This conversation between Joseph Tisiga and Merray Michael Mina was situated within Tisaga’s solo exhibition It was God the whole time at Bradley Ertaskiran in Montreal.
Joseph Tisiga’s work is informed by global histories of colonial violence and witnessing the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples. He begins with fact, then cocoons it with fiction. He cloaks archeological and totemic forms in connotations and allusions, creating a pictorial and psychic plane in which mythologies morph.
The worlds he creates provoke these questions: What is fabulation’s role in the face of colonial violence? Could fabulation become a tool in the production of a new political reality? And could it liberate marginalized artists from the moral imperative to bear witness?
