Everybody sit down!: The Seal Feast – The moment the thawing harp seal reached Walker Court on June 13th, 2018 for the public opening of Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the air became electric. An inexplicable combination of excitement and trepidation gripped the crowd who edged in closer. “Sit down,” instructed Anishinaabekwe artist, Rebecca Belmore. “Everybody sit down,” echoed Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, a Kalaallit artist and performer and one of the curators of the exhibition. The crowd sat. Inuit and First Nations guests looked on in joy and reverence. Others were fixed with wonder. Within minutes Laakkuluk, along with Inuk artists Ruben Komangapik and Koomuatuk Curley (another member of the curatorial team) had removed the skin and flippers to reveal the deep red flesh of the seal meat. Working quickly, sushi boats filled with ulu-cut morsels circulated through the space. Inuit elders welcomed cultural sustenance and others remarked how good it tasted. We all ate Inuit country food – a seal hunted by Kenojuak’s own grandson in Kinngait and shipped, frozen solid, to downtown Toronto. Anticipation of the event, knowing that such a feast had never been staged at a major public art institution, was anxious. Hoops jumped, gatekeepers quelled, Public Health assured, and seal caught added up to something magical. This conversation attempts to reveal this magic from the perspective of its seven key actors.
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Related Resource
This video footage documents the Seal Feast held at the Art Gallery of Ontario for the opening of Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak on June 13th, 2018. It shows the frozen seal, caught in the community of Kinngait, being brought into Walker Court where Kuzy Curley, Ruben Komangapik and Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory carve it up to serve to the public. The video soundtrack is by Nelson Tagoona.
Presenters

Taqralik Partridge
Taqralik Partridge is a writer, artist and curator originally from Nunavik and now based in Ottawa. She has exhibited her work as part of the Biennale of Sydney and Among All These Tundras, and curated Qautamaat | Every day / everyday, an exhibition featuring Inuit photography at the Art Gallery of Guelph. A former Editor-at-Large for the Inuit Art Quarterly, Partridge has also recently released a book of poetry, Curved Against the Hull of a Peterhead (2020). She is the Director of the Nordic Lab at SAW, Ottawa, and adjunct curator at the Art Gallery of Guelph.

Jocelyn Piirainen
Jocelyn Piirainen is an urban Inuk, originally from Iqaluktuuttiaq (Cambridge Bay), NU, and since 2019, has been working as the Assistant Curator of Inuit Art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq. A graduate from Carleton University, her educational background has primarily focused on the arts, particularly film and new media. When not working as a curator, her artistic practice primarily involves analog photography and film — mostly experimenting with Polaroids and Super 8 film — as well as honing her crochet and beading skills. She has contributed to publications such as Canadian Art, Canadian Geographic and the Inuit Art Quarterly.

Anna Hudson
Anna Hudson, PhD / FRSC, is an art historian and curator specializing in 19th and 20th-century art in Canada, in addition to modern and contemporary circumpolar Indigenous art and performance. Hudson is a professor of Art History and Visual Culture in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design at York University (Toronto). She also continues to research and publish in the area of her doctoral dissertation, Art and Social Progress: the Toronto community of Painters (1933–1950), exploring the influence of scientific humanism on art, criticism, and cultural advocacy in the interwar years.

Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory
Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory is an award-winning performance artist, poet, actor, curator, storyteller and writer. She is Kalaaleq (Greenlandic Inuk) known for performing uaajeerneq, a Greenlandic mask dance. Her collaboratively created play Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools, won two Dora Mavor Moore Awards, a Toronto Theatre Critics Association award and traveled internationally before the pandemic. Winner of the inaugural Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award from the Inuit Art Foundation, she has contributed new work in Abadakone (National Gallery of Canada) and is co-creator of Silaup Putunga, a film installation piece acquired by the Art Gallery of Ontario and will be in exhibition in 2022. Laakkuluk is currently shortlisted for the 2021 Sobey Art Prize. She performs and collaborates with many artists and is a fierce advocate for Inuit artists. She lives in Iqaluit with her husband and 3 children.

Koomuatuk Sapa Curley
Koomuatuk Sapa Curley is an artist and videographer from Nunavut, now living in Ontario. Coming from an artistic family that began with Pitseolak Ashoona, he was taught to carve at a young age by his grandparents Qaqaq and Mayureak Ashoona as well as by a large circle of talented family members. He continues to honour them and carve the deeply rooted Inuit themes they taught him yet with a fresh vision that is his own. Besides carving, he has an equal interest in finding ways for Inuit artist voices to be heard and worked on a series of video interviews in Inuktitut for the Mobilizing Inuit Cultural Heritage grant (York University). His most recent project in 2021 has been a public art monument of his great grandmother Pitseolak Ashoona in his home town Kinngait.

Georgiana Uhlyarik
Georgiana Uhlyarik is the Fredrik S. Eaton Curator, Canadian Art, and co-lead of the Indigenous + Canadian Art Department at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. She co-curated: Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak, the J.S. McLean Centre for Indigenous + Canadian Art, Introducing Suzy Lake, among several international collaborations. Originally from Romania, she lives in Toronto with her twin sons.