Divya Mehra's Afterlife of Colonialism, a reimagining of Power. The Winnipeg artist is one of the five finalists for this year’s Sobey Art Award, the $100,000 annual prize for an emerging artist that will be presented Nov. 16.National Gallery of Canada
A sacred figure of the goddess Annapurna was welcomed home to India last year after Winnipeg artist Divya Mehra discovered records at Regina’s MacKenzie Art Gallery showing the small statue had been stolen from a shrine on the Ganges. Meanwhile Mehra, like Indiana Jones snatching the idol in Raiders of the Lost Ark, replaced the stolen sculpture with a bag of sand, now carefully tucked into the museum storage case where the figure once lay.
Mehra is one of the five finalists for this year’s Sobey Art Award, the $100,000 annual prize for an emerging artist that will be presented Nov. 16. (The finalists represent five regions, and the four runners-up receive $25,000 each.) The exhibition of their work now showing at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa includes a mural-sized photograph of Mehra’s little sandbag sitting in the MacKenzie’s storage.
Mehra also contributes a letter to the new King Charles III suggesting he return the Koh-i-Noor diamond to India – it was taken by the British from a 13-year-old maharajah in 1849 – and a sandbag that might replace the giant gem. That bit of repatriation may prove more complicated.
You can see Mehra’s successful Annapurna project as an act of museology, of politics, or of art, but wherever you position it, it proved both practical and potent: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi may now take all the credit, but it was due to her intervention that something concrete happened.
Stanley Février's Installation view.National Gallery of Canada
That’s a rare event in an artistic career. We don’t demand that art change the world, only that it reflect it – or perhaps transcend it. Most of the work in this exhibition is a retort to colonialism and it may sway minds or provoke thoughts, but it is unlikely to result in tangible acts of decolonization. So why make it? These artists, so certain of their themes, seem uncertain of the answer.
Stanley Février is a Quebec artist and critic of the institutional racism of Canada’s museums and public galleries. His Sobey work includes photographs of a performance he organized in which figures shrouded in black body suits surrounded the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal to protest against the lack of artists of colour in its collection, and then ran the museum’s annual reports through papers shredders. Here the paper shredders are lined up like a little graveyard, while votive candles bearing the logos of Canada’s museums sit in reverential rows. Apparently, we museum lovers are worshipping a dead thing.
Krystle Silverfox's All That Glitters is Not Gold.National Gallery of Canada
At least Février, like Mehra, has a wicked sense of humour. Krystle Silverfox is a Vancouver artist whose family comes from the Selkirk First Nation in the Yukon and whose largest installation for the Sobey show is a wall-hanging that features the unravelling of a Hudson Bay blanket, symbol of the historical exploitation of Indigenous people. If only this issue was as easy to untangle in the outside world as it is to depict on a gallery wall.
Silverfox also contributes a series of abstract photographs that feature unidentifiable black swooshes or valleys that she calls Landmarks. More mysterious, these are more engaging than her sculptural combinations of the blankets with copper pennies or copper wire, a reference to the mines that have scoured the Yukon. Perhaps the landmarks are also scars on the landscape; their obliqueness demands their slow consideration not as statement but as art.
Tyshan Wright's Installation view.National Gallery of Canada
Halifax artist Tyshan Wright is a descendant of the Jamaican Maroons, who escaped slavery and fought the British to live freely on that island. Coincidentally he wound up in the one place in Canada with a piece of that history: In the 18th century, 549 Maroons were transported to Halifax by the British, where they resisted assimilation before eventually settling in Sierra Leone. Wright faithfully recreates traditional Maroon drums, horns and stools, in another bid to rewind history.
Because these objects are so precisely detailed and set aside in their own room with a video of Wright drumming, his work offers one of the few occasions in this show where the viewer is encouraged to contemplate rather than merely agree. (To be fair, contemplation of any of this art is made particularly difficult by Mehra’s other contribution, a Taj Mahal bouncy castle that requires a loud blower to keep it inflated.)
Azza El Siddique's Measure of One.National Gallery of Canada
In this often didactic company, the odd one out is Toronto artist Azza El Siddique, represented by her large installation Measure of One, a metal scaffolding with troughs of water and a rack of grey clay pots. The piece suggests both antiquity and contemporaneity, creating an almost sacred enclosure that only hints at the presence of the steel maker and the potter. El Siddique researches ancient Nubian and Egyptian guides to the afterlife but whether you know that or not, there is a sense of uneasy quest in her work as the viewer tries to place themselves in this sparse architecture.
Despite the gaudy colours of Mehra’s bouncy castle or the painstaking craft of Wright’s Maroon reproductions, these artists and their research-driven approaches are typical of contemporary art where form seems subservient to content. Yet historically it’s the dynamic relationship between the two that makes art interesting: The vessel is as important as the elixir. It’s worth remembering that the Sobey Art Award is a prize for emerging artists. Finer form may yet blossom from a generation that has content all figured out.
The Sobey Art Award exhibition continues to March 12 at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.