this was a densely wooded hill

Henry Art Gallery, 2022-23 - Concept and design led by Satpreet Kahlon, in collaboration with Asia Tail + Kimberly Deriana for yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective

In 2021, yəhaẃ received funding to purchase a site in Seattle for transformative land-based arts programming. The organization’s continuing search for land during the planning of this was a densely wooded hill forms the basis of the installation. The ongoing displacement of Native and Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories and the institutional preservation of this displacement in museums are its broader context.

As you enter the gallery, an overhead, arcing form welcomes you into the space. This cascading archive of objects, connected to community, will continue to grow through the duration of the exhibition. A ground plane depression references the spatial boundaries of a traditional earth lodge, concave formations created by decomposed village sites. Mounds and earthen structures in many forms offer historical context about the ways multiple tribal communities across Turtle Island have nurtured and cared for the land, and have also been displaced.

In a small gesture of reversal, the pieces of the installation that originated from living things and that can be repurposed, including the oyster shell floor and tree stump seating, will be returned to yəhaẃ to be brought back into living entanglements on the land parcel—offered to the ground or used for community activities.

-Curatorial statement, Mita Mahato and Ian Siporin

artist statement:

this installation is an attempt to make material an immense and accumulatory grief, both collective and personal. by gathering and weaving together disparate, precious materials, some new, some collected over decades of our lives, we ask:

what is the shape of mourning? what is the sound of a memory? how do we honor the sharp, tingling sensation of yearning that fills the cavity of our soft bodies when we think of how things could have been? can a series of objects, strung together by many hands, over silence, laughter, and tears, communicate, somehow, an absence: the space between what we desire and what we have - that gulf which grief bears witness to?

we honor, in this space, losses recent and ancient, intimate and far-reaching. we mourn the trees that once grew in this very room. we mourn the ancestors who walked on this hill. we mourn the land that lies beneath this building - a damp soil and rock that waits to feel the touch of the sun again. we honor the sun, the sky, the birds - ourselves, each other, and you. we honor this present moment by attempting to breath life into this institution, which like all other museums, necessitates death. by prioritizing preservation over decay, archive over life. sites where bodies become artifacts, and bones are refused the honor of a slow degradation back into the atoms of the earth.

in this installation, we have tried, sincerely and imperfectly, to bring vitality to these walls. a reminder of the feeling of breeze on the back of a neck; the sound of a bird call through an open window at dawn; the sweet, piercing sensation of holding a loved one’s hand, for maybe the last time.

you are invited, not only to bear witness to our grief, but to bring your own into this space and share it with us, in the form of a small object, a quiet sigh, or a closed eye moment of earnest reflection. in this way, we weave mourning together, yours and ours, and hold it, suspended tenuously in the light of a setting sun, slipping through a narrow bank of windows into a room where a family of trees once grew, and with great patience and wisdom, wait to someday grow again.

-Satpreet Kahlon, representing yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective

this was a densely wooded hill is organized by Mita Mahato and Ian Siporin. Concept and design led by Satpreet Kahlon, in collaboration with Asia Tail and Kimberly Deriana. Community objects are contributed by Michael Anderson, Ezekiel Chavira (age 12), Seven Chavira (age 10), Catherine Cross Uehara, Moe'Neyah Holland, and Raven Juarez, with bird sounds collected by 'turam purty in conversation with Iisaaksiichaa Ross Braine and Shareena Purty.