Kwilul (I Search For You)
Canada | 2023
English | Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality
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Looking Back While Looking Ahead
Curated by Sky Fine Foods
Premiering at Geary Art Crawl, Sept. 23-24 2023, and ongoing
Looking back at our histories of connection to places, while looking ahead into the futures shaped by our dreams and expectations. Artists Elina Lex, Akshata Naik, Amanda Amour-Lynx, Tru Elmore, Curtia Wright and curator Miriam Arbus come together in an exhibition of digital sculptures activated with augmented reality technologies.
Kwilul (I Search For You)
Hidden in plain sight, St. Ann wears peaked hood with L’nu (Mi’kmaq) double curve motifs, as observed in a Mi’kmaw church. A reflection on hidden knowledges, survival, and cultural preservation, St. Ann as a symbol reappropriates Indigenous ecological and cosmological practices prior to contact, represented through the saint of forgotten grandmothers.
Kwilul (I Search For You) navigates complicated feelings related to cultural loss and the grief felt from the impact residential schools made on our storytelling and beliefs. When I encountered this statue of the young Virgin Mary and St. Ann, wearing traditional regalia worn primarily by L’nu women, I felt startled and curious about the juxtaposition of two separate spiritual ideologies.
L’nuekati’k, the ancestral territory of the Mi'kmaq, spans the coastal shores of the Atlantic Ocean as part of the Wabanaki Confederacy. For over 11,000 years, the Wabanaki people have made their home across the Atlantic provinces, including Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI, Newfoundland and Labrador and Northern Quebec, crossing the colonial borders to Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.
The Atlantic coast had been the first contact point for those who travelled across the ocean by ship, with the French arriving 150 years prior to the British. These interactions inform the Peace and Friendship Treaty (1752) as we currently know it, where the cultural exchange between nations had a deep effect on the religious practices of the Mi’kmaq. For geographical reasons, the Mi’kmaq endured colonial contact the longest relative to nations further from the coast, as European settlements migrated west to the other provinces. Thus, L’nu beliefs have increasingly assimilated and welcomed Christian imagery and traditions over several centuries.
Kwilul (I Search For You) is a gesture of gratitude toward the protective forces of my ancestors who lived according to Netukulimk (natural law) while maintaining friendly relationships with the Anglican Church and adapting our rituals to reflect our shared traditions and beliefs, concealing the deep ties our people have with Mother Nature and the land, to preserve our culture for future and present generations to retrieve and reclaim with pride.
A neon colour palette reimagines St. Ann, her image renewed through the vivid passion of today’s generation, whose cultural pride activates our quantum memory with the same fierce guardianship over our waters and rights to livelihood our great grandmothers taught to us.
