Visual Arts Open Lecture Series: Tania Willard

Tania Willard, photo by Billie Gabriel Photography.

Join us for an afternoon Visual Arts lecture with Tania Willard, a mixed Secwépemc and settler artist whose research intersects with land-based art practices.

Tania Willard’s research cites Indigenous land as a source of aesthetic knowledge from a specific Secwépemc worldview. This lecture will build on Willard’s research in Indigenous language, land, and art through ideas of “site/ation”. ‘Site/ation describes the ways that land, as a basis for Indigenous knowledge, can be a site of knowledge production and knowledge transfer equal to the value of academic text-based citations. It critiques Western approaches to Land and Eco Art that neglect the injustice of colonial land dispossession.

Drawing on the work of various Indigenous scholars, and organizations like the Dechinta Centre for Land and Technology in the Northwest Territories, Willard argues for the importance of land-based knowledges, bringing these resurgent Indigenous concepts into play with resurgent Indigenous art practices. Presented as an Open Lecture in the On Other Archives visual arts residency, Willard aims to contribute to a decolonial poesis of land.

This event is part of the Visual Arts Open Lecture Series, which presents talks by leading Canadian and international artists, curators, and academics. Tania Willard is in Banff as faculty of the Visual Arts residency On Other Archives, which invites artists to think critically about the archive as a method or '"technology" for re-storying social and cultural narratives.

Visual Arts is supported by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Program.