LUMINOCITY
Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke
Shiraz Bayjoo
Blaine Campbell
Carolina Caycedo
Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman
Luciana Freire D'Anunciação
Marja Helander
Cheyenne Rain LeGrande
Beric Manywounds
Natalie Purschwitz
Ahilapalapa Rands
Genevieve Robertson
October 14 to 21, 2023
Curated by Emily Dundas Oke and Charo Neville
Luminocity, a week-long outdoor video art exhibition, returns to the unceded and unsurrendered lands of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc within Secwepemcúl’ecw this fall. Dynamic video projections and immersive light experiences will fill the grass field at Riverside Park and transform the exterior of the Kamloops Art Gallery. With projects that range from narrative storytelling to experimental film and animation, accompanied by nightly tours in the Riverside Park, Luminocity offers a portal to urban transformation and insightful encounters for all ages.
Through the vibrant and compelling work of 12 artists and collaborators from East Africa, Northern Europe, the Pacific Rim, South America, and Turtle Island, Luminocity 2023 shares diverse sensibilities of place, and underscores the interdependence between people and the natural world. This iteration of Luminocity transports us to sites of contestation, with embodied and performative practices offering intimacy, connection, and refusal. The selection of videos considers the global impacts of the tightly wound relationship between capitalism and colonization on the natural environment and the migratory movements of people. Although the effects of capitalism and colonization are experienced globally as an enmeshed web of histories, local contexts retain a specificity of ancestral medicine, customs, and storytelling.
The selected videos explore concepts of continuation and transformation, with water as a central guiding element. As an essential life-giving force, water is also a resource fraught with competing demands as it provides a vital source of nourishment, electricity, and transportation, and allows for movement between and around land. It is medicine, and yet, our waterways have been instrumentalized and targeted through imperial pursuits.
Interconnected narratives speak to the histories of transit that bridge vast realms – from Mauritius in East Africa to Sápmi in Northern Europe. Extensive passages across and within waterways have been marked by historic and ongoing displacement. The artworks gathered for Luminocity demonstrate the entanglement of embodied practices within these histories, and the necessity of culture and artistic customs in asserting sovereignty. Imbued with sublime cinematography, mesmerizing storytelling, and energetic beats, many of the videos bear witness to the resulting loss of culture and language due to colonial assertions on land and water and highlight the resilience of bodies and cultural tradition in the face of destructive forces.
Indigenous voices are amplified to share ways of knowing that honour the natural and spirit worlds. Assertions of presence are made visible though dance, music, and ceremony. The stories shared connect divergent art practices to create a dialogue around settler and Indigenous relations and diasporic experience. Affirmations of living and oral cultures are shared through stunning choreographies and soundscapes. As our world is shaped by transit and immense networks of cultural exchange across waterways, this exhibition is intended to transport audiences.
Luminocity, 2018. Photo: Devon Lindsey.
E V E N T S // 2 0 2 3
I N T H E N E W S
L O C A T I O N S // 2 0 2 3
A R T I S T S // 2 0 2 3
Generously sponsored by GK Sound and the City of Kamloops.