Description

Join us for I Dream in Wampum, choreographed by the 2025 Clifford E. Lee Choreography Award winner Barbara Kaneratonni Diabo. The work is a dynamic, powerful science-fiction dance journey where Indigenous people show a future of strength and celebration.

Originally from Kahnawake, Diabo is a Kanien'keha:ka choreographer and dancer whose work draws from diverse dance styles including powwow, Haudenosaunee, and contemporary dance traditions. As Artistic Director of A’nó:wara Dance Theatre, she creates works that centre Indigenous worldviews while expanding the possibilities of contemporary dance through story, movement, and cultural continuity.

A post-show conversation with choreographer Barbara Kaneratonni Diabo will follow the performance.
 

I Dream in Wampum

Enter into a world of Indigenous Futurism. This is a story inspired by Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk) teachings, allowing us to imagine worlds where colonialism never happened.  We follow Kahente, an Indigenous youth, on his journey to the stars. After finding seven wampum belts from the constellation, we call the Seven Dancers (Tsata Teienonniakhwa), he starts his journey to each of these worlds to discover his ancestors and star-beings. If successful, this path can lead him to Sky World (Karonhiakehson Ohontsa), the place of his people’s origins, and bring him a greater understanding of his past, present, and future. I Dream in Wampum is a dynamic, powerful science-fiction dance journey where Indigenous people show a future of strength and celebration.

Let the journey begin…

I Dream in Wampum has been made possible with support from:

Banff Centre
Canada Council for the Arts
Le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ)
Le Conseil des arts de Montréal

A’nó:wara Dance Theatre benefited from creative residencies for this production from: 
Banff Centre
Centre de Création O Vertigo (CCOV)
Festival of Dance Annapolis Royal (FODAR)
La Danse sur les routes du Québec/Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique/Conseil des arts de Montréal
Place des Arts
Quand l'art passe à l'action (ASTA)

I Dream in Wampam
Page Summary
A bold contemporary dance imagining worlds where colonialism never happened and envisioning Indigenous futures grounded in strength and celebration.
Exhibition
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Free
No
Donation
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Banff Centre Artist/Practicum/Staff Only
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Date
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https://tickets.banffcentre.ca/online/mapSelect.asp?BOset::WSmap::seatmap::performance_ids=88A446EC-37AA-4CAF-AD4A-97B2C2D6F2DF
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Event Subtitle
Choreographed by 2025 Clifford E. Lee Choreography Award winner Barbara Kaneratonni Diabo
Body
Image
Image of person wearing red hat and scarf

Image credit: Cheryl L’Hirondelle, nikamon ohci askiy (songs because of the land), 2008. Photo: Red Works

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The exhibition presents L’Hirondelle’s career-spanning exploration of nēhiyawin (Cree worldview), on view from February 13 to June 21, 2026, and features the performance-based artwork, yāhkaskwan mīhkiwap (aka light tipi).

BANFF, AB, FEBRUARY 5, 2026 – Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity is thrilled to present the first career survey devoted to the expansive, multi-decade practice of the interdisciplinary artist and singer/songwriter, Cheryl L’Hirondelle at Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery. The exhibition, Cheryl L’Hirondelle: where the voice touches (((acts, utterances, transmissions for freedom))), running from February 13 to June 21, 2026, brings together decades of works across performance, video, “net.art” originally sited online, and in sound and installation.

Born in Alberta with family ties to Papaschase First Nation and Kikino Métis Settlement, and based in Saskatoon, the artist’s practice is grounded in nēhiyawēwin (Cree language) as the sounding of nēhiyawin (Cree worldview). In her work, nēhiyawēwin appears as syllabic tags marked in chalk or assembled with stones in the land, as voice and radio transmission, and in digital spaces including as net.art. The exhibition’s title references L’Hirondelle’s ongoing interest in echolocation as a means of listening to place and responding, reflecting how her use of sound and song has deeply informed her practice across media and contexts.

L’Hirondelle has produced and exhibited work at Banff Centre throughout her career, making this the ideal venue for her first career survey co-curated by Tarah Hogue (independent) and Jacqueline Bell (Director, Walter Phillips Gallery and Collections). Her first appearance at Banff Centre occurred in 1990, with a number of the artworks on view previously presented or produced on campus over the subsequent decades. 

Quotation

We are honoured to work with the artist on this career-spanning exhibition of her practice. Like the voice—central to L’Hirondelle’s work in performance, song, and in sounding in relation to land and others—her practice moves with freedom across multiple spaces of reception, contexts and media. We hope that in assembling many of these works together for the first time, audiences will gain a deeper understanding of the breadth of the artist’s work and its critical and historical impact across numerous fields of practice, from net.art and performance to socially engaged work and installation.

