KATHERINE TAKPANNIE: Every Now and Then I Get a Feeling
February 20 – April 4, 2026
SAW Art Centre, 67 Nicholas Street, Ottawa, ON
Curated by Jason St. Laurent
We are delighted to share that Katherine Takpannie’s survey exhibition titled Every Now and Then I Get a Feeling, opens at SAW artist centre on February 20th. Learn more about the exhibition here.
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Exhibition Statement written by curator Jason St. Laurent:
Every Now and Then I Get a Feeling is the first major survey exhibition of Katherine Takpannie’s photography, bringing together key works spanning two decades of her practice, including her most recent series, Urban Inuk, produced entirely in Ottawa with members of the local Inuit community.
Katherine Takpannie has emerged as a defining voice of her generation, working both behind and in front of the camera to assert authorship over representations of contemporary Inuit life. Moving between documentation and self-performance, her practice juxtaposes images of urban Inuit experience in the South with striking self-portraits and landscape photography made in the North. In these works, her body becomes a site of encounter—situated within, rather than set against, the land—foregrounding questions of belonging, embodiment and self-determination within the inherited and lived territories of her family and ancestors.
Drawing on Inuit knowledge systems, Takpannie references creation stories that predate colonization, in which living beings are believed to emerge from the niaquqtaak (hummocks) of the earth. These stories position women as inseparable from the land and as givers of life, from which emerges a responsibility to protect both women and the environment. In dialogue with this worldview, and in light of research demonstrating how the climate crisis exacerbates gender-based violence, Takpannie’s work calls for collective stewardship of the land—insisting that women be treated with the same care, respect and responsibility.
Throughout her artistic career, Takpannie has often interwoven her practice with activist projects that reflect these concerns, bringing attention to some of the most urgent social issues affecting Indigenous communities in Canada, including missing and murdered Indigenous women and the ongoing youth suicide crisis. Among these, the series Our Women and Girls Are Sacred (2016–2020) stands out: in several photographs, Takpannie ignites flares of red smoke in natural settings, creating private, ephemeral monuments to missing and murdered women, including her friend and major artistic influence, the late Inuk artist Annie Pootoogook. In another work, a photograph of Takpannie’s brother, set against a gritty urban landscape, captures a moment that is at once hopeful and forward-looking. In light of his death by suicide in 2020, the title of the 2017 work, Return if Possible, takes on especially poignant resonance.
In the SAW project room, the exhibition includes the feature documentary Inuuvunga – I Am Inuk, I Am Alive, featuring documentary footage created by Nunavik teenagers, who come of age within a rapidly changing cultural landscape. The film, produced by the National Film Board of Canada in 2004, echoes many of the themes explored throughout Katherine Takpannie’s survey exhibition. In the SAW North Lobby, SAW Nordic Lab presents eight self-portraits by artists participating in the NEXT Emerging Indigenous Makers Program, created under the mentorship of Nordic Lab Screenprinting Studio Director Michael Peterson and Paris-based photo muralist Hugues Anhès, who completed an artist residency at SAW in fall 2025 as part of the SAW Art + Protest Initiative.
As Ottawa continues to establish itself as a major centre for Indigenous art and culture, Katherine Takpannie has emerged among a celebrated group of contemporary Indigenous photographers, including Meryl McMaster, Barry Pottle, Jeff Thomas and Rosalie Favell. Every Now and Then I Get a Feeling offers a timely opportunity to encounter Takpannie’s distinctive body of work. Through her photography, she seeks to shift perspectives, foster empathy and influence societal change, moving visitors from passive viewing toward active engagement.
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Image details: Katherine Takpannie, Amaama, 2023, archival pigment ink print.