SASKATOON.- Remai Modern is presenting a new, multi-year project that convenes a group of artists with diverse practices living and working across the northern hemisphere, from urban centres to remote, rural, and reserve communities. In response to our location on the banks of kisiskâciwani-sîpiy (the South Saskatchewan River), Carried by rivers, held by lands considers the museum’s connections to multiple elsewheres. Rather than a group exhibition, it is an exercise in creating connections and building alliances between artists, artworks, and locations over time—an attempt to create a context across distances, based on affinities and shared concerns, and a belief in the importance of staying with the trouble. As Donna Haraway writes, this means learning to be truly present in ‘mixed-up times’ marked by both devastation and joyful resurgence, and cultivating situated relations of response and alliance rather than deferring responsibility to an imagined future.
Coalescing around land- and water-based livelihoods and knowledges, Carried by rivers, held by lands foregrounds the critical interdependencies and specificities that define our shared present and collective future, particularly considering the urgencies of the climate crisis and the inheritances and status of colonial capitalism. Enacting forms of creative expression grounded in the inter-relationship between community and land, the artist projects are a call to action. They propose alternative economic relations and offer acts of cultural and environmental restitution. By weaving together globalized connectivity and local articulations, Carried by rivers, held by lands builds and benefits from a network of shared relations. Grounded in dialogue and collaboration, the project seeks to harness art’s capacity for transformative collective change.
Flowing in and out of the institution, Remai Modern serves as a confluence of these varied practices, acting as a vital gathering place for the project’s upstream and downstream currents. A series of artist projects are being developed through commissions, exchanges, gatherings, residencies, and community-engaged processes, and will be presented in Connect Gallery and in the museum’s interstitial spaces, as well as taking place outside of the museum in relation to places and communities the participating artists are connected to.
The first two projects by Althea Thauberger and Joi T. Arcand open on November 14, with additional work being presented throughout 2026.
Carried by rivers, held by lands is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Additional support for upcoming projects includes IASPIS – International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts.
Althea Thauberger
Der Kleiekotzer (The Bran Puker) is a major new multimedia installation by Saskatchewan-born artist Althea Thauberger. Known internationally for her place-based experimental documentaries, Thauberger here turns a lens for the first time toward the Treaty lands, province and communities of her upbringing.
At the heart of the exhibition is an experimental non-fiction video work, the result of three years of collaborative research and production. Beginning with stories of her ancestors, the work speculates on aspects of the geopolitical history of the Black Sea German ethnocultural settler communities. These groups were instrumental to the colonial project of establishing Canada and the United States, and political histories of wheat farming.
The exhibition’s title is borrowed from historical objects used as spouts on flour mills in the Upper Rhine region in the 18th and 19th centuries, where Thauberger’s ancestors originated. The project takes the form of an immersive installation that incorporates photographic and video documentation, wheat, and replica objects associated with a subset of the Black Sea German cultural group. These elements give tangible and experiential form to the film’s narrative, weaving together the very substance of settlement—shelter, sustenance, and economic purpose—with the lives, cultures, and livelihoods they engendered and displaced.
While drawing on the methodologies and materials for which she has become recognized globally, Der Kleiekotzer marks a significant turning point in her practice: a return to the place of her upbringing, refracted through histories of migration, settlement, and their ongoing neocolonial dynamics.
Joi T. Arcand
Encompassing installation, photography, and design, Joi T. Arcand’s practice enacts a visionary and subversive reclamation and indigenization of public spaces using Cree language and syllabics. Hailing from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, Saskatchewan, Treaty 6 Territory, Arcand currently resides in Ottawa. Installed at the end of the corridor outside Marquee Gallery on Level 3, the phrase ᐯᐦᐯᔭᐠ ᐆᒥᓯ ᐃᓯ ᐁᐊᑎᐦᑌᑭ ᑕᑿᐦᐃᒥᓈᓇ appears in cahkipēhikana (syllabics) as an LED channel sign, its bright glow beckoning visitors onward.
The phrase is drawn from the chapter “Reminiscences of Muskeg Lake” in kôhkominawak otâcimowiniwâwa / Our Grandmothers’ Lives as Told in Their Own Words, a collection of personal stories from the daily lives of seven nêhiyaw-iskwêwak (nêhiyaw women) spanning the past century. In a conversation between Alpha Lafond, Arcand’s great-aunt by marriage, and Rosa Longneck, Lafond recalls the words of her relative, Julia Arcand: “Just like this, as one by one the chokecherries are ripening.” The ripening of chokecherries in August marked both the passage of time and the cyclical return of the seasons. For the kôhkomwak (grandmothers), attentiveness to the land is itself a form of knowledge—nêhiyawîhtwȃwin, the Cree way—yet they note that chokecherries now ripen earlier, reflecting the effects of environmental change.
A language learner herself, Arcand describes nêhiyawêwin as present everywhere on the land, resonating through place names, plants, animals, and people. For her, working in these territories means engaging with language as an essential part of place. She sees the beauty of syllabics as a powerful entry point for learning more about the language and the history of its written form.
