Redefining Worth in Museums and the Art World

The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia is pleased to present VALUE: Rebecca Belmore at the Museum of Anthropology, a solo exhibition featuring four different works that span the artist’s career.

Throughout the four decades of her artistic practice, Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore has created works responding to ongoing conditions of colonialism. Working in a range of media, Belmore’s objects and performances challenge the operations, structures and processes of the galleries, museums and other institutional structures in which they circulate. Her work provokes viewers, curators, collectors and museum workers to consider how we all live within a condition that commodifies cultural material, land, space and bodies.

The physical and social structures of museums, moreover, convey value through the simultaneous display and protection of objects: security guards, cameras, alarms and glass cases all transmit a sense of worth. Belmore’s work considers the colonial silencing, alienation and violence that are so often entangled in these modes of display, even as her work is exhibited within them.

The Museum of Anthropology, or MOA, in many ways and like many museums, shares its 19th-century visual-culture roots with retail modes of display. Rows of cases and drawers that make objects available for visual consumption serve as a compelling framework for a contemporary artist frequently concerned with an Indigenous experience of commodification under colonialism — and one whose work is often resistant to such modes of display. How, then, do we consider “value” in relation to Belmore’s work at the Museum of Anthropology, an institution committed to the preservation of cultural property, meaningfully centring community needs, and celebrating diverse ways of knowing the world?

VALUE includes four works situated as interventions dispersed across the museum’s existing displays. Each work emerged from specific situations, social structures and institutions and so carries its own history of commentary on value and the commodity within those origins. The works’ correspondences and discordances at MOA open the possibility of reconsidering what sort of value is being preserved and protected here.

I AM WORTH MORE THAN ONE MILLION DOLLARS TO MY PEOPLE (2010) carries all the complexities of Belmore’s career-long concern with the systems of value within which she operates. Belmore created this placard to be used in a performance protesting legal action that had been brought against her. On Labour Day weekend 2010, Belmore positioned the placard on the sidewalk outside the Vancouver Art Gallery, where it served as a backdrop of her performance. (The Vancouver Art Gallery was not involved in the legal action.)

The placard, though disposable in material and intention, was transformed in value when acquired by UBC’s Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery for its permanent collection immediately following the performance. As such, this work, now on loan to MOA for the exhibition, is encumbered with restrictions tied to its use and placement, and so appears in a protective case — a declaration that poses some significant questions. What is being valued in a protest sign? Is it now monetary value, or a relational one between institutions as asserted by Belmore, or the cultural value established by its role in the artist’s historic performance?

Wild, a four-poster bed and associated site-specific performances, was commissioned for the Grange, a historic 19th-century house that would become the first home of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. The work includes a bedcover fringed with long, black, human hair and a canopy trimmed with beaver pelts and more human hair. Fur trapping was vital to early colonial economies in North America, continuing well into the period during which the Grange was built. Human hair was also commodified under colonization: as an incentive to clear the land for European settlers, bounties were offered by colonial governments for the scalps of Indigenous people.

Displaying Wild at MOA, as in other institutions, comes with prestige entangled with troubled responsibility. Now set in a gallery dedicated to European ceramics — where wares from the 16th to 19th centuries tell of cultural exchange as well as histories of migration, faith and persecution — this disturbingly beautiful bed conjures the bloody reality of colonial capital.

Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother is a megaphone two metres wide by two metres long. The work was Belmore’s response to the 1990 Mohawk-led Kanehsatà:ke Resistance protesting the expansion of an Oka, Quebec, golf course that would encroach on sacred Mohawk lands, including a cemetery. Military and police forces suppressed the land defenders by preventing communication from inside the barricades reaching the outside. Belmore created the megaphone after this event, wanting to literally amplify voices addressing governments that are not listening.

For more than 30 years, Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother has lived a dual life as both a museum object and a tool to be borrowed by community to speak directly to the land. In doing so it bypasses institutions and social structures that have suppressed voices at Kanehsatà:ke and elsewhere. It continues to do this work.

In 2005, Rebecca Belmore was selected to represent Canada at the 51st Venice Biennale. The work she created, Fountain, is a waterfall screen onto which a video is projected. The video, filmed on Iona Beach not far from MOA (both on Musqueam land), shows Belmore walking away from a fire on a beach, struggling in the sea, and then emerging with a heavy pail as she heads toward the camera. She throws the contents of the pail at the camera, and rather than water, the liquid is blood. As the blood runs down the screen, the artist stands silently on the other side, holding our gaze.

For viewers, our moment of wonder at seeing a moving image on a screen of falling water turns to discomfort as the artist confronts us through a curtain of blood. In Belmore’s words, “the piece moves from fire to water to blood. My intent is to link our bodies to the essential elements necessary to life. To embrace a moment where we can acknowledge how we are all connected and implicated in history and in the world.”

In each of these works, Belmore is responding to a colonial condition: the commodification of Indigenous presence within the institutional frameworks in which she works. The works provoke viewers as well as institutions to contend with the colonial conditions of commodification, silencing and alienation of the systems through which art is circulated, valued and historicized. Belmore’s work resists easy containment within these systems while insisting on relational and embodied forms of value. The artist leaves us to consider our own place within the histories that surround us.

To learn more about the exhibition, visit the Museum of Anthropology at UBC’s website.