Unhistories: Art and the Unconcluded


Shown in conjunction with the 2018 CADN Graduate Student Conference un-histories: art and the unconcluded, which seeks to seeks to counter history’s containment and to foreground its continuing relevance in the present. Using the notion of “un-histories” to unsettle conventional limits of history by prompting critical inquiries into how history functions, encouraging: re-organizing the composition of the past, re-constructing methods of transmitting narratives,
and destabilizing the seeming linearity of events. Un-histories reimagine history as a practice for addressing the “unconcluded”—subjectivities and narratives previously considered spectral, disparaged, marginalized, erased, shamed, abashed, or localized.

 
DateSaturday, March 10, 2018 - 3:00pm

Location

Graduate Gallery, 205 Richmond St. W

Artwork on display:
Ukiuktaqtumi, Stephen Puskas, 2017
30:10 minutes, colour

Didactic:
A father picking arctic berries with his daughters on a sunny September day and a group of elders playing dice at a local community centre make up two separable moments bound together by Montreal-based Inuk artist Stephen Agluvak Puskas’s short-film Ukiuktaqtumi (2017). Lyrically stitching together video footage found on the web (each
borrowed with consent from the original videographers), Puskas shapes a wide-ranging view of Inuit life ukiuktaqtumi (“in the North”). In a gesture of endurance, the independent yet woven threads of narrative in Ukiuktaqtumi often begin inside of a moment and unravel without conclusion.

Through these rifts in continuity, Puskas echos the imperative of self-representation for Inuit communities in Canada, whose prolonged subjugation to the colonial lens has fostered inaccurate narratives that call for an unlearning and dismantling of such histories. Ukiuktaqtumi does just this—made in response to non-Inuit filmmaker Dominic Gagnon’s Of the North (compiled of taken footage that constructed a distorted image of Inuit), Puskas presents a selfdetermined
and consenting outlook of life in the North – full of variance, movement, and (dis)/continuities.

~
 

Artist Bio:
Stephen Agluvak Puskas is co-founder and former producer for Nipivut, Montreal's Inuit community radio show. Selected by the Senate in 2017 as an Indigenous Youth Leader, Stephen works to improve Indigenous representation in media and to shed light on the exploitation of Inuit culture like with Ungava Gin. He volunteers for Dawson College's Indigenous Education Council and has also helped write the Inuit chapter of the Indigenous cultural awareness manual for the SPVM. Stephen's film about Inuit self-representation, Ukiuktaqtumi (OO-KEE-UKTAK-
TOO-MEE) recently won the Prix de la Releve at 2017's Presence Autochtone and he is currently an associate producer at the National Film Board, working on the coastal Labrador project, which aims to support Labrador Inuit in producing documentary films.

~

Throughout this exhibition we are encouraging and accepting donations for Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami: The National Representational Organization Protecting and Advancing the Rights and Interests of Inuit in Canada.
Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami serves as a national voice protecting and advancing the rights and interests of Inuit in Canada, with a stated vision for Canadian Inuit to prosper through unity and self-determination.
More information can be found at : https://itk.ca

~

We would also like to thank VTape (http://www.vtape.org) for their assistance in organizing the presentation of this work.

DateSaturday, March 10, 2018 - 3:00pm

Website Location

Graduate Gallery, 205 Richmond St. W

Ukiuktaqtumi, Stephen Puskas, 2017
Saturday, March 10, 2018 - 3:00pm

Artwork on display:
Ukiuktaqtumi, Stephen Puskas, 2017
30:10 minutes, colour

Didactic:
A father picking arctic berries with his daughters on a sunny September day and a group of elders playing dice at a local community centre make up two separable moments bound together by Montreal-based Inuk artist Stephen Agluvak Puskas’s short-film Ukiuktaqtumi (2017). Lyrically stitching together video footage found on the web (each
borrowed with consent from the original videographers), Puskas shapes a wide-ranging view of Inuit life ukiuktaqtumi (“in the North”). In a gesture of endurance, the independent yet woven threads of narrative in Ukiuktaqtumi often begin inside of a moment and unravel without conclusion.

Through these rifts in continuity, Puskas echos the imperative of self-representation for Inuit communities in Canada, whose prolonged subjugation to the colonial lens has fostered inaccurate narratives that call for an unlearning and dismantling of such histories. Ukiuktaqtumi does just this—made in response to non-Inuit filmmaker Dominic Gagnon’s Of the North (compiled of taken footage that constructed a distorted image of Inuit), Puskas presents a selfdetermined
and consenting outlook of life in the North – full of variance, movement, and (dis)/continuities.

~
 

Artist Bio:
Stephen Agluvak Puskas is co-founder and former producer for Nipivut, Montreal's Inuit community radio show. Selected by the Senate in 2017 as an Indigenous Youth Leader, Stephen works to improve Indigenous representation in media and to shed light on the exploitation of Inuit culture like with Ungava Gin. He volunteers for Dawson College's Indigenous Education Council and has also helped write the Inuit chapter of the Indigenous cultural awareness manual for the SPVM. Stephen's film about Inuit self-representation, Ukiuktaqtumi (OO-KEE-UKTAK-
TOO-MEE) recently won the Prix de la Releve at 2017's Presence Autochtone and he is currently an associate producer at the National Film Board, working on the coastal Labrador project, which aims to support Labrador Inuit in producing documentary films.

~

Throughout this exhibition we are encouraging and accepting donations for Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami: The National Representational Organization Protecting and Advancing the Rights and Interests of Inuit in Canada.
Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami serves as a national voice protecting and advancing the rights and interests of Inuit in Canada, with a stated vision for Canadian Inuit to prosper through unity and self-determination.
More information can be found at : https://itk.ca

~

We would also like to thank VTape (http://www.vtape.org) for their assistance in organizing the presentation of this work.

Venue & Address: 
Graduate Gallery, 205 Richmond St. W
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