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Canadian artist John Wynne’s Anspayaxw is one of the exhibits opening at the Surrey Art Gallery on Saturday.

With just a few hundred fluent speakers remaining, Gitxsanimaax – like thousands of native tongues around the globe – is a language at risk of extinction. And what we stand to lose is the focus of Anspayaxw, a powerful installation by renowned London-based Canadian sound artist John Wynne.

For the piece, Mr. Wynne travelled to the Gitxsan community of Anspayaxw near Hazelton, where he recorded native speakers in collaboration with UBC linguist Tyler Peterson and visual artist Denise Hawrysio.

"I would ask, 'What would you like us to record? What would you like to say?'" recounts Mr. Wynne, whose works have been shown from London to Dubai, and who was the first sound artist in the Saatchi Collection, one of the world's most esteemed contemporary-art collections.

One man delivers a formal speech about traditional language and practices; another sings her own Gitxsanimaax translation of the Bob Miller song White Azaleas; another recounts a residential school tale about a group of teens who broke into the pantry where the Spam they were being fed was stored and threw it outside, leaving police to drive over the cans.

"He told that story first in Gitxsan, and I heard the word 'Spam' and I heard the word 'riot,' so he finished and I said, 'What was that about a Spam riot?'" says Mr. Wynne with a laugh. "Then he explained it in English."

The resulting work features the audio projected through photographs of the Gitxsan in the spaces where they were recorded, paired with mirror images of the same spaces, but devoid of people – a visual nod to the ongoing loss of native speakers. Mr. Wynne also incorporates environmental sounds from the area – water travelling under ice, the breath of a dog, a chainsaw, a bingo caller.

Anspayaxw, which originally showed at MOA during the Cultural Olympiad, is being paired with Views from the Southbank II: Moments, Reflections, Intervals, an expansive exhibition of portraiture from south of the Fraser that features works by Edward Burtynsky, Ken Lum, Lisa Chen and more than two dozen others, and is helping to mark the gallery's 40th anniversary.

"We are losing languages all the time. And some people might say, 'Why do we need them?'" says Mr. Wynne, whose work also explores how documentation and translation are imperfect mirrors for disappearing languages. "But there is all kinds of cultural knowledge in languages that just won't exist once they're gone."

Anspayaxw, Views from the Southbank II, and Remediating Curtis – Imagining Indigeneity open at the Surrey Art Gallery on Saturday (surrey.ca/artgallery).

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