The interdisciplinary practice of Niap (also known as Nancy Saunders) goes beyond the scope of painting without losing sight of the symbolic force of this mode of expression as an \u201copen window through which history can be observed.\u201d The Montr\u00e9al-based, Kuujjuaq-born Inuk artist is interested not only in the tensions between history and contemporaneity but also in the \u201czones of contact\u201d that they engender. Dialogue is central to her work; the back-and-forths between disciplines, publics, cultures, and temporalities colour the entirety of her thoroughly contemporary practice. Avoiding the pitfalls of a polarizing or victimist critique, Niap takes a benevolent approach to rebuilding the connections between past and future, often overturning in a single work any notions of artistic tradition or modernity, Indigenous or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her recent projects, the series Uncategory Land<\/em> (2019) and Untitled<\/em> (2019), combine performance and painting in works that challenge, from within, the northern landscape as motif or passive object. Born of a collaboration between Niap and non-Indigenous photographer Robert Fr\u00e9chette, the series connects the restraint of the black-and-white photographs with the vibrancy of the Nunavimmiuq\u2019s pictorial touch. Projected, sprayed, or applied directly onto the prints, the abstract, resolutely expressionist painting invites reflection on the subjugating power of regimes of visibility \u2014 regimes imposed by, among others, the colonialist, patriarchal, and extractivist visions of Canadian landscape painters, who created a terra nullius<\/em> of both the northern landscapes and territories and the bodies of the people who inhabit them. The minimalist geometric motifs visible in certain works, such as Uncategory 14 Land<\/em> (2019), thus allude to tattooing, a recurrent motif in Niap\u2019s works and a sacred practice for members of numerous Indigenous communities and nations, who see it as a means of connecting with the land and affirming their own individual identities. More than seductive, the paintings complicate the often romantic and ingenuous view of the North as an untouchable space-time, the drippings, scratchings, and trails of neon colour thwart- ing our scopic\u2014and colonialist\u2014desire for purity. Through this performative pictorial reappropriation of territory, Niap reconciles different peoples and different temporalities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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