nichola feldman-kiss \ Scapegoat
Curated by Pamela Edmonds and Mona Filip
February 9 – March 18, 2022

McMaster Museum of Art is pleased to present Scapegoat, a solo exhibition by nichola feldman-kiss curated by Pamela Edmonds and Mona Filip. On view from February 9 to March 18, 2022 (delayed from a January 4 opening due to the pandemic), the exhibition brings together two bodies of work centred on the artist’s prosocial, practice-based research exploring the role of the human body in geopolitics. As a first-generation Canadian with familial roots in the Caribbean and the Holocaust, their process-rich work unites the personal and the political, raising questions about how to witness and make sense of one’s implication in colonial history.

A pioneer in early digital art, feldman-kiss’ visceral and immersive hybrid-media installations explore the body as a site of confrontation and vulnerability. The exhibition, which includes photography, video, digital and performance interventions, asks us to reconsider difficult questions about what it means to be conscious social bodies in the contemporary moment, and lays bare the entanglements of the globalized order that insist rights onto some, while withholding the same entitlements from others.

Scapegoat began in 2015 in response to the multitude of violent conflicts raging internationally. Simultaneously prophetic and timely, the exhibition takes on new meaning as the world lurches from one global crisis to another, reckoning with the consequences of settler colonialism, social upheaval, and climate emergency. In this contentious era, as dialogues on retribution, repatriation and reconciliation come to the fore, the exhibition considers the question “What ethical roles and responsibilities do contemporary artists and museums have?”

Deep curiosity into their artistic subject propelled the artist into far away contexts to witness the tragedies of colonialism such as those that gave rise to the artist’s own ancestral trajectories. Their uneasy online acquisition from a Canadian supplier of the osteological specimens slated for the medical market led to experiential research within the international supply chains where trade relies on social inequity for profit. Conceptually rooted, Scapegoat evolved into a haunting portrait series that delves into how political gamesmanship and global division can cast black and brown lives into precarious existence and argues for a more inclusive and egalitarian way of recognizing all planetary life.

According to Pamela Edmonds, Senior Curator at McMaster Museum of Art, “Scapegoat is a challenging exhibition that demands a particular kind of responsiveness. feldman-kiss’ art does not invite easy or passive consumption. It enacts a certain affective labour, asking audiences social and political questions that leave us vulnerable to their effects. At the same time, it offers a collective space for grieving, healing, witnessing and reimagining.” Scapegoat is a provocation and an elegy, attending to generational traumas through dignity and defiance.

The museum and the artist acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.

Image: (Scapegoat) Sydné, 2017. copyright nichola feldman-kiss