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Tarah Hogue and Jacqueline Bell, co-curators of the exhibition
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Across her practice, L’Hirondelle often invites participation and at times works through shared authorship, creating situations that ask visitors to listen attentively and to consider their own position within networks of relation. Many of the works in this exhibition operate through modes of reception that run counter to the constraints of the white cube, emphasizing presence, duration, and responsiveness. In this context, freedom encompasses both L’Hirondelle’s insistence on artistic autonomy and a nēhiyawin understanding of freedom, in which self-determination is exercised through responsibility and in relation to others. 

Among numerous works, the exhibition includes: nikamon ohci askiy (songs because of the land), 2008, restored 2023, a net.art work originally accessible online where sounds reflecting the artist’s practice of singing the landscape can be accessed and changed via the digital interface of the work; ēkaya-pāhkāci – Don’t Freeze Up v2, 2019, a multisensory installation incorporating video projection and sound that evolved from a live performance; and Here I Am (Bless My Mouth), 2013, featuring songs co-written by the artist and a group of incarcerated women and their literacy teacher in Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge, a minimum-security federal prison located at Nekaneet First Nation, Saskatchewan, which are voiced by others and shared through an installation incorporating audio, video and large-scale panorama.

Cheryl L’Hirondelle: where the voice touches (((acts, utterances, transmissions for freedom))) will be celebrated with a free opening reception with the artist present on February 12 at 5 p.m. and a free exhibition tour at Walter Phillips Gallery on April 1 at 5:30 p.m. Attendees of Walter Phillips Gallery are also invited to attend yāhkaskwan mīhkiwap (aka light tipi) on February 13 at 6:15 p.m. yāhkaskwan mīhkiwap (aka light tipi) is an ongoing performance-based artwork that L’Hirondelle has brought to various cities and communities since 2014. In the work, she invites artists, storytellers, and participants to gather around a tipi formed through beams of light cast into the night sky. The drifting smoke from burning sage bundles makes the tipi visible to viewers, welcoming audience members to experience knowledge sharing through storytelling and song. The performance will be co-hosted by L’Hirondelle with performer Anders Hunter (Îyârhe Nakoda) and invites participation from artists in residence and faculty in Banff Centre’s Toga da wôhnagabi: Music Creation Residency 2026. 

Quotation

It has been such a pleasure working with the curators and all the trusted folks from Banff Centre and Queen’s University to bring these works together—such good relations all around. My hope is that people will come to participate and experience the exhibition and the various different projects and make their own good relationships with the work, remembering and honouring the right relations we all need to maintain and uphold, while visiting here on this beautiful land.

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Cheryl L'Hirondelle
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Cheryl L’Hirondelle: where the voice touches (((acts, utterances, transmissions for freedom)))

  • Dates: February 13, 2026, to June 21, 2026
  • Venue: Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
  • Address: 107 Tunnel Mountain Dr., Banff, Alberta
  • Price: Free
  • Hours: Wednesdays through Sundays, 12:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Public Events

This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Government of Canada, and Government of Alberta.

Walter Phillips Gallery is grateful to the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (AGNES) and Vulnerable Media Lab at Queen’s University, who as part of the Emulator Library for Media Art (ELMA) project have revived two works by Cheryl L’Hirondelle and a digital publication she guest directed in the exhibition. AGNES recognizes the Canada Council for the Arts for funding the ELMA project. Walter Phillips Gallery also acknowledges Vulnerable Media Lab’s restoration of the work, nikamon ohci askiy (songs because of the land), 2008 with support from the artist's nephew, Callum Beckford, funded by Queen's University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The artist would also like to thank SK Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts for funding to assist in preparation for this exhibition.

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See Banff Centre’s Media Room here.

For photos, information, or interview requests, please contact:

Carly Maga                             
Director, Communications                         
Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity             
tel: +1.403.763.6210                
cell: +1.403.431.3423                
carly_maga@banffcentre.ca                                    

About Cheryl L’Hirondelle

Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Cree/Halfbreed; German/Polish) is an interdisciplinary artist, singer/songwriter, and critical thinker whose family roots are from Papaschase First Nation / amiskwaciy wāskahikan (Edmonton) and Kikino Metis Settlement, Alberta. Her work investigates and articulates a dynamism of nēhiyawin (Cree worldview) in contemporary time-place to create immersive environments towards radical inclusion and decolonisation. As a songwriter, L’Hirondelle focuses on sharing nēhiyawēwin (Cree language) and Indigenous and contemporary hybrid song forms and Indigenous language sound shapes and personal narrative songwriting as methodologies toward survivance. L'Hirondelle has performed, presented, and exhibited nationally and internationally. L’Hirondelle was awarded two imagineNATIVE New Media Awards (2005 and 2006) and two Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards (2006 and 2007). L'Hirondelle also received the 2021 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art. In 2025, she was bestowed an Honorary Doctorate from Queen’s University and the King’s Coronation Medal from the Indigenous Curatorial Collective. Her latest album, released in October 2025, is Why the Caged Bird Sings, a collection of songs co-written with incarcerated women, men, and detained youth from across the land now known as Canada and is available on all platforms.

