Mootookakio'ssin: Creating in Space Time

This exhibition explores creating in relationship to historical cultural material that is housed in British museums and features physical and digital artwork by uLethbridge students as well as artists living in the UK and in Ghana. Expanding from the Mootookakio’ssin research project, the exhibition spans the gap in space and time between contemporary artists and historical cultural material that is separated from homelands. Mootookakio’ssin: Creating in Spacetime bridges temporal gaps between historical cultural material housed in museums and living contemporary artists. For the past few years, Blackfoot Elders, artists, scholars, and museum professionals living on Blackfoot Territory and in Britain have been working together, talking, and thinking about material culture, cultural capital, power, and estrangement. We’ve visited with historical cultural material in museum collections, survived the pandemic, jumped time zones, and calibrated calendars to make connections. Always guided by the Blackfoot principle that we have a responsibility to share and to care for knowledge, teaching and learning is at the core of our work. Mootookakio’ssin: Creating in Spacetime is an exhibition as process, an exhibition that experiments with what an art gallery can be, and whom it serves. Students enrolled in Indigenous Art Studio (Fall 2024) at ULethbridge created their works in the gallery space, transforming the gallery into a Collective Studio. Over several weeks of discussion, self-reflection, study, and consultation, Indigenous Art Studio students chose projects that were personally meaningful to them. Critique of museum practices, healing from generational trauma, reimagining of culturally important stories and materials, the search for comfort and interactivity in the art gallery: these among others are topics which the Indigenous Art Studio classroom has taken on in this exhibition. While these themes are not always easy to engage with, it is the hope that by creating in spacetime around these stories, we can bring knowledge and healing to our many communities. Students expanded their project ideas from this with the support of the ULethbridge Art Gallery staff and visiting artist Louisa Minkin. We were open to the public as we created the exhibition and people were invited to drop by and visit with the artists. This is an exhibition as conversation. Minkin brought artworks from students at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London who have been working together on the Prisoners of Love project. Prisoners of Love: Affect, containment and alternative futures aims to connect UK museum collection items with their trans-national home peoples and bring emerging artists from diasporic communities in the UK, curators and researchers into conversation, to work responsively with complex histories and material practices. We have been working with the Economic Botany Collection and the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, Horniman Museum and Gardens and Compound 13 Lab in Mumbai, India; Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and the Department of Archaeology at the University of Ghana in Accra; Hastings Museum and Art Gallery and the Mootookakio’ssin project based on Blackfoot homelands at the University of Lethbridge. The travelling works shown here were put together during OST, our project residency in a derelict bank in the heart of the City of London this September. Please be advised that the works in this exhibit touch upon subjects which visitors may find upsetting, and may bring up unexpected feelings, memories, and responses. While the works are intended to encourage reflection and conversation, it is important for visitors to be mindful of their own preparation to engage with topics having to do with the lasting effects of colonialism on Indigenous communities around the world, past and present