New Red Order: Give it Back
to
Audain Gallery 149 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6B 1H4
New Red Order, "Tank," 2020
courtesy the artists.
New Red Order: Give it Back
Audain Gallery, Hastings Street Windows
New Red Order (NRO) is a public secret society of rotating membership that works to re-channel settler desires for Indigeneity into supports for Indigenous futures. Formed in contradistinction to the Improved Order of the Red Men and The Degree of Pocahontas — North American organizations founded in the late nineteenth century exclusively for white men and women to “play Indian” — NRO imagines that the appropriative impulses at the heart of these societies might be redirected. Using strategies as diverse as calling out and calling in, recruitment, and cumulative interrogation, the work of NRO aims to shift potential obstructions to Indigenous growth.
In Give it Back, a street-facing window exhibition, New Red Order engages with moves toward Land Back, which involve calls to restore stolen Indigenous territories to Indigenous people. Occuring on unceded land of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), and Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ) Nations, in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of so-called Vancouver, the project reveals instances where the repatriation of land, from settlers to Indigenous individuals or groups, has been promised or perhaps enacted. Beyond the necessary disruption of settler colonialism with the need to take back land, Give it Back investigates, presents, and promotes another mode of return: through actualized gestures of land being "voluntarily" released to Indigenous people. Employing videos and a real-estate ethos, Give it Back unfolds to chart moments in a speculative future history of the movement.
Linking with NRO’s persistent deconstruction of the idea of an Indigenous informant — a term that describes a person who reveals too much of their own communities, in either legal or anthropological contexts — which involves acknowledging NRO members’ own complicity as informants, Give it Back speculates on the recuperative possibility of calling in others, settlers included, to inform with them. In foregrounding voluntary practices and promises of land’s return, the work offers a potential — if partial — attempt to undo settler colonialism by those who stand to benefit most from its upholding.
For this exhibition, New Red Order core contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys are joined by Virgil B/G Taylor. Working in filmmaking, performance and installation art, New Red Order have presented their work internationally, expanding the public secret society network across numerous institutional platforms.
Virgil B/G Taylor makes fag tips, an online speculative zine. He is one half of sssssssssSsss, a study-friendship with Ashkan Sepahvand, and a member of What Would An HIV Doula Do?, a collective of artists, writers, caretakers, activists, and more gathered in response to the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic. His work explores histories of care and crisis, magic, and toxicity.
Presented in partnership with DOXA, Cineworks and the School for Contemporary Arts at SFU.
Curated by cheyanne turions
Pyro-concept accomplice: Kate August
Performing arm accomplice: Ashley Byler
Wardrobe accomplice: Enver Chakartash
Labour force accomplice: Christopher Lacroix
Performing arm accomplice: Jeremy Pheiffer
SCREENING: Anti-Ethnography Presented online - Please register to receive a virtual ticket to access the program.
Presented in partnership with DOXA, and aligned with New Red Order’s exhibition Give it Back at Audain Gallery, this screening program examines the violence inherent in the ethnographic impulse, unveiling the absurd fetishism underpinning the discipline.
For Indigenous peoples, the camera is a dangerous weapon, one that has been wielded against them since the device’s inception. Anthropology's obsession with preserving images of so-called vanishing cultures, through ethnographic films or, relatedly, archives filled with boxes of ancestral remains, has long been a tool used to colonize and oppress Indigenous peoples.
By relegating Indigenous identities to the past, and forcing Indigenous people to authenticate themselves through this past, their existence as contemporary individuals living in a colonized land is denied. It is in this sense that ethnography confines Indigenous agency.
The ethnographer's encapsulating gaze ignores the fact that, for Indigenous communities, tradition is not an immutable set of truths handed down by revelation, but a set of ever-evolving social practices whose continuity cannot be repaired by preservation, only elaborated through struggle and, finally, achieved under conditions of genuine self-determination. In the works assembled for this screening, the power of Indigenous people claiming the camera for themselves is explored.
The Anti-Ethnography screening is free and open to all regions. Please register to receive a virtual ticket to access the program. Once the program is unlocked, the viewer will have 24 hours to finish watching the program.
Anti-Ethnography Program:
Land Acknowledgment, New Red Order, 2021
Sioux Ghost Dance, W.K.L. Dickson/Thomas Edison, 1894
Welcome to the Third World, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, 2004
Auntie Beachress — Are You Looking at Me?, Tonia Jo Hall, 2015
Overweight with Crooked Teeth, Shelley Niro, 1997
Instant Identity Ritual, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Gustavo Vázquez, 2007
Alphabet City Serenade, Diane Burns, 1992
Bizarre Thanksgiving Performance Ritual, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Gustavo Vázquez, 2013
Auntie Beachress — Lakota Language Challenge, Tonia Jo Hall, 2015
wawa, Sky Hopinka, 2014
Auntie Beachress — Only Boring People Get Bored, Tonia Jo Hall, 2015
Mobilize, Caroline Monnet, 2015
Dance to Miss Chief, Kent Monkman, 2010
Native Fantasy: Germany’s Indian Heroes, Axel Gerdau, Erik Olsen, and John Woo of The New York Times, 2014
The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, 2018
We Only Answer Our Land Line, Woodrow Hunt and Olivia Camfield, 2019
Reclamation, Thirza Jean Cuthand, 2018
Auntie Beachress — Life's Struggles, Tonia Jo Hall, 2015
Curated by New Red Order