Pasapkedjinawong: La rivière qui passe entre les rochers—the river that passes through the rocks

Pasapkedjinawong presents artists from across Turtle Island and the Great Ocean who examine how languages survive, adapt, exceed, or resist frameworks of colonial violence and repression. Considering languages and cultures as living systems in the manner of rivers and other bodies of water, this exhibition looks closely at what happens when the customary flow of a language is interrupted, diverted, or impeded by an outside force. Our languages adapt, slow to a trickle, leave dry paths carved in the land that are waiting for new rainfalls, or flow ever strong through new or neighbouring channels; and the perseverance of these waters continues to feed and sustain the peoples and cultures that rely on them.

The artists in Pasapkedjinawong represent this continuing lifeforce, articulating renewed architectures of language and thought fed by new and ancestral ways of knowing and viewing the world. Employing sound, silence, image, body, fibre and tactility, they each map the multiple currents that flow past the seemingly monolithic domains of colonial languages to expand our imagination and understanding of unfurling histories and futures of culture and communication on this Planet.