Lara Kramer Them Voices, performance view, Festival TransAmériques, Espace Libre, Montréal, 2022.
Photo: Alex Côté, courtesy of the artist

Dreaming Undreamt Dreams with Lara Kramer

Joëlle Dubé

Facebook Tweet LinkedIn Email

In her 75-minute performance Eating bones and Licking bread (2020), Lara Kramer returns to a recurring dream that has periodically visited her since childhood: she is standing in a long line waiting to enter a huge dome-like glass house. Soldiers filter who can get in. The dream is a thicket of nostalgia, scarcity, and otherworldliness, and basking in those—at times contradictory—impressions is the character that Kramer embodies. The dome dream is temporarily blurry, overlapping, ambiguous.

For Kramer, a multidisciplinary artist of mixed Oji-Cree and settler ancestry, the dream reads as a future memory that requires our collective attention. Interested in the paradoxical way that colonialism maintains its subjects in a constant state of hunger, all the while consuming both bodies and lands, Kramer adopts the posture of an anachronistic pathfinder, at once past, present, and future, operating in the strange temporal realm of dreams.

Facebook Tweet LinkedIn Email

This content is available with a Digital or Premium subscription only. Subscribe to read the full text and access all our Features, Off-Features, Portfolios, and Columns!

Subscribe (starting at $20)

Already have a Digital or Premium subscription?

Don’t want to subscribe? Additional content is available with an Esse account. It’s free and no purchase will ever be required. Create an account or log in:

My Account