Naadohbii: To Draw Water

First Indigenous triennial in Winnipeg focuses on the importance of water.

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Marking the inaugural exhibition of the Winnipeg Indigenous Triennial, a new group show at the Winnipeg Art Gallery takes on an urgent, elemental issue. 

The exhibition’s title, Naadohbii, comes from an Anishinaabemowin word meaning to seek or draw water. It works with the double connotations of the word “draw,” suggesting both the physical act of gathering water and the artistic act of representing it. 

The show, which brings together more than 25 artists from North America, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, is curated by Jaimie Isaac, the gallery’s former curator of Indigenous and contemporary art, along with Reuben Friend and Ioana Gordon-Smith, of the Pātaka Art and Museum in New Zealand, and Kimberley Moulton, a curator at Museums Victoria in Australia.

With works that are often intensely local but also globally connected, Naadohbii offers multifaceted Indigenous perspectives on the power of water, both as a sacred and symbolic force and as a resource that increasingly faces threats from economic greed and environmental devastation. 

The show draws in viewers with the striking Body of Water by Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe, Lac Seul First Nation, Ontario), a cast aluminum sculpture of a tarp-covered canoe that stands near the entryway. The piece is beautiful, with dramatic underlighting and a fluid and reflective surface.  It’s also ominous – overturned, landlocked and too heavy to float – suggesting underlying threats to water such as pollution and climate change. 

We see these layers of meaning repeated throughout the exhibition. Naadohbii includes a range of media – photography, weaving, painting, printmaking, sculpture, cyanotype, animation, sound and video art – but perhaps its essential medium is time. These are works that use time, first in their making and then in our complex apprehension of them, encouraging us to sit, letting them flow around and through us. Many pieces seem to channel the human impulse to contemplate bodies of water, to experience the deep current of emotion that comes from watching rivers flow past or waves breaking on the shore.

Some of the strongest pieces are video installations, which have a built-in duration. Rachael Rakena (Ngāpuhi, Ngāi Tahu, Aotearoa/New Zealand) has created an evocative video projection in which a woman clings fiercely to a rock, recreated in three dimensions in the gallery, as sea waters break around her. There’s a poetic sense of the life force connecting human, water and shoreline, but the work is also a protest against New Zealand’s Foreshore and Seabed Act. The controversial legislation, now repealed, gave the Crown ownership of these coastal environments.

Likewise, Nova Paul (Te Uri Ro Roi and Te Parawhau/Ngāpuhi, Aotearoa/New Zealand) follows the Waiapao Springs riverscape at foot level, creating a deeply immersive and intimate video record, while accompanying footage shows the artist’s cousin, oral historian Dinah Paul, speaking about the need to preserve the waterway from development through a claim to the Waitangi Tribunal, a permanent commission of inquiry for claims against Crown actions that breach promises in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.

Other works suggest time through painstaking processes and lineages of inherited knowledge, such as the vivid, vibrantly gorgeous Water Song by Christi Belcourt (Michif, Manitou Sakhigan, Alberta, lives in Anishinaabe territory on Lake Huron). Colourful medicinal plants on a velvety black backdrop composed of thousands of small points of paint suggest traditional Métis flower beadwork converted to a grand scale. Belcourt conveys not just the beauty of each plant but also the interconnected ecosystems that nurture them, all underpinned by clean water.

Works by Regina Pilawuk Wilson (Ngan'gikurrungurr, Australia) include functional objects made from river plants, as well as large detailed paintings that look, at a glance, like abstractions, but are actually embedded in traditions of weaving, stitching, net-making and durrmu, the ceremonial art of dot body painting. 

Other works seem to subvert romanticized Western traditions of landscape painting and photography. Nici Cumpston (Barkindji, Australia) creates atmospheric photographs of the land in Australia’s massive Murray-Darling river basin. Hauntingly lovely images of dead trees, their sinuous grey lines contrasted with the sky, also document the long-term effects of lock-and-weir systems, irrigation for industrial agriculture and intensive resource extraction. 

James Tylor (Nunga Kaurna Miyurna, Māori Te Arawa and European, Australia) likewise explores what he calls “the economics of water” with black-and-white photographs of river landscapes broken up by the rigid geometric application of gold-coloured paint, suggesting interventions by capitalism and colonialism.

The last element of time in Naadohbii involves the comprehensive didactic panels. They make for lengthy reading, but contextualize the works with crucial historical, political, social and cultural information. ■  

 Naadohbii: To Draw Water at the Winnipeg Art Gallery from Aug. 14, 2021 to Feb. 5, 2022. Artists include Christi Belcourt, Onaman Collective (Christi Belcourt and Isaac Murdoch), Rebecca Belmore, Kevin Brownlee, Lindsay Dobbin, Eshuguriak, Maria Hupfield, Mina Inuktalik, Marianne Nicolson, William Noah, Jessie Oonark, Annie Oqaituq, Lukie Airut, Elisa Jane (Leecee) Carmichael, Dr. Vicki Couzens, Nici Cumpston, Ishmael Marika, Abraham Anghik Ruben, James Tylor, Regina Pilawuk Wilson, Israel Birch, Nikau Hindin, Jeremy Leatinu’u, Nova Paul, Rachael Rakena, Keri Whaitiri and Nelson Takkiruq.

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