Water (Deshkan Ziibi)

artLAB Gallery, in collaboration with Art Gallery of Hamilton, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Forest City Gallery, Futura Resistenza, Glenfiddich Artists-in-Residence, McIntosh Gallery, New Adventures in Sound Art, Other Sights, Thames Art Gallery, National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition, School for Advanced Studies in the Arts & Humanities, WalkingLab, present

Water (Deshkan Ziibi)

12-HOUR EVENT
12 noon – 12 midnight (EST)
December 12, 2024

Online: YouTube Livestream
Live: artLAB Gallery, London, Ontario (free, venue is accessible)

Curated by Christof Migone, Sheri Osden Nault, Ruth Skinner

Fifth in a series of twelve annual events taking place on December 12 from noon to midnight (EST). Each year the event moves through each word of the 12-word phrase ‘You And I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death’ and activates the word of the year in myriad ways.

This year’s event, the 5th edition in the 12-part annual series, will willingly wade the time away, in eddies, in sinks, in drains, in backwaters, through root systems, capillaries, infiltrating, inundating our “humid brains” (Isabelle Stengers).

Recipes for getting wet: out of the blue, blue planet, into the molecular, cellular, time’s involved, time runs through it, hydrophonics, hydrojams, glistening gestures, swimsink, cloud seeding, drought, contamination, advisories, nautical sea, nausea, leagues under, deep diver, pearl mother, Mariana Trench. We quickly see this could flow forever, for, as Yve Lomax put it in Sounding the Event: “Yes, this noisy restless sea is pure multiplicity: it is mixture, it is contingency and it is turbulent.” Or, put more succinctly, as Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar realizes: “isolating a wave is not easy.”

The Anishinaabek People refer to the Thames River as Deshkan Ziibi (which means Antler River in Ojibwe / Anishnaabemowin language). The river has also been called Askunessippi (Antlered River) by the Neutrals. (Source: Upper Thames River Conservation Authority).

HOUR 1 (12h)
artLAB Gallery presents

UpStream/Downstream by Tom Cull with Daniella Butters & Sruthi Ramanarayanan

UpStream/DownStream brings together art and activism to focus on the question of clean drinking water and healthy river ecology in London, Ontario, and at Oneida Nation of the Thames—two communities that are connected by the Deshkan Ziibi/Thames River.

+ At 12:40, Place (Dis) 1: Eight Beats by Shore by E.B.B.S.

HOUR 2 (13h)
National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition presents

Nasunikejk (elmitukwi’k) by Amanda Amour-Lynx

Archive of Trickster 2 by Kaya Joan

A weaving together of physical with digital archival imagery relating to projects of urbanization at the mouth of the Humber river.

Humber Water Dance by Star Nahwegahbo

+ At 13:40, Place (Dis) 2: touching, knowing by Sheri Osden Nault

HOUR 3 (14h)
WalkingLab presents

SPIT HOLD by Eli Nolet

A fluid exploration of the embodied potentiality of queer memory and stone butch identity.

+ At 14:40, Place (Dis) 3: Water Texture-Sound Study by Lina Choi

HOUR 4 (15h)
Doris McCarthy Gallery presents

Forgiveness by Farheen Haq

Time as was told by Laura Millard

Compulsory Figure by Jordyn Stewart

Reimagining Niagara: Sights and Sounds of Niagara Falls by Jordyn Stewart

Jack Pine, 8′ Camera Crane by Jon Sasaki

Uncharted Waters Kempenfelt Bay by Lou Sheppard

+ At 15:40, Place (Dis) 4: (untitled) by Bagida’waad Alliance

For this video, members of Bagida’waad, along with Marla Hlady and Gwen MacGregor, went out onto the water in canoes near the Akiwenzie home at Neyaashiinigmiing.

HOUR 5 (16h)
Art Gallery of Hamilton presents

(untitled) by Celia Vernal, Tyler Tekatch, Laurie Kilgor-Walsh

+ At 16:40, Place (Dis) 5: Kehyá:ra’s by Melissa General

The artist repeatedly walks into the Grand River—a river that plays an important role in General’s cultural history, including its use as a landmark that defines the territory promised to the Haudenosaunee in the Haldimand Proclamation.

HOUR 6 (17h)
SASAH presents

A Confluence of Legacies by Michelle Wilson and the Coves Collective Ensemble

+ At 17:40, Place (Dis) 6: Flow by Kate Armstrong and SURFACE TENSION by Claire Liu

HOUR 7 (18h)
Thames Art Gallery presents

Shipwreckiana by Dickson Bou, Sharmistha Kar, Peter Lebel, Patrick Mahon, Thomas Mahon, Valerie Mills-Milde, & Quinn Smallboy

An allusive event including real time interventions where references to water and shipwrecks forge abstracted spaces marked by trouble, beauty and difference.

+ At 18:40, Place (Dis) 7: (untitled) by the Shipwreckiana Collective

HOUR 8 (19h)
Futura Resistenza presents

Temper (Length Wave) by Christof Migone

Performed by Masha Kouznetsova and Ellen Moffat

The Release Into Motion

A mouth holding a tomato frozen into a block of ice until both melt and fall off.

+ At 19:40, Place (Dis) 8: Empty (Bucket) by Christof Migone

HOUR 9 (20h)
Forest City Gallery presents

Refraction by Racquel Rowe

+ At 20:40, Place (Dis) 9: Sea Bath I and II by Racquel Rowe

An intimate ritual performed by the artist and her mother, taking early morning baths in the sea in Barbados.

HOUR 10 (21h)
Glenfiddich Artists-in-Residence presents Penelope Cain