Indigenising Water

Abstract

Abstract This article unpacks the stakes of Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain, a video installation that represented Canada at the 2005 Venice Biennale. The artwork consisted of a video installation based on a performance she gave in Vancouver. The work engaged water from a perspective informed by the artist’s Indigenous identity and heritage, framing water as a site of struggle and violence in a manner informed by settler colonialism on Turtle Island but in a way that resonates with crisis of global water inequality and hydrocolonialism today. This article unpacks the stakes of this biennial artwork, relating it to the artist’s long interest in water and Indigenous rights, the influence of Ana Mendieta’s performance work on the piece, as well as global efforts to reimagine water outside regimes of state and corporate control. It joins a growing literature on reimagining water in the current period of crisis.