About Tarah Hogue

Tarah Hogue is a curator, writer, and cultural worker based in Treaty 6 and 7 territories and the Métis homeland. Her practice is grounded in relational geographies, attending to how people and artworks shape and are shaped by the territories they belong to and move through. She approaches curating as a form of generative inquiry and connection, where otherwise ways of knowing and being can emerge through encounters between artworks, spaces, and publics.

Hogue is currently Adjunct Curator (Indigenous Art) at Remai Modern and has curated independently since 2009 across a range of venues and collaborations. Her recent projects include Carried by rivers, held by lands (Remai Modern), co-curated with Aileen Burns, Johan Lundh, and Maria Lind—a multi-year initiative that brings together artists from across the northern hemisphere to think with place, build solidarities across distance, and pursue collaborative forms of cultural and environmental restitution. She is also co-curator, with Siri Engberg, of Dyani White Hawk: Love Language (Walker Art Center; Remai Modern), a major survey of fifteen years of the Sičáŋǧu Lakota artist’s practice.

Of Michif and Euro-Canadian ancestry, Hogue is a citizen of the Otipemisiwak Métis Government within Alberta.

About Walter Phillips Gallery

Walter Phillips Gallery is exclusively committed to the production, presentation, collection, and analysis of contemporary art and curatorial practice. For contemporary artists, particularly those engaged in alternative forms of practice, Walter Phillips Gallery remains an essential and principal site where art is presented to an audience for critical reception. banffcentre.ca/walter-phillips-gallery   

About Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity

Founded in 1933, Banff Centre is a post-secondary institution built upon an extraordinary legacy of excellence in artistic and leadership development. What started as a single course in drama has grown to become a global organization leading in arts, culture, and creative decision-making across dozens of disciplines, from the fine arts to Indigenous Wise Practices. From our home in the stunning Canadian Rocky Mountains, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity aims to move everyone who attends our campus - artists, leaders, thinkers, and audiences - to unleash their creative potential and realize their unique contribution to build an innovative, inspiring future through education, performances, convenings, and public outreach. banffcentre.ca

Banff Centre
107 Tunnel Mountain Drive
Banff, Alberta
Canada
T1L 1H5
403.762.6100
www.banffcentre.ca

We recognize, with deep respect and gratitude, our home on the side of Sacred Buffalo Guardian Mountain. In the spirit of respect and truth, we honour and acknowledge the Banff area, known as “Minihrpa” (translated in Stoney Nakoda as “the waterfalls”) and the Treaty 7 territory and oral practices of the Îyârhe Nakoda (Stoney Nakoda) – comprised of the Bearspaw, Chiniki, and Goodstoney Nations – as well as the Tsuut’ina First Nation and the Blackfoot Confederacy comprised of the Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai. We acknowledge that this territory is home to the Shuswap Nations, Ktunaxa Nations, and Métis Nation of Alberta, Rockyview District 4. We acknowledge all Nations who live, work, and play here, help us steward this land, and honour and celebrate this place.
 

Media Release
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Description

Join us for an afternoon presentation by Isabelle Sully, an artist, curator, and writer whose practice often centers on the mechanisms and materiality of administration.

In this talk, she presents her practice through a series of recent projects, drawing on both the institutional contexts she works within and the self-initiated facets of her work. She reflects on projects developed through her current role as Artistic Director at A Tale of A Tub in Rotterdam, alongside initiatives such as DIY publishing and a performance project based in the smallest theatre in the Netherlands. Across these examples, she explores how administrative writing can be refigured as an artistic practice.

She is a faculty member for the Early Career Banff Artist in Residence 2026, a transformative five-week residency that provides mentorship, critical feedback, and studio time to visual artists in the early stages of their careers. 

This event is part of the Visual Arts Open Lecture Series, which presents talks by leading Canadian and international artists, curators, and academics.

Visual Arts is supported by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Program.

