Becoming Ancestors seeks to offer an expanded understanding of ancestrality. It brings together Western and Indigenous artists who explore ancestral memories: their fragmentation, repression, persistence, and imaginative potential.
Historically, ancestral knowledge has been closely tied to Indigenous cosmologies and how they look at memory, land and time as non-linear. Reclaiming it has been a vital part of their identity and resistance after centuries of dispossession. Western cultures have long exoticized this different form of knowledge production and transmission, denying the presence and possibilities of ancestrality for the West itself. Through their works, the artists in the exhibition ask what it means to be connected or disconnected from our ancestors, and how both experiences might serve as starting points for imagining different futures.
