Signs of Your Identity
August 24 - September 30, 2017
Artist Reception | Tuesday, September 19
About the Exhibition
For 120 years, the Canadian government operated a network of Indian Residential Schools that were meant to assimilate young indigenous students into western Canadian culture. Indian agents would take children from their homes as young as two or three and send them to church-run boarding schools where they were punished for speaking their native languages or observing any indigenous traditions, routinely sexually and physically assaulted, and in some extreme instances subjected to medical experimentation and sterilization.
The last residential school closed in 1996. The Canadian government issued its first formal apology in 2008.
Generations of Canada's First Nations forgot who they were. Languages died out, sacred ceremonies were criminalized and suppressed. "'You stupid Indian' were the first English words I ever learned," Tom Janvier told me. He was sent to residential school as a 3-year-old, where he was bullied, beaten, and sexually molested. "It became self-fulfilling. My identity was held against me.”
These double exposure portraits explore the trauma of some of the 80,000 living survivors who remain, and through extensive accompanying interviews address the impact of intergenerational trauma, lateral violence, and document the slow path towards healing.
About the Artist
Daniella Zalcman (b. 1986) is a documentary photographer based in London and New York. She is a multiple grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a fellow with the International Women's Media Foundation, and a member of Boreal Collective. She is also the founder of Women Photograph, an initiative to elevate the voices of female and nonbinary visual journalists.
Her work tends to focus on the legacies of western colonization, from the rise of homophobia in East Africa to the forced assimilation education of Indigenous children. Her ongoing project Signs of Your Identity has been recognized with the 2017 Arnold Newman Prize, a 2017 RFK Journalism Award, the 2016 Magnum Foundation Inge Morath Award, and the 2016 FotoEvidence Book Award.
Daniella’s work regularly appears in The Wall Street Journal, Mashable, the BBC, and CNN, among others. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in architecture in 2009.