This exhibition is presented as part of Tending Land, a program marking the 40th anniversary of the Digital Arts Resource Centre (DARC), and bringing together several artists from around the world, whose works relate narratives about the ways in which land may be perceived, connected with, and cared for. The program honours the fact that questions concerning land and sovereignty are of particular significance in Canada, where traditional territories have been expropriated by the settler-colonial state, and historic treaties around Indigenous Peoples’ land rights were often reneged upon. The exhibition also draws links to the centrality of land in the struggles of many communities around the world, especially the global majority who have experienced colonialism in various guises, and who continue to endure its troubling aftermath today.

Autobiography of the Drowned* is an oral history of the Chakma Adivasi (indigenous) people from Bangladesh, performed as an online dialogue between Samari Chakma, in Sydney, Australia, and Naeem Mohaiemen, in Dhaka. The work raises questions about how the modern borders of formerly colonised nations have recreated patterns of oppression that entrapped Indigenous and minority groups, resulting in dispossession, persecution, and displacement from ancestral homelands. Capturing the story of Samari Chakma’s mother specifically, the performance speaks to the struggles of those who lost their land after the government dammed the Karnaphuli River at Kaptai in the early 1960s, flooding villages and farms. The format of the conversation, which is translated between the Chakma language and Bangla (the national language of Bangladesh), emphasises the narratives being related, urging the viewer to listen carefully to loss and pain experienced in the past, as well as the continued impact of these events on the community today. Created during the COVID-19 pandemic using a digital communication platform, the work not only suggests new ways of keeping stories alive even during times of isolation, but also points to the way in which dispersed members of disenfranchised communities, who have sought refuge in different parts of the world, become exiles left only with memories, at times with no prospects of ever returning home.

Tending Land is curated by Amin Alsaden.