Northern Indigenous people define a sense of home in exhibition at U of T Architecture and Design Gallery

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As you step into the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, you are also stepping onto someone’s porch. Wooden racks crowded with coats, fishing implements and snowshoes line a corridor. Along one wall hangs a qamutiik, a traditional Inuit sled.

This is The Porch, an installation by Taqralik Partridge and Tiffany Shaw that recognizes a specific kind of space in northern households. It is also the starting point for the exhibition Towards Home, now running at the University of Toronto Architecture and Design Gallery until March. And this porch is meant to create a very specific atmosphere: home. “I want Inuit to feel welcome in exhibitions that I’ve curated,” Partridge said. “And I hope that, by extension, everyone else will feel welcome as well.”

Towards Home, which is also titled ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ in Inuktitut and Ruovttu Guvlui in Sámi, is an exceptionally rare thing: an Indigenous-led exhibition on architecture. The show began at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal in 2022. It is co-curated by Partridge, an associate curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario; Sámi architect and artist Joar Nango; Jocelyn Piirainen, an associate curator at the National Gallery of Canada; and Rafico Ruiz, the associate director of research at the CCA.

While the CCA is internationally known for its exhibitions on architectural culture and for its library, it has had blind spots. “The CCA has been, I think, rather slow in foregrounding questions of Indigenous design,” Ruiz said. “This is really a first step – and a fantastic first step.” Now, with the Toronto exhibition, “we are passing the baton” to Daniels.

The exhibition’s approach to architecture is loose – inevitably so. It explores the expansive ways in which Northern Indigenous people define, and strive for, a sense of home. This begins with the idea of a porch – which, Partridge said, is not just a room but a “liminal space” between indoors and outdoors. “It holds all the things that signify your connection to the land and all your daily activities,” she said. As such, “it’s a symbol of being connected to the land and relying on the land.” Home is not a building; it is a place and a state of being.

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Such expansive ideas about place spill through the exhibition, in which the artists pose some broad questions about domesticity. That idea is inevitably complex for individuals and peoples whose homes and lives have been profoundly disrupted by the rippling effects of colonization.

The exhibition design, by Métis architect and designer Shaw, takes advantage of the gallery at the Daniels school – one of very few gallery spaces in the country that feature architecture. An elevated corridor snakes around the edges of the space, revealing design models and craft by young Indigenous makers. The main volume is filled with a handful of sizable installations carried over from the Montreal version of the show.

The first of these is artist Geronimo Inutiq’s I’m Calling Home, a commissioned radio broadcast that recalls the central role that radio plays as a tool of communication. (Inutiq’s mother worked for the CBC, so this work is personal.) Within an interior that approximates his own childhood house, Inutiq presents a “Northern Virtual Broadcast” that mixes real conversation with other Inuit with hits of magic realism. (A heat wave in Northern Quebec. It’s fantastical, at least for now). For Inutiq, this is an effort to connect emotionally with a childhood home with which “it is now difficult to reconnect,” he said. “Through my art, and my practice, I create a conversation with my heritage.”

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In another installation, Nuna, artist Asinnajaq creates a tent-like structure that recalls a mossy nook where she had “the best nap of my life,” as she explained at the opening event. A glowing textile drapes over a frame of elegantly joined wooden members before a squiggle of neon that evokes a campfire. “This is not a depiction of a traditional space,” she said. “It’s imagining having a space – a space to work, a space to be with family, a space to be with other people.”

Among the other elements of the show are Partridge’s photographs of landscapes in Iqaluit and Montreal – landscapes that many Inuit have seen as they come to the city, for reasons including medical treatment. “These are places that Inuit inhabit even if they are not obviously places of beauty,” Partridge said. “Inuit relate to the land wherever we are. Everything we stand on is part of the Earth.” And so, in a sense, it is home.