Celebrated Artist Rebecca Belmore Awarded Audain Prize for the Visual Arts

Renowned multidisciplinary artist Rebecca Belmore is the 2024 recipient of the Audain Prize for the Visual Arts.

The legendary figure is recognized internationally for her performance, photo and site-specific installation work.

“For the press release, I was asked to come up with a quote that kind of spoke about my feelings about art,” Rebecca told the audience at the award ceremony. “So, I thought about it over coffee a couple days ago, and I wrote, ‘We who work in the fields of art believe in its greatness.’ And I think today, in the world that we inhabit together, it’s becoming more and more difficult to believe. So, it’s only through surrounding yourself with likeminded people, and people who work in the fields with you, that we can go back to believing again when we wake up the next day.”

A member of the Lac Seul First Nation (Anishinaabe), Rebecca would become the first Indigenous woman to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2005. Her estimable record of international exhibition includes participation in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, the 2019 Istanbul Biennial and documenta 14 (2017). Her equally impressive solo exhibition record includes recent shows at Griffith University in Australia, the Audain Art Museum in BC and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

Her previous awards include the 2014 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation Viva Award, the Hnatyshyn Visual Arts Award in 2009, the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2013 and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize in 2016.

In 2018, Rebecca received an honorary doctorate from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU).

Selected by an independent panel of jurors, the annual Audain Prize celebrates outstanding artistic achievement and is administered by the Audain Art Museum. Past recipients include numerous ECU community members such as James Hart (Hon. Doc. 2004), Stan Douglas (Alum 1982), Susan Point (Hon. Doc. 2008), Ian Wallace (Hon. Doc. 2007) and Carole Itter (Hon. Doc. 2024).

Also announced at the September ceremony were the annual Audain Travel Award winners. The award provides a $7,500 travel grant to each of five students enrolled in university-level visual arts programs. Fourth-year ECU Visual Arts student Sun-Nam Manuel was among the recipients.

The 2024 Audain Prize was presented by Scott Watson, director emeritus and research fellow at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery and head of this year’s Audain jury. Scott noted Rebecca’s decades-long track record of creating “works that astonish with their beauty and rigour, touch deeply with their passion and intelligence, and always move us with their great courage.

“Rebecca has moved spectacularly in the new world,” he continued. “She is one of not just Canada’s, but her generation’s most important artists … Hers is a star that is still ascending.”

Rebecca’s powerful artwork has unflinchingly and consistently addressed the social, personal and political realities of Indigenous experience with characteristic nuance, ferocity and depth. The Oka Crisis, revelations around the Saskatoon police’s horrific ‘Starlight Tours,’ Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and the intersection of education, community, family, Indigeneity, trauma and racism have all figured into Rebecca’s oeuvre.

For instance, a recent work commissioned by The Polygon Gallery in collaboration with the Burrard Arts Foundation titled Hacer Memoria (“try to remember”) refers to an apology delivered by Pope Francis during a 2022 visit to Maskwacis, AB, in acknowledgment of the Catholic Church’s role in perpetuating the residential school system.

In co-opting the Pope’s phrasing, Hacer Memoria emphasizes the unfinishedness of the story of colonization. Meanwhile, Rebecca’s inclusion (on the tarps themselves) of the word “hereafter,” aside from its overt suggestion of a colonial, Christian eternity, may also be read as “here, after,” evoking a future defined by Indigenous resilience and grit.

In 2019, Rebecca was the subject of a CBC arts program exploring her decades of work. During a wide-ranging interview, she reflects on the expansive purview of her practice, including how she got her start and found her voice.

“Is your art trying to change the world?” host Sean O’Neill asks her partway through the conversation.

“No,” she responds. “Just trying to make sense of it.”