May 10–September 8, 2024
Remai Modern is pleased to present How Not to Be Seen, a group exhibition centred around visibility in our digital age.
It has never been easier to access images and information; the technology and systems that observe, collect, and circulate details of individuals and communities expose people in an unprecedented way. Racialized and marginalized groups feel the effects of this exposure most profoundly. Bodies, minds, and the sacred knowledge they hold need new strategies and tools for protection. This exhibition brings together artists who consider physical and cultural safety in a world where everyone and everything is increasingly available to any audience, at any time.
The exhibition borrows its title from Hito Steyerl’s seminal work, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013). The show features above-mentioned artwork by Steyerl alongside works by Brook Andrew, Zach Blas, Sandra Brewster, Ruth Buchanan, Nick Cave, Charles Campbell, Ruth Cuthand, David Garneau, Sondra Perry, Amalia Pica, and Haegue Yang.
The artists in How Not to Be Seen find ways to be simultaneously present and safe, offering warnings and ways forward that are generative and generous. They work in a wide array of media including painting, sculpture, video, sound, installation, photography, and beading to offer points of view on the politics and poetics of visibility—and its opposite—as they relate to safety. The artists bring lived experiences and knowledge from geographically and culturally diverse positions. Works address widespread impacts of colonialism, invasive technologies, and intolerance to difference. They also offer joyful, humorous, wonderous, and creative redirections for safe futures.
How Not to Be Seen brings together works in a variety of media, including Toronto-based artist Sandra Brewster’s Blur Grid, made up of the artist’s enigmatic photo-based gel transfer portraits that capture subjects in motion; Brook Andrew’s mixed-media works that create a “mise-en-scène of continuing culture and new imaginings” as he explores his Wiradjuri culture; and Saskatoon-based artist Ruth Cuthand’s meticulously beaded brain scans that translate the realities of neurological difference into impactful visual representations.
The exhibition also includes Sol LeWitt Upside Down—Cube Structure Based on Five Modules, Expanded 186 Times #95-D, a work from Remai Modern’s collection by Haegue Yang. Made from domestic venetian blinds, these sculptures create great volume from minimal material, affect patterns of light and dark, and disrupt sightlines, in addition to creating its own. Through this everyday material, Yang invites us to consider what we are taught to see and calls attention to what we overlook.
How Not to Be Seen is curated by Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh, Co-Executive Director & CEOs, and Michelle Jacques, Director of Exhibitions and Collections & Chief Curator.
Remai Modern is situated on Treaty 6 Territory and the Traditional Homeland of the Métis. We pay our respects to First Nations and Métis ancestors and reaffirm our relationship with one another. The museum’s programming is supported by the Frank and Ellen Remai Foundation, the City of Saskatoon, the Canada Council for the Arts, SK Arts and SaskCulture’s Saskatchewan Lotteries Fund.