Postcommodity: Time Holds All the Answers

Remai Modern is honoured to present Time Holds All the Answers, a new exhibition by Postcommodity, curated by Dr. Gerald McMaster. Comprised almost entirely of new work, this will be Postcommodity’s most significant museum presentation to date. An opening celebration, including a live performance by Postcommodity, will take place on Thursday, September 16. A conversation between the artists and curator will be hosted at the museum on Saturday, September 18, and will be accessible via a livestream on Zoom.

Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective, currently comprised of Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist. They create works of art through a shared Indigenous lens and voice, examining aspects of 21st-century life to inspire a uniquely Indigenous vision of the future. Using provocation as a tool, they spark constructive conversations that challenge the social, political and economic processes that destabilize communities and geographies.

Time Holds All the Answers takes on subjects including environmental crises, Indigenous sovereignty and land stewardship, the forces of capitalism, and the mythologies of modern art and architecture. In sharing their work in Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis, Postcommodity recognize how Indigenous people, stories and art forms have long travelled between the south and the north, since time immemorial.

Postcommodity use hacking as a creative strategy, taking existing objects and systems and breaking them apart to modify their original purpose. Through hacking, Postcommodity approach sites of conflict as places of curiosity, where multiple realities exist in tension. Something can be at once harmful and healing, terrifying and beautiful, inside and beyond. 

The artists consider the entire museum as a site where their concept of “re-imagined ceremony” takes shape. Ceremony is usually associated with religious or spiritual rituals and gatherings that celebrate particular events. In Postcommodity’s approach, the museum becomes an immersive environment, with careful attention to where and how artworks are encountered and moved through. Visitors are welcomed into a space of exchange, where meaning can be created together from a place of shared respect and responsibility. This re-imagined ceremonial ground collapses time, unifying the past, present and future. Dialogues of co-existence emerge, where one worldview is not privileged at the expense of another. 

Time Holds All the Answers opens September 18, 2021, and will be on view through January 23, 2022. The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive monograph, published later this year. Designed by Sébastien Aubin, it includes critical and poetic texts by McMaster, Roberto Bedoya, Bill Kelley Jr., Elise Y. Chagas, Floyd Favel and Postcommodity.

Dr. Gerald McMaster is a leading voice internationally, with over 30 years of experience in contemporary art, critical theory, museology and Indigenous aesthetics. McMaster serves as Adjunct Curator for Remai Modern, and is Director of the Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge at OCAD University. Wapatah is a hub for facilitating the documentation, communication and interpretation of Indigenous ways of seeing. Drawing on the inseparable concepts of perception and knowing, Wapatah assists Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and researchers to collaborate on the engagement with and representation of artistic knowledge. The Wapatah team has worked closely with Remai Modern on all aspects of Time Holds All the Answers.