Screening

(2015. HD video, stereo, colour, 38’57”)

In Seraphine, Seraphine, Krista Belle Stewart interrogates and expands the public record of the artist’s mother, Seraphine Stewart, British Columbia’s first Indigenous public health nurse. Next to and juxtaposed with a generally sympathetic but fictionalized 1967 CBC docu-drama on Seraphine Stewart, the film shows filmed testimony Seraphine Stewart gave in 2013 to a Vancouver Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing. The CBC film gives a version of the elder Stewart’s story in a scripted voiceover, while in her testimony, she narrates aspects of her own experience, from her childhood partly spent in residential schooling on, unmediated by outsiders. Bringing these ways of telling into contact and conflict, in this film work, Krista Belle Stewart underlines issues of agency and authenticity in representations of her family, and challenges audiences to recognize and counteract colonial structures in archival and media practices.

Additional Resources:

International Studio & Curatorial Program: CONCRETE TRUTH: ART AND THE DOCUMENTARY

Haus der Kulturen der Welt: Bodies of Fact: The Archive from Witness to Voice

Presentation

(2018. HD video, stereo, colour, 23’)

** Please note that this presentation of Potato Gardens Band takes place in conversation with Krista Belle Stewart’s artistic work, including the iteration of Truth to Material currently installed at Goethe Pop Up Seattle. **

“Krista Belle Stewart’s ongoing project Potato Gardens Band has evoked critical questions regarding the nature of cultural ownership, archives, and truth itself. Each of the three iterations in this series, have incorporated the singing voice of Stewart’s great-grandmother, which was in 1918 recorded on wax cylinders by the anthropologist James Alexander Teit.  Along with this ancestral voice, came jaw harp and tin whistle music, performed by the elder woman’s group, the ‘Potato Gardens Band.’ Over consecutive iterations, Stewart and her collaborators have widened the scope of the complex ancestral dialogue enabled by those recordings. The piece has thus become a fluctuating incantation, of intersecting personal, familial, and cultural memories.

“The final iteration of Potato Gardens Band, video from which is shown in this presentation, took place in 2018 between Stewart’s Spaxomin land and Vancouver’s 221A gallery. Asked to stage a performance, Stewart transmitted a live feed, from her phone, of a speaker system playing her great-grandmother’s recording, on her ancestral land. This performance expressed kinship between individual and ancestral pasts. But crucially, it also constituted a gesture of refusal, directed at the expectation that one’s history and trauma be reified into a cultural commodity, within the neo-colonial industry. The piece’s power lies in this equivocal negation.” (From the artist’s website)

Additional Resources:

ArtPapers: Inaudibility: Krista Belle Stewart’s Sonic Repatriation of Knowledge

Hessel Museum of Art: this is the no thing that we are