two vastly different, yet interconnected, regions.

The main themes in this group exhibition are drawn from the Arctic/Amazon symposium that was co-hosted by the Ontario College of Art & Design University and The Power Plant in September 2019. The purpose of the symposium was to gather established and emerging Indigenous scholars, curators, and artists primarily from North American regions of the Arctic and Amazonian zones to meet, exchange ideas, share works, and develop collaborative strategies that would bring together traditional knowledges of Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.