What does one do with such a clairvoyant image?

What does one do with such a clairvoyant image? is a group exhibition across two venues—Gallery 44 and Trinity Square—that explores questions of sovereignty, nationhood and identity through strategies of speculative fiction and alternative histories of land and landscape. In works that explore the political demands of image-making, this exhibition asks how images might produce resistance to power structures, and how the narratives of history can be written, or re-written, by artists. The title is drawn from a work by Kapwani Kiwanga and offers a provocative initial claim: images have agency that extends beyond the temporality of the present. Together these works foreground the possibilities of an otherwise unsettled future against the prospect of being indentured to history. 

The re-appropriation and re-use of historical imagery offers a range of possibilities for resistance. Tania Willard’s Only Available Light (2016) combines historical research and archival materials to question anthropological representations of the artist’s Secwe̓pemc community. The work departs from an educational film by archaeologist Harlan Ingersoll Smith, who was a member of the infamous Jesup North Pacific Expedition of 1897–99. Willard’s intervention into the film physically obstructs and distorts a clear view of the imagery. By confronting the desire of settler society to consume Indigenous cultures as exotified or prehistoric, Willard transforms Smith’s ethnographic video and renders it unavailable to the broader Canadian public for which is was intended. Instead, it comes to viewers only as light, as a meditation on loss and resilience transposed through time. 

Dana Claxton’s new body of work, Road Trip (2017), combines found imagery from a quintessentially middle-class Canadian holiday of the 20th century—the road trip. By layering anonymous but familiar images of camping and leisure activities with beadwork patterns from the Lakota nation, Claxton’s project queries how histories are represented, and for whom. In knitting together familiar cultural forms, Claxton emphasizes that history is an embodied story that is personally contingent, not a dispassionate relation of events.

While the archive offers a rich terrain for speculating on the possibilities of what might have been, artists looking to the near-future recognize that the minor, everyday rituals of domestic life can make much larger paradigm shifts possible. Stephanie Comilang’s Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me Paradise) (2016) is a science-fiction documentary set amongst the maze-like temporary structures constructed by Filipina migrant workers who gather together every Sunday throughout Hong Kong. Narrated by a disembodied, ghostly drone who is only able to engage with the women during their Sunday activities, the video suggests a future where the isolation of economic migration and class can be thwarted through the emergent energy of collectivity.

The mundane nature and drudgery of everyday life is likewise reflected in Martine Syms’ audio film Most Days (2014), a table-read of an original screenplay accompanied by a score composed in collaboration with Neal Reinalda and published as a vinyl record. The project details an average day for Chanel Washington, a young black woman in 2050 Los Angeles, tracking her boredom, sense of dread and increasing uncertainty about life in the very near future. Alongside Most Days is Syms’ Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto (2013), a text work that articulates a new theory of the Black aesthetic in the 21st century that coalesces around a movement of black, diasporic artists that consider everyday moments of futurism as lived reality.

Balancing upon a fulcrum of past, present and future, the work of Kapwani Kiwanga uses the iconography of photographs to interrogate various historical narratives. In the video installation, The Secretary’s Suite (2016), Kiwanga reveals the conflicting priorities that motivate international diplomacy and gift-giving, suggesting cracks in the façade of history. The project is based on a 1961 photograph of then Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s office at the United Nations. As Kiwanga sorts through various photographs of gifts given throughout history, she narrates the possible intentions behind these exchanges. The stories provoke a viewer to question the nature of sovereign states and the ways in which decisions with global implications are made, revealing the oftentimes contradictory narratives of colonial history.  

In a new body of work commissioned specifically for this exhibition and extending across the vitrine spaces of Trinity Square and Gallery 44, Dylan Miner foregrounds processes of reciprocity and redress. Entitled omazinaakizaan: s/he takes its picture (2017), Miner uses found photographs that depict common monuments to colonial dispossession and responds to their ideological premise by scarring the images’ surfaces. His marks are not subsequent to an original image but rather are irreducible from the images themselves. In refusing a distinction between temporalities, the colonial gaze finds itself decentred.

In framing these artists’ projects with a question that implies a supernatural force, What does one do with such a clairvoyant image? calls the viewer to imagine futures that are radically different from the colonial present. And during a present moment that is politically charged and fraught with conflict, an underlying question remains implicit: what is to be done now, with what we sense just beyond the horizon?