Abstract
Transgressing the Exhibition: Isuma at the 2019 Venice Biennale Curated by Asinnajaq, Candice Hopkins, Catherine Crowston, Josée Drouin‐Brisebois and Barbara Fischer. Exhibited Artist Collective: Isuma (Zacharias Kunuk, Paul Apak, Pauloosie Qulitalik, Norman Cohn), May 11–November 24, 2019, Canadian Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Parallel Online Exhibition: http://www.isuma.tv/isuma‐book and http://www.isuma.tv
Highlights
New content was uploaded each month during the exhibition, which turned the website into a dynamic and growing archive of material, providing historical context to the exhibition through essays and research, as well as podcasts, additional art works, and images spanning the three decades since Isuma’s founding
The Canadian Pavilion is a red and spiral-formed brick building designed in 1956 in the Giardini della Biennale, the area in which the 30 permanent national pavilions of the up to 90 representatives of the exhibition are located. This was the first time that Inuit artists exhibited in the Venice Biennale since its foundation in 1895, and only two Indigenous artists have held solo exhibitions in the Canadian Pavilion before Isuma, many more have participated in the off-site program
Isuma choose to engage with this conflict by questioning the so-called nationality the pavilion is supposed to represent at the Biennale. This tension between the work of Isuma and the settler-nation-state of Canada, whose government-supported national gallery commissioned the exhibition, points toward the colonial past and the struggle with land claims, resource extraction, and disputes over Arctic sovereignty that Inuit communities have fought since the forced resettlements that took place over decades, beginning in the mid-twentieth century (Huhndorf 2009, 79–82; Kardová and Rimella 2019)
Summary
New content was uploaded each month during the exhibition, which turned the website into a dynamic and growing archive of material, providing historical context to the exhibition through essays and research, as well as podcasts, additional art works, and images spanning the three decades since Isuma’s founding. This was the first time that Inuit artists exhibited in the Venice Biennale since its foundation in 1895, and only two Indigenous artists have held solo exhibitions in the Canadian Pavilion before Isuma, many more have participated in the off-site program (see Anthes 2009; Igloliorte 2019).
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