Art, Activism and the Stories We Carry Home

THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / VISUAL ART DEPT.

Spring in Winnipeg, Canada is very stubborn. The kind that teases warmth in the morning only to pull it back by noon, leaving behind wind sharp enough to cut through layers. Back in 2021, on one of those days when cold still clung to the air, I wandered through the Exchange District, watching its red-bricked facades give way to the sweeping alabaster curves of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Merely wandering, I had not planned to visit the museum, but I was impelled to by the building’s twisting form rising from the earth and gesturing toward something higher, like an unfinished thought. ‘Hope, maybe?’ I thought to myself. ‘Or just the weight of history itself.’

Reluctant yet curious, my footsteps echoed softly through the museum’s galleries, each room opening seamlessly into the next, inviting me deeper into the stories contained within.

Four floors and many steps later, I found myself standing before the Artivism exhibition, where the dim lighting lent an almost reverential glow to the pieces on display. There were the haunting Masks of Yazidi Women by Rebin Chalak, cast from the faces of genocide survivors and tapestries of the Intuthuko Embroidery Project, stitching together South Africa’s apartheid wounds. Each piece bore the weight of its own history, its own reckoning. And yet, as I took them in, my thoughts turned inevitably to home.