Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival - She Has Something To Say

May 1, 2021 – June 12, 2021

Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival

She Has Something to Say
Olga Korper Gallery

May 1 – June 12, 2021

Bringing together works by Lois Andison, Barbara Steinman, and Katherine Takpannie, She Has Something to Say celebrates the power of women’s voices, underscoring the global need for awareness, advocacy, and change on various fronts.

With an imposing yet graceful presence, Montréal-based Barbara Steinman’s oversized diptych L’Ecoute II (1998/2021) opens the exhibition. Depicting the mighty force yet graceful touch of androgynous hands, the work alludes to the biases and limitations imposed on women. In the adjoining series Birds of the Air: After Eadweard Muybridge (2008), silhouetted birds flap entwined wings, wresting themselves from the constraints that bind them in order to take flight.

Toronto-based Lois Andison’s video installation threading water (2014) draws the viewer in with the sound of stirring water. Dancing in the open lake like a synchronized swimmer, a solitary figure maneuvers an oversized object reminiscent of a barbershop comb. As the performance continues the dancer tires, the physicality of her strokes taking its toll and highlighting the emotional plight of women in debunking the notion of a gender-neutral world.

Two series by Ottawa-based Inuk artist Katherine Takpannie speak to the underlying social, economic, cultural, institutional, and historical causes contributing to the ongoing violence against and associated vulnerability of Indigenous communities. In Our Women and Girls are Sacred (2016–18), theatrical plumes of red smoke invoke the tragedy of murdered and missing Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people in Canada. The series All Eyes on Mi’Kma’Ki (Ma Myriah) (2020) confronts inadequate governmental action regarding fundamental water rights.

Bringing these three distinct voices into conversation, She Has Something To Say speaks to complex, intersectional, and ongoing feminist struggles within the contemporary cultural landscape, and highlights the critical role of artists in making them visible and inciting change.