Headshot of Isabelle Sully
Page Summary
Isabelle Sully presents recent projects exploring how administrative writing and institutional systems can function as artistic practice.
Exhibition
No
Free
Yes
Banff Centre Artist/Practicum/Staff Only
Off
Licensed
Off
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4-5:30 PM

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1773698400
Description

Join us for an afternoon presentation by Jacob Korczynski, a curator whose more than twenty years of practice are rooted in long-term collaboration with artists across exhibitions and publications.

His talk centres on his most recent body of research, including a project that brought together the work of artists Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Jimmy Robert, developed with support from a Curatorial Research Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. He will also reflect on how several projects from the past decade anticipated his current thinking on intergenerational dialogue.

He is a faculty member for the Early Career Banff Artist in Residence 2026, a transformative five-week residency that provides mentorship, critical feedback, and studio time to visual artists in the early stages of their careers. 

This event is part of the Visual Arts Open Lecture Series, which presents talks by leading Canadian and international artists, curators, and academics.

Visual Arts is supported by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Program.

Jacob Korczynski
Page Summary
Curator Jacob Korczynski presents recent curatorial research developed through collaboration with artists across exhibitions and publications.
Exhibition
No
Free
Yes
Banff Centre Artist/Practicum/Staff Only
Off
Licensed
Off
Performance Date
Date
Extra Description

4-5:30 PM

Computed Sort Date
1773093600
Description

Join us for an afternoon presentation by Nour Bishouty, a multidisciplinary artist working across video, sculpture, works on paper, digital images, and writing.

In this talk, she traces the through-lines of her practice, examining how personal experience becomes legible within broader cultural and historical contexts. Drawing on works from the past decade, she explores how familial and inherited narratives can function as a counter-archive, using fragmentary traces and speculative gestures to unsettle systems that claim to organize meaning, including taxonomy, archives, museology, and colonial logics. She reflects on how misreading, absence, and distortion operate as material conditions in her work, and asks what becomes visible when certainty slips. She also examines how not knowing, or not fully understanding, might itself become a way of paying closer attention.

She is a faculty member for the Early Career Banff Artist in Residence 2026, a transformative five-week residency that provides mentorship, critical feedback, and studio time to visual artists in the early stages of their careers. 

This event is part of the Visual Arts Open Lecture Series, which presents talks by leading Canadian and international artists, curators, and academics.

Visual Arts is supported by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Program.

Nour Bishouty
Page Summary
Nour Bishouty traces how personal histories become counter-archives, using fragments, misreading, and uncertainty to question systems that shape meaning.
Exhibition
No
Free
Yes
Banff Centre Artist/Practicum/Staff Only
Off
Licensed
Off
Performance Date
Date
Extra Description

4-5:30 PM

Computed Sort Date
1772838000

Submitted by Sonia Zyvatkau… on
English
Andrea Wing

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Andrea Wing has spent two decades directing award-winning documentaries and commercial campaigns. She specializes in content on the fringe - capturing the lives of those on the edge of society in demanding environments. Her latest documentary, Leo and Chester won Best Mountain Culture Film at the Banff Mountain Film & Book Festival. Andrea is a fierce advocate for the next generation, designing workshops that arm female filmmakers with elite technical skills.

Faculty

Submitted by Sonia Zyvatkau… on
English
Tarah Hogue

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Tarah Hogue is a curator, writer, and cultural worker based in Treaty 6 and 7 territories and the Métis homeland. 

Hogue’s practice is grounded in relational geographies—attending to how people and artworks shape and are shaped by the territories they belong to and move through. She approaches curating as a form of generative inquiry and connection, where otherwise ways of being in the world emerge through encounters between artworks, spaces, and publics. Hogue is currently Adjunct Curator at Remai Modern, Saskatoon where she previously served as the institution’s inaugural Curator (Indigenous Art). 

Recent curatorial projects include Dyani White Hawk: Love Language, co-curated with Siri Engberg (Walker Art Center, October 2025 and Remai Modern, April 2026, touring); and Meryl McMaster: Bloodline, co-curated with Sarah Milroy, (McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2022 and Remai Modern, touring). Her exhibition Storied Objects: Métis Art in Relation (2022), curated with advisor Sherry Farrell Racette, received an AAMC Award for Excellence. In 2019, Hogue was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation–TD Bank Group Award for Emerging Curator of Contemporary Canadian Art.

Faculty

Submitted by Sonia Zyvatkau… on
English
Krista Belle Stewart

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Krista Belle Stewart was raised in the Syilx Nation community of Spaxmn. She currently divides her time between her rez and Vienna. Her multidisciplinary practice moves among and between familial histories, archival research, land, place, and story, forming artworks that engage enduring questions of lived experience and continuity as they unfold within Syilx territory and beyond. Her work has been exhibited at MUDAM, Luxembourg; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; and Kunstverein Hamburg. Additional presentations include Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; the 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; the 39th EVA International, Limerick; and MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, New York. Stewart is currently preparing for a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. She is also a PhD in Practice candidate at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien.

