In four films (or videos), a photographic series and an audio recording, the exhibition Sediment dusts off, with relevance and without aggressiveness, a good number of archives. And reviews, beyond the exercise, the way of telling the story of humanity.
The proposal by curator Denise Ryner, ex-director of Or Gallery, an artist-run center in Vancouver, is part of the current baptized, depending on the context, decolonization, decentralization, deinstitutionalization. We can say that the exhibition Sediment. Archives as a fragmentary basis — full title of this Leonard Bina Ellen Gallery exclusive — projects a future colored by a better understanding of the past.
The commissioner casts a wide net. Between letters from Toussaint Louverture, leader of the struggle for Haiti’s independence, and the testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Seraphine Stewart, the first indigenous nurse in a public establishment, Sediment unearths multiple layers of history. And adds others, absent from the dominant discourses.
One could read the works from an accusatory angle. Because, of course, France and its principles of freedom and equality, visible on the stationery used by Louverture and filmed by Louis Henderson in bring Breath to the Death of Rocks (2018), are a prime target. Canada and its supposed pluralist modernity are, themselves, in Seraphina, Seraphina (2014), video by Krista Belle Stewart. The British Empire is targeted by Pamila Matharu in INDEX (SOME OF ALL PARTS)video of 2022, the colonial past of Portugal by Filipa César in the film SpellReel (2017).
The non-belligerent nature of the exhibition calls for another reading. Including footage shot before the independence of Guinea-Bissau (1973), SpellReel (which will be translated as “deciphering a reel”) is based on a revolutionary ideal with noble intentions. To free from fear, you have to free from ignorance, says Amilcar Cabral, a politician at the time.
One hand in the documentary, the other in the essay, Filipa César juxtaposes her own images and those of reels that survived the destruction. At the heart of the story, a traveling cinema travels through Guinea-Bissau and shows old films in the presence of their authors. Art takes on a role not of subversion, but of education. Propaganda? Rather, the commissioner speaks in her text of an “essential tool for survival”. Open debate.
A similar conversation, between black and white images of yesterday (often silent) and those in color and sound of the artist, takes place in Seraphina, Seraphina. In both works, living memory and oral transmission lead to an interpretation, if not different from the story, more precise, richer. The polished portrait that the CBC offered in 1967 of the said Seraphine appears otherwise incomplete.
Sediment is not a bulldozer exhibition that blows everything up. Denise Ryner, through her geological metaphor, suggests that, when we rely on a single way of telling, layers of archives accumulate without our knowing it. Orality, personal objects and family traditions form these archives, witnesses of “a presence, a rootedness and a resistance”.
Photos and recordings of Token (2018-2019), by Sandra Brewster, evokes the efforts of Caribbean populations to preserve traces of their past during their migration. In performance on March 11, Justine Chambers will bring to life the outfits and dances cherished by women like her grandmother. But the highlight of the exhibition is to put on the account of Pamila Matharu. The documents vintage (advertisements, press clippings, etc.) — the artist’s collection — which scroll silently through INDEX…compose fragments of an immigration story. The selective memory of the public will retain only a part of it and it will not be more serious.
With long works (up to 96 minutes for one of them) and cinema seats, the exhibition has a lot to say. But we can be content to leave only with fragments, provided that we do not claim to know the totality of the story.