This digital work, presented to mark National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, is a collaboration between Indigenous artist Darlene Gijuminag and Pakistani-Canadian filmmaker Imran Babur. After the Aga Khan Museum’s virtual Music for a New Day project brought Gijuminag and Babur together in 2020, the artists were invited to hold space in the Museum in 2021 for the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. Their work is a reflection on the meaning of this commemorative day using Matt Donovan and Hallie Siegel’s contemporary installation, Rust Garden.
The exhibition, which took place in the Museum Collections Gallery provided an opportunity for visitors to contemplate our national story by rearranging low-carbon steel letters to create messages that represent their ideas of what it means to be Canadian.
The more than 700,000 letters used in the installation appear in Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan’s classic 1945 novel Two Solitudes - a coming-of-age story about a young man with a French-Canadian father and an English-Canadian mother, who struggles to reconcile his mixed cultural identity.