INUA Sneak Peek

Dr. Heather Igloliorte is an Inuk from Nunatsiavut. She is an Assistant Professor and University Research Chair in Indigenous Art History and Community Engagement at Concordia University in Montreal, and an independent curator of Inuit and other Indigenous arts. Heather’s teaching and research interests center on Inuit and other Indigenous visual and material culture, circumpolar art studies, performance and media art, the global exhibition of Indigenous arts and culture, and issues of colonization, sovereignty, resistance and resurgence. Some of her recent publications related to this work include the catalogues SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut (2017) and Inuit Art. The Brousseau Collection (2016) and essays in Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (2014); Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism (2012); Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 3 (2012); Curating Difficult Knowledge (2011); and Inuit Modern (2010).

Igloliorte has been a curator for twelve years. Her recent exhibitions include co-directing the circumpolar night festival iNuit Blanche (2016),​ and curating SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut ​(touring 2016-2019), the permanent Inuit sculpture exhibition Ilippunga at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec (2016), Decolonize Me (Ottawa Art Gallery, 2011-2015), and “we were so far away”: The Inuit Experience of Residential Schools (Legacy of Hope Foundation, 2009 – ongoing). Igloliorte previously served as an Executive Member of the Board of Directors for the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective (2005 – 2011) and on the Indigenous Advisory Council of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (2013-2016). She currently serves on the Editorial Advisory Committee for Inuit Art Quarterly, on the Board of Directors for North America’s largest Indigenous art historical association, the Native North American Art Studies Association, and the Faculty Council of the Otsego Institute for Native American Art History at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

Asinnajaq is an Inuk filmmaker and visual artist from Nunavik. She grew up in Montreal, and attended NSCAD University in Halifax, earning a BFA in 2015. She has spent two summers traveling throughout Inuit Nunangat as a trainee aboard the Lyubov Orlova. In August 2016, she co-curated a three-evening film festival of Inuit films, games and country food with co-curator Stephen Agluvak Puskas. Asinnajaq’s work moves to honor the past, and think towards the future. As part of Toronto’s imagineNATIVE 2017, Asinnajaq curated a screening of films titled Channel 51 Igloolik that provided a retrospective of 30 years of video art making by Isuma, Arnait, and Artcirq. Assinajaq’s film Three Thousand is featured in the exhibition.

Kablusiak is a multi-disciplinary Inuk artist based in Calgary, born in Yellowknife, and raised in Edmonton. They hold a BFA in Drawing from the Alberta University of the Arts and completed the Indigenous Curatorial Research Practicum at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in the summer of 2018. They were awarded the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Young Artist Prize (2017) and the Primary Colours Emerging Artist Award (2018). Kablusiak uses art and humour as a coping mechanism to address cultural displacement. The light-hearted nature of their practice extends gestures of empathy and solidarity; these interests invite a reconsideration of the perceptions of contemporary Indigeneity. Kablusiak is currently a board member at Stride Gallery (2016-present).

Krista Ulujuk Zawadski is the Curator of Inuit Art for the Department of Culture and Heritage, Government of Nunavut. She is responsible for overseeing the loan of the government’s extensive art collection to the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG) for cataloguing and documentation. The collection will be prominently displayed at the WAG’s Inuit Art Centre before returning to Nunavut in the future. Through this initiative, Zawadski is currently working on an exhibition project on the art of Baker Lake and has organized arts events and consultation sessions with Inuit artists.

Raised in Chesterfield Inlet, she currently calls Rankin Inlet her home. She has recently completed a master’s degree in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Aside from her education and training at UBC, she has received museum training from Inuit Heritage Trust and the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.