Faculty

Submitted by Sonia Zyvatkau… on
English
Deanna Bowen

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Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky-born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. She is a recipient of a 2021 Scotiabank Photography Award, a 2020 Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts, a 2018 Canada Council Research and Creation Grant, an Ontario Arts Council Media Arts Grant in 2017, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. Deanna is an Associate Professor in Concordia University’s Studio Arts program. Her writing, interviews, and art works have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives, and Transition Magazine. Bowen is the editor of the 2019 publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.

Faculty
Description

Rejoignez-nous pour une soirée dédiée à la littérature francophone contemporaine dans le cadre de la série Literary Cabaret, avec des lectures d'écrivains en résidence du programme Contemporary French Writers Residency au Banff Centre. Ce premier chapitre rassemble des œuvres originales d'auteurs qui explorent la poésie, la prose, les formes hybrides et les approches expérimentales du langage.

La soirée est animée par Chris Clarke et Cole Swensen, traducteurs et poètes primés, et mentors pour la résidence. Ils animent le programme, mettant en lumière les échanges dynamiques entre les traditions littéraires francophones et internationales, et partagent chacun une courte lecture de leur propre travail. Les écrivains liront des œuvres en cours, principalement en français, offrant un aperçu rare des processus créatifs qui façonnent certaines des voix littéraires les plus audacieuses de la France d'aujourd'hui.

Découvrez une sélection de livres de Pages Books et profitez d'un moment chaleureux et festif avec des écrivains, des lecteurs et la communauté. Ouverture des portes à 18h15 au CLVB '33, début des lectures à 19h00. Les invités sont les bienvenus pour échanger avec les écrivains et les intervenants après les lectures jusqu'à 21h30.

Ne manquez pas cette soirée inspirante consacrée à la langue, à la culture et à la littérature française contemporaine.

Le programme de résidence et l'événement sont généreusement soutenus par la Fondation DRG.
 

Fondation DRG Logo
Chris Clarke and Cole Swensen
Page Summary
Soirée de littérature francophone contemporaine avec lectures d'écrivains en résidence. Animé par Chris Clarke et Cole Swensen.
Exhibition
No
Banff Centre Artist/Practicum/Staff Only
Off
Licensed
Off
Performance Date
Date
Extra Description

Date : mar. 17 fév. 2026 à 19h00
Lieu : CLVB '33

Restrictions d'âge: 14 ans et plus

Cet événement est gratuit et tous sont les bienvenus.

 

Location
Expandable Content
À propos des animateurs

Chris Clarke

Chris Clarke.jpg

Chris Clarke est traducteur littéraire et chercheur. Il enseigne actuellement au département des études de traduction de l’Université du Connecticut. Au nombre de ses traductions de textes en français et en espagnol figurent des livres de Raymond Queneau, de Pierre Mac Orlan, d’Éric Chevillard, et de Julio Cortázar. Chris Clarke a reçu le Prix de la traduction (fiction) de la French-American Foundation en 2019 pour sa traduction de Vies imaginaires (Imaginary Lives) de Marcel Schwob, prix duquel il a été finaliste en 2017 pour la traduction de Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue (In the Café of Lost Youth) de Patrick Modiano, lauréat du prix Nobel de littérature, publiée chez NYRB Classics.

Cole Swensen

Cole Swensen (1).jpg

Cole Swensen est poète et traductrice de textes de poésie et de prose contemporaines françaises ainsi que d’écrits critiques sur l’art. Ses textes poétiques ont gagné le Prix de la poésie de l’IOWA (Iowa Poetry Prize), le Prix du livre du Poetry Center de l’Université d’État de San Francisco et le prix de la National Poetry Series; ils ont aussi été finalistes du National Book Award, du Prix du livre du Los Angeles Times et du prix Griffin. Parmi les plus de 20 traductions  de recueils de poèmes qu’on lui doit, on compte trois finalistes du prix du meilleur livre en traduction de Open Letters (Université de Rochester), deux finalistes du Prix de la traduction de l’ALTA, et des finalistes du prix Stephen Mitchell, du Prix de la traduction de la French-American Foundation et du Prix de la traduction de Big Other. La traduction que Cole Swensen a faite de L’Île des morts (Island of the Dead) de Jean Frémon a gagné le prix PEN America  de la traduction. Elle partage son temps entre Paris et San Francisco.

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Event Subtitle
Animé par Chris Clarke et Cole Swensen
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