Upcoming
VITRINE: Forgotten Language
Forgotten Language
Works by Amanda Amour-Lynx
05 March – 25 April
Forgotten Language is a collection of works by Amanda Amour-Lynx which are performative acts of cultural reclamation. It documents the pursuit for radical self-acceptance, evident by the messy, untangling process that ensues when recovering lost histories. Stories are embedded linguistically through mnemonic and symbolic coding, abstraction, body movements and stored memories. Language is place. Place is being.
These studies are stories of returning to a knowledge that was taken away, and are reactions to how colonialism has affected the artist personally and intergenerationally (focusing on matters concerning the relationship to time and place; the difficulty of familial roots; complex blood memory; being of mixed heritage; lateral violence; and internalized racism). Forgotten Language is Amanda’s intent to heal ancestral wounds through acts of restoring cultural literacy in herself, existing on various planes of being, undoing and reclaiming.
Territories spill off the map
Invented names for the state I’m in
Your boundaries have the word of law
And mine, imagined
I summon the stories under the earth
And the secrets of the sky
You lay another brick
You dig another mine
But these boundaries,
These Boundaries are mine
Where my skin touches air
And my blood touches bone
This place is for me alone
– Amanda Amour-Lynx
BIOGRAPHY
Amanda Amour-Lynx is a Mi’kmaq First Nations interdisciplinary artist, social worker and educator living in Toronto, Ontario, on Dish with One Spoon treaty territory. Her work combines art and activism, focusing on Indigenous storywork and community-based approaches to explore healing, trauma and collective truths. She incorporates spirituality, the occult and mysticism into her practice.