Weight of inheritance (2022)

To maintain authentic visual sovereignty, Indigenous artists need to preserve our relationships with our ancestral homelands which determines our bodily autonomy as Two-Spirited peoples. Displacement of Two-Spirit bodies remains a point of contention in our own communities, where homophobia and heteropatriarchy proliferate due to foundational settler-colonial systems that have impacted our ways of life. This results in the necessity of creating constellations of relations – in order to nourish our own communities. This concept expands beyond borders; these moments when we gather and create visual knowledge together are essential to asserting our erotic and bodily sovereignty. In photography specifically, our communities are often portrayed as subjects or photo projects, rather than collaborators. By reclaiming our self-representation, we are reinforcing agency for our own storytelling – what were once stories of us dying are now transforming. We are portraying our thriving and prospering Indigenous intelligence system with the hope of continuing as the Métis people have always done.

Weight of inheritance is a new photographic work by artist Dayna Danger that explores the process of remembering ancestral, intergenerational knowledge based on their experiences of living in a society that did everything in its power to extinguish the hope and culture of Métis people. The artist’s great-grandmother was a hide tanner as was her mother. Their practice is part of Danger’s inheritance.  What is the responsibility to bring this inheritance to fruition? What does it mean to activate knowledge that was buried for protection until it is safe to come out again?

Bio:

Dayna Danger (they/them) is a Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer, Métis-Saulteaux-Polish, visual artist, hide tanner, drummer, and beadworker. Danger’s art practice is an act of reclaiming space and power over society’s projections of sexualities and representation. This transpires in Danger’s art by their intentionally large-scale images that place importance on women-identified, Two-Spirit, transgender, and non-binary people. Their art uses symbolic references to kink communities to critically interrogate visibility and rejection. Danger centers Kin and practicing consent to build artworks that create a suspension of reality wherein complex dynamics of sexuality, gender, and power are exchanged.

Photo credit: Karen Asher