Aux confluents de l’Akiawenhrahk
Yahndawa’
Exhibitions in Québec : La Bande Vidéo,
L’Œil de Poisson, VU, Baie Vitrée de Méduse
September 9th to October 16th 2022
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Exhibition at the Musée
huron-wendat, Wendake
June 10th to September 10th 2023
Artists
Aïcha Bastien N’Diaye
Alexis Gros-Louis
France Gros-Louis Morin
Andrée Levesque Sioui
Teharihulen Michel Savard
Manon Sioui
Nicolas Renaud
Annie Baillargeon
Anne-Marie Bouchard
Dgino Cantin
Phile Després
Érika Hagen-Veilleux
Jeffrey Poirier
Alain-Martin Richard
Authors
Guy Sioui Durand
Anne-Marie Proulx
Organisations
Avatar
La Bande Vidéo
La Chambre Blanche
Le Lieu
L’Œil de Poisson
Rhizome
VU
The first iteration of the Yahndawa' exhibition took place in autumn 2022 in various Méduse exhibition spaces. This unifying event showcased performances and works created in collaboration, co-creation or dialogue with other artists and/or centres.
Yahndawa’ is ahaha’, an ancient waterway which the earth, ya’ta’, wears on her back. She carried the sky, yaronhia’, on her shoulders long before she took us into her arms. Änen’enh; we are her children. As she teaches us, the stories and dreams that we carry are renewed in our relationships, commensurate with what we give and what we receive. Kwaweyih. Our words, onywawenda’, are also promises. Our actions mark the ecosystems. One day, we shore up the riverbanks; the next, we let the waters and life reclaim their natural course. Time and time again, we portage and we are transported, we interconnect and we shape our landscapes. Onyiondih. Yithïa’ch.
—Andrée Levesque Sioui and Anne-Marie Proulx
A guided tour of the exhibition by Alain-Martin Richard, broadcast live on the evening of the opening, is available for viewing :
Audio recordings, Anne-Marie Proulx and Guy Sioui Durand (VU)
From murmured Wendat words and recorded conversations, Anne-Marie Proulx and Guy Sioui Durand bridge the gap between new and ancestral memories; intimate and communal territories. Their time spent witnessing and contributing to Yahndawa’ shape their exchanges and serve to forge new ones, inviting them to embark on new and unfamiliar paths – the river’s flow moving them forward. Through the medium of orality, their words are given space to breathe, drawing them out into the open, onto the land, and inviting them to call upon the people and the places they encountered to join the conversation occurring between worlds.
Là où coulent les ramifications de nos portages, Teharihulen Michel Savard and Annie Baillargeon (VU)
Through performances and gestures, Annie Baillargeon and Teharihulen Michel Savard were inspired to create photos, videos and sculptures that served to welcome each others personae – the witch and the warrior – as a way to reclaim both myths and healing rituals. Jointly addressing the forms of violence and erasure long imposed on Indigenous people and women, the pair forge a dialogue between identities, giving each other the freedom to move through both individual and shared forms of expression. From the banks of the river running through the city, the artists encourage us to seek connection as a way to heal, soul and body, people and nature.
Manon Sioui, France Gros-Louis Morin and Anne-Marie Bouchard (VU)
Presenting an assemblage of symbolic portraiture, each artist harvested assorted plants in familiar territories to create a communal garden. Allied by intentions of preservation and reuse, the artists resorted to environmentally friendly foraging methods, which moved them to further integrate environmental safekeeping as part of their artistic process. The cyanotype technique uses light to create an outline of the plants’ presence on paper, which is then rinsed to make images appear: this unveiling recalls the forming of friendships throughout the artists’ shared creation, moving them to call upon their ancestors and invite them to reconvene in this communal space.
Exodus / Shahies / Sans-titre, Alexis Gros-Louis (VU)
Alexis Gros-Louis incorporates multiple references to Wendat territory and culture to create abstract works that question our ability to extract ourselves from history and memory, especially once a wound or a barrier has formed. His work invokes different forms of distance – physical, historical, political, economic and cultural – all interjecting with our understanding of territory, and what it truly signifies. These works also connote the artist’s path, travelled as a way to reconvene with the ancestral territories of his people, and through which his labour leads him to a slow recovery of the misplaced parts of his identity.
La Parole entravée, Alain-Martin Richard (VU)
La Parole entravée is an interactive installation created with the help of each of Yahndawa’s participants. Invited by Alain-Martin Richard to personalize willow branches and turn them into contact sticks, the members of the group were then asked to perform on film, revealing their own interpretation of what it means to block or liberate speech. In the gallery, the willow sticks are hung to mimic a forest under which the Pleiades shine. Their shadows lengthen to blend into the projection of the waterfall, from which ambient sound emerges and grows overbearing at times. The shifting soundscape serves as a reminder that in the cascading strength of water, overflowing and regenerating, speech can be renewed.
Confluences, Andrée Levesque Sioui, Erika Hagen-Veilleux et Jeffrey Poirier and Notes d’atelier, Erika Hagen-Veilleux (L’Œil de Poisson)
Born out of a shared creation that echoes the inherent forces of nature and human encounters, the handmade arrowhead sash reveals the painstaking labour required by the three artists to make such a work. The main structure, produced by Poirier, rises like a fragile monolith and functions as a reference to the immeasurable forces of nature. The interlaced textile work introduces traditional techniques of finger braiding in the arrowhead style, long practiced by Andrée Lévesque Sioui, who taught them to her two creative partners. The studio notes provided by Érika Hagen-Veilleux accompany the structure, acting as a timeline of gestures, intentions and experiences shared between the artists.
