Rebecca Belmore

Rebecca Belmore (Anishnaabe) is a member of the Lac Seul First Nation at Frenchman's Head, Ontario. Born in Upsala, Ontario, Canada in 1960, she currently resides in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Rebecca Belmore’s disarmingly elegant works represent and engage the resistance of Indigenous peoples. Her performances, sculptures, videos, photographs and installations evoke the connections between bodies, land, and language, and the violence that colonialism has enacted upon them. Whether a vigil for missing women in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver, British Columbia, or a photograph of a deep scar, healed and adorned with beads, her work is imbued with ritual that plays out on the body, on the land and in the elements. Belmore’s work is firmly rooted in the current political and social realities of Aboriginal communities, but its power and poetry resonate worldwide. Belmore represented Canada at the Venice Biennale's Canadian Pavilion in 2005. She was recently the winner of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2013), and she has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally.