Goethe Pop Up Seattle and Northwest Film Forum present a program of film and video work by Krista Belle Stewart, a Berlin-based artist and member of the Syilx Nation, in conjunction with Stewart’s exhibition Truth to Material currently on display at Goethe Pop Up. Co-presented with Henry Art Gallery.
This program is best viewed in conversation with Krista Belle Stewart's visual art. Your ticket also entitles you to a special tour of Krista Belle Stewart: Truth to Material, directly before the screening, with curator Martin Schwartz. To join, please arrive at Goethe Pop Up Seattle at 6 p.m. on February 9. The Pop Up is located one block away from NWFF, at 1424 11th Ave, Suite 101, in Chophouse Row. Please bring proof of vaccination and ID.
If you prefer to see the program at NWFF, please register to attend IN-PERSON.
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
- Year2018
- Runtime23 minutes
- DirectorKrista Belle Stewart
Goethe Pop Up Seattle and Northwest Film Forum present a program of film and video work by Krista Belle Stewart, a Berlin-based artist and member of the Syilx Nation, in conjunction with Stewart’s exhibition Truth to Material currently on display at Goethe Pop Up. Co-presented with Henry Art Gallery.
This program is best viewed in conversation with Krista Belle Stewart's visual art. Your ticket also entitles you to a special tour of Krista Belle Stewart: Truth to Material, directly before the screening, with curator Martin Schwartz. To join, please arrive at Goethe Pop Up Seattle at 6 p.m. on February 9. The Pop Up is located one block away from NWFF, at 1424 11th Ave, Suite 101, in Chophouse Row. Please bring proof of vaccination and ID.
If you prefer to see the program at NWFF, please register to attend IN-PERSON.
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
- Year2018
- Runtime23 minutes
- DirectorKrista Belle Stewart
