Christi Belcourt

In Michif (Métis) artist Christi Belcourt’s painting The Fish are Fasting for Knowledge from the Stars, 2018, six northern freshwater fish watch the dance of the Milky Way through an abandoned ice fishing hole. According to Isaac Murdoch, Anishinaabe knowledge keeper and Belcourt’s frequent collaborator, fish are known to “stargaze and look through B’gonegiizhik [the great hole in the sky] to see the future.” “Uprising,” Belcourt’s mid-career retrospective here, presents a mercurial sense of scale, such that the glowing spots on the side of the pike rhyme with the galactic blowout overhead. On

Jamilah Sabur, Tidal Locking, 2019, video, color, sound, 5 minutes.

picks May 22, 2020

Open Justice

A blue whale’s song sweeps across the Andean plateau in Malena Szlam’s ALTIPLANO, 2018, constructed with shivering superimposed layers of 35-mm film that resemble a defective stereograph. Szlam traces the ridges of the ancestral lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita, which are now cleaved into Chile and Argentina and mined for saltpeter and nitrite. The film is transporting and, like the online exhibition it belongs to, “Open Justice” (commissioned by Denise Ferreira da Silva and curated by Ronald Rose-Antoinette), it leaves nothing settled.

Scrolling down the site, a viewer sees