This interview took place between exhibiting artist nichola feldman-kiss and McMaster student and M(M)A curatorial mentee Adeola Egbeyemi who discussed the current exhibition Scapegoat, from influences to themes and context. 

A: Can you speak about your artistic process behind the work being presented in Scapegoat? Was anything different from previous processes in your career?

n: Well actually this is the first project that I have ever made that I stopped working on for some time because I felt it wasn’t good for me. I was over-identifying with it, digging deeper and deeper into the systemic racism which I was experiencing. It’s not something I have talked about publicly, but it alluded to personal challenges happening at the time. I was basically being dragged through a horrible family court litigation by an ex-husband, who is a litigator. It was through the litigation process that the shocking systemic bias of our legal system became revealed to me. It was very confusing, because part of my confusion was that I was surprised by it. All this history of generational trauma both abstract and lived, had been the story of my work…I realized I had preferred to keep my head in the sand as a strategy for coping in this society. When this occurred to me, I could no longer. I am just beginning to be able to talk about this experience as part of the context for creating Scapegoat and other works from my project A slight aversion to the plight of the sufferer (Pietà) that began in 2015.

A: That makes a lot of sense to me. And I want to say thank you for sharing that, it adds another layer for me. How did that experience impact how you hope for audiences to enter into this exhibition or come away from it?

n: I don’t make my work in consideration of the audience. My work is more of an excretion. The thing that I do, is that I take in and take in then distill it as art and poetry. I really don’t think I have a whole lot of control over it.

A: I wanted to ask you about geopolitics in your work. In 2011, you spent time in the Sudans as part of the Canadian Forces Artist Program. Sudan and South Sudan are such young countries and geographically they’re located at a basin, where the Nile River will flow into it, so they’ve got really fertile irrigation and land.

n: Funny that; yet there is famine.

A: In many African nations—my parents are Nigerian immigrants—there are the contrasts between the vast richness and resources of these lands—and the people as well and their ability to hustle and their ability to…

n: Survive.

A: Yes! And to create, and navigate, and push forward. Contrasted with the anti-blackness and all the “isms” of the world.

n: And also there is joy. The joy of a culture in radical presence –in full-on aliveness.

A: In the curators’ statement, the exhibition is described as having taken on a new meaning “…as the world lurches from one global catastrophe to another.” Within the past two years, it’s hard to count so many catastrophes. A big one has been the global climate crisis and the different protest movements with a lot of youth today and the more recent conflict in Ukraine. I was wondering how your work might affect societal issues because I know that art has the potential to renew and change individuals as they experience it. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on how Scapegoat might do that?

n: Well, when I was a student at University of Ottawa, the teaching of the time was that art did not have the capacity to change society. I came into art school thinking I was going to be a photojournalist. But in order to take the photo courses I wanted, I needed to be a fine art major because studios were reserved for fine art students and I said, “Okay. Tell me what I need to do to become a fine arts major.” Next day, done. I was a fine art student. I had been president of the Student Association of the Faculty of Arts and occupied leadership positions at the Ontario and Canada Federation of Students. So as an art student, I was very politicized. I arrived politicized. Art school became that place where I could exercise my feisty, opinionated self, much more than anywhere else in the university, so I just fell in love with that place.

I worked actively in my university, in support of the South African anti-apartheid movement to promote divestment. I had a dream to go to South Africa because I thought the country could teach me something about how my own complicated identity fits within a polarized society. I was a big fan of the artist Alfredo Jaar. He had the courage to go to the Rwanda genocide and say “Look!” He actively sought to show the effects of the genocide to the art community. For me, it’s not a choice to make work about equity, inequality and injustice, and to pull people’s eyelids back. At a certain point, it became a matter of urgency.

A: I wanted to ask one thing in regard to the title of Scapegoat. How it touched me is that there’s this quote by Andre 3000 that says, “across cultures darker people suffer most. why?” That spoke to me in terms of how marginalized and racialized people, especially Black people, have been the scapegoat for racism, sexism, colourism and the weight has been put on us, shifted to us, and we’re carrying too much. I was wondering if you wanted to speak to the idea of what a scapegoat is from the title.

n: Scapegoat is a collision of secular and religious belief and philosophy. It’s a concentration of Christianity, Judaism, philosophy, ritual and so-called animism. Though a lot of people see religious iconography in my work, I say it’s just the zeitgeist coming through me. I am agnostic. I do not plan the Judeo-Christian mythological character of my work.

How I ended up with the goat in Scapegoat was because while I was photographing the men, I began photographing young women at the petting zoos north of Toronto’s 401 highway. The reason for that was because I was seeking healing activities. Petting zoos are profoundly healing places, holding these baby animals is profoundly comforting. A lot of us urban dwellers have forgotten about the pleasures of handling farm animals. You know, if you go to places in Africa or South Asia for example, to see a little herd of animals such as a herd of goats, cattle, camels hanging about cities is completely normal. In Toronto we’re not allowed to bring farm animals into the city. Some Canadian cities like Montreal are beginning to see value in removing those prohibitions.

But the idea behind Scapegoat was also about ideas around who populates our prisons? Who populates the remand (detention) centers? Who is denied support of the Toronto bail programs?  Who are the people who are trying to get out of their home countries and into Canada? It’s a lot of young men. I mean a lot of families, a lot of women, a lot of children, a lot of people, but predominantly young men. The family will invest in the young man. “You go, you lay the groundwork, we follow.” That young man is also at a stage that coincides with an adventurous spirit and an immortality complex where they do extreme sports, they’re easily recruited, so called radicalized. It’s a risk-taking age stage that is taken advantage of by world order.

There is also a vulnerability at work here. The relationship between photographing the men [in Scapegoat] and me, was also very collaborative and special. We disclosed and shared a space of co-knowing. I know they understood what I was going through in the courts because they also shared with me what their lives were. In the studio, we became very connected for being really real with each other. I think this body of work is the most intimate I’ve ever got with my subject. It is a document created as grief, during a grieving period, but also a document of active, living trauma.