Online exhibition: Picturing a Pandemic
Part 5: Future Nation, Something Said, Confirmation of my Sins, Contoured Thoughts
9 – 23 July

Picturing A Pandemic looks to the artist’s moving image and performance practices of the 1990s to the present, to consider how queer, two-spirit and non-binary BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of colour) video practices continue to stage modes of decolonial resistance as interstices between crisis and liberation. This situates debates following the COVID-19 global pandemic and eco-activist and Black Lives Matter uprisings in the context of the linked colonial histories of the UK and Canada.

In recent decades, unfolding economic, political and ecological crises have given shape to geopolitical alignments extending the reach of global neoliberal capitalism. Meanwhile, resurgent populist nationalism that feeds white supremacy and promotes police and state violence towards LGBTQIA people, people of colour and indigenous peoples perpetuates coloniality and cultural amnesias which at the same time propels the rampant exploitation of oppressed people and the planet.

Combining speculative fictions, archival, auto-ethnographic, ritual and meditative practices, the works of Jay Bernard, Evan Ifekoya, Zachery Longboy and Kent Monkman demonstrate that in light of an increasing awareness of the continuities of colonialism, the violence of neoliberal capitalism and of climate denial, the normalisation of racist politics and the prevalence of racist, homophobic and transphobic institutions, government policies and public discourses, these artists offer ways to bear witness, build resistance and re-forge old and new activisms.