The installation featuring throat singers Evie Mark and Akinisie Sivuarapik. Visitors stand in the felt pods and are then able to hear the singing. The outside of the pod features traditional tattoo patterns, or tunniit, designed by Mark. (Pierre Poirier/Canadian Museum of Nature)
A exhibition spotlighting the art and artists of Nunavik opened this Friday in Ottawa with a view to showcasing the region’s art and artists.
Our Land, Our Art is taking place at the Canadian Museum of Nature and features the works of several Nunavik artists, created especially for the show. The works include a range of mediums from visual arts to video to beadwork to singing to circus performing.
It was put together by the Avataq Cultural Institute, which works to promote and preserve the language and culture of Inuit in Quebec.
The exhibition also features 32 traditional objects, artworks, and artifacts from the Avataq Cultural Institute’s collections, which provided inspiration to the artists. This sculpture is one of the items selected by throat singers Evie Mark and Akinisie Sivuarapik. (Pierre Poirier/Canadian Museum of Nature)
“At Avataq we have things like archeology, cartography, genealogy, and art is a great way to talk about the link with the land,” Andrée Anne Vien, the coordinator for Aumaaggiivik, the Nunavik arts secretariat, told Eye on the Arctic in a phone interview.
“The choice of artists was really about showcasing the variety of disciplines as well as connecting with the young generation of emerging artists as well as established ones.”
Using the past to inspire the present
Nunavik is the Inuit region of Arctic Quebec and has a population of approximately 13,000 people, with 14 communities.
The show is an important moment to showcase the unique Inuit culture of the region, Vien said.
“Many people don’t know there are four distinct Inuit regions in Canada, and that Nunavik is one of them,” she said. “An exhibition like this can show some of what makes Nunavik unique and we hope visitors see just how much talent there is in Nunavik.”
Artists include throat singers Evie Mark and Akinisie Sivuarapik; Taqralik Partridge, a visual and spoken-word artist originally from Kuujjuaq; Kangiqsujuaq photographer and video artist Lucasi Kiatainaq; and visual artists Qumaq M Iyaituk and her sister, Passa Mangiuk, who grew up in Ivujivik.
A large beaded amautik (women’s parka) by visual artist Taqralik Partridge. Her work is inspired by themes of the environment and ancestral connections to the land. (Pierre Poirier/Canadian Museum of Nature)
In addition, 32 items from Avataq’s collections are also on display, carefully chosen by the artists themselves and used to inspire the works for the show.
“The works themselves transmit so much about the land and the traditions, at the same time as how Nunavimmuit [people from Nunavik] live their culture today,” Vien said.
Those objects include things like contemporary carvings as well as objects traditionally used by Inuit including igaak (snow goggles), a nariarsaq (fishing lure) and a soapstone qulliq (oil lamp).
Some of the other objects include a pana (snow-knife blade) and a panak (knife handle ) made of walrus ivory.
The 1957 soapstone sculpture by Thomasie Kaitak that inspired photographer Lucasi Kiatainaq’s contributions to the show. (Pierre Poirier/Canadian Museum of Nature)
A wooden rod and seal bone, ajaqaq—similar to a cup-and-ball game—is also on display along with a wooden figure, believed to have been used as doll.
Throat singers Evie Mark and Akinisie Sivuarapik’s installation in the show is made up of two hanging pods that visitors can enter to hear the duo’s singing. The traditional items they chose includes archive photos and items associated with or used mostly by women.
For photographer and video artist Lucasi Kiatainaq, inspiration came from a 1957 soapstone sculpture of a hunter by Salluit artist Thomasie Kaitak.
“For me, it embodies that moment when a hunter experiences a feeling of uncertainty mixed with the adrenaline rush that comes with a success to come—a feeling that myself, my father and our ancestors have felt so often,” Kiatainaq told the museum.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
