"Scare Eye" by Postcommodity
photo: Jason Grubb
This banner project for Winnipeg Cultural Capital of Canada 2010 Program comprises a large-scale exhibition focused on presenting Aboriginal Art from around the world. This will be an incredibly important show, featuring the work of a number of renowned Canadian Aboriginal artists, complemented by some of the most innovative and engaging work drawn from Aboriginal populations around the world.
Meet the members of the remarkable curatorial collective that is developing Close Encounters.
In addition to the main exhibition site at 109 Pacific Ave, many galleries around Winnipeg are partnering with Close Encounters and programming complimentary shows.
Find out more about our partners.
About the exhibition:
The world is changing. Now is the moment to reconfigure our notions of time to reveal alternative ways of thinking and being for the future. In Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years Indigenous artists imagine the future within the context of present experiences and past histories. By radically reconsidering encounter narratives between native and non-native people, Indigenous prophecies, possible utopias and apocalypses, this exhibition proposes intriguing possibilities for the next 500 years. “We all in different measure have carved out the future,” observes Hopi photographer and filmmaker, Victor Masayesva, in his book Husk of Time. “We are all clairvoyants, soothsayers, prophets, knowingly assuming our predictions.”
Close Encounters brings together over 30 Indigenous artists from across Canada, the United States, South America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, including newly commissioned work from Rebecca Belmore, Faye HeavyShield, Kent Monkman, and Edward Poitras. Jimmie Durham’s long-term sculptural work A Pole to Mark the Centre of the World at Winnipeg will be an ongoing critique of widely held ideas surrounding space and location, while James Luna's poignant installation The Spirits of Virtue and Evil Await my Ascension, addresses issues of ritual and the passing of time. Close Encounters showcases artists and artworks that collectively invent provocative futures from a diversity of perspectives and practices.
With its myriad histories, trajectories, tensions, collisions, and self-image(s), the city of Winnipeg offers an intriguing juxtaposition for these artistic mediations. Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years presents international Indigenous perspectives in a city that in many ways also epitomizes the future of Aboriginal people in Canada. Works in multiple venues throughout the city will serve as catalysts to invent different ways of thinking, acting, and being in the world of our shared future. At this pivotal moment in time, Close Encounters invites engagement with the speculative, the prophetic, and the unknown.
Primary Private Sector Funder: The Winnipeg Foundation
We are still seeking sponsors for this event. To find out how to sponsor us, visit our Sponsorship and Donor Opportunities page.