Onyionhwentsa’, onywawenda’ - Racines de l’oralité, Andrée Levesque Sioui (L’Œil de Poisson)
Andrée Levesque Sioui has been teaching the Wendat language for over ten years, yet this polysynthetic language remains mysterious and fascinating. Here, she focuses on the root of words, the smallest lexical unit that carries the main meaning of a word and from which we construct words and phrases—these words-rivers capable of carrying speech, reminding us who we are and raising our voices in song. Levesque Sioui embodies yahndawa' and its watershed as a grandmother who carries words to us, who forgets nothing and who has heard the language of her ancestors.
Performeur sul neutre, Phile Després (L’Œil de Poisson)
On a long sheet of polymer fastened to the exhibition wall, Philip Després wears his heart on his sleeve. In a letter that recalls his journey with Yahndawa’, the performer admits his unease and resistance to participating in the exchange. Després resorts to humility, favouring a gentler style than that of his habitual performances, opting to listen and focus on the learning still to come. His letter addresses the challenges that can arise when we nurture relationships between people who don’t share identities or culture, and whom we may otherwise be oblivious to. With sense and sensibility, the artist delivers the letter during a performance, navigating both public and intimate spaces.
Nos cœurs ratchets, Aïcha Bastien N’Diaye and Dgino Cantin (L’Œil de Poisson)
Combining danse and sculpture, Our Ratchet Hearts is a poetic installation in which Aïcha Bastien N’Daye and Dgino Cantin’s take over space through movement, merging their creative outlooks. Playing to their strengths rather than their differences, the work unfolds as an eclectic codex, borrowing from the visual language of hunters, cabarets enfumés and boxing rings. Cantin’s sculptures are turned into accessories, at once fragile and heavy, which are then subjected to Bastien N’Daye’s impulses and movements so as to render a narrative, a place where spontaneous gesture happens in relation to shifting rhythms and contexts.
Installation vidéo et wampum, Nicolas Renaud (L’Œil de Poisson)
Dans Onyionhwentsïio, un sentier de portage montre comment la charge qui courbe le dos peut être celle des nécessités de la vie ou de cinq siècles d’histoire. Représentation personnelle d’une identité métissée, cette vidéo trace des voies directes vers l’autre œuvre présentée en galerie, une installation vidéo portant sur un wampum catholique fabriqué en 1678 par des femmes wendat et offert à la cathédrale de Chartes où il est encore conservé aujourd’hui. Malgré les inscriptions en latin qui en ont fait un objet chrétien et qui peuvent apparaître comme le reflet d’une assimilation culturelle et d’une soumission à l’Église, Renaud a su percevoir la présence des pensées ancestrales wendat dans cet objet de parole, d’ententes politiques et de communication avec les esprits.
Onyionhwentsïio, Nicolas Renaud (Méduse's Entrance Hall)
In Onyionhwentsïio, a portage trail conveys how back-bending weight can stem from life’s necessities as much as it can come from centuries of history. As a personal depiction of Métis identity, Onyionhwentsïio directly ties in with Renaud’s other work in the gallery, a second video installation that refers to a Catholic wampum made by Wendat women in 1678 that was, upon completion, gifted to the Chartres Cathedral where it is still preserved today. Despite the Latin lettering that denotes the object’s Christian character and reflects a certain cultural assimilation and submission to the Church, Renaud goes beyond the surface in order to identify the ancestral Wendat beliefs in the object and draw attention to its original use as a conduit for speech, political agreement and spiritual communication.
Vidéo de performance collective, Annie Baillargeon, Alexis Gros-Louis, Alain-Martin Richard, Teharihulen Michel Savard (Hall d’entrée de Méduse)
In the woods located between the river, the city, the railroad and the cemetery, the four artists gather to carry out various interventions and gestures on the land. Slipping into costumes, masks and snowshoes, three of them break off into the underbrush, looking to collect discarded litter, regrouping later to clean their findings together. At the very end of the performance, they make their way back to the fourth artist, who has pitched flags and sowed plants on the land. The record of this spontaneous and communal performance gives us a look behind the curtain, at how the artists managed to come together within the tapestry of their different practices.
Vertige et Les sept feu, Anne-Marie Bouchard and Manon Sioui, in collaboration with France Gros-Louis Morin (La Bande vidéo)
This video installation, split into two separate yet complementary parts, presents river and landscape that mirror each other, flowing in synchronous and asynchronous ways like two parallel horizons. The landscape, evoked by projections of plants and materials from the natural world, embraces and makes way for the river, flowing fabric meticulously adorned with beaded patterns in reference to the wampum from the Seven Fires prophecy. As such, La rivière des Sept feux becomes a gathering place – for the delicate corn husk figurines that populate the set, as well as for us, the viewers who observe the scene from the shore.
Ondulations : anatomie d’un désordre, Andrée Levesque Sioui, Erika Hagen- Veilleux et Jeffrey Poirier (Baie vitrée de Méduse)
Yahndawa’
Exhibition at the Musée
huron-wendat, Wendake
June 10th to September 10th 2023
The second iteration of the Yahndawa' collective exhibition was presented at the Huron-Wendat Museum in Wendake. On this occasion, we officially unveiled the new mural displayed at the CHSLD and the works exhibited at the Marcel Sioui Senior Citizens' Residence, resulting from the Portages mediation project that brought together artists Anne-Marie Bouchard, Manon Sioui and Andrée Levesque Sioui to work with a group of young people from the Maison des Jeunes de Wendake and seniors from the Résidence Marcel-Sioui.