Will Kwan: A Littoral Reconstruction

The performance was curated by Helena Reckitt as part of the public programme devised in association with the exhibition 'Cuttings (Supplement)' Simon Starling at The Power Plant in Toronto.

Responding to Starling’s intervention in Lake Ontario, Toronto-based artist Will Kwan presented a new performance that considered how national identity is delineated through a population’s claims to land, landscape and natural heritage. During the summer and fall of 2007, a number of assaults targeting Asian Canadian anglers in Ontario were reported to provincial authorities. The incidents unhinged certain established assumptions about multicultural Canadian society, revealing an undertow of xenophobia against those perceived as “outsiders.”

A Littoral Reconstruction attempts to retrace the physical and mental landscape of the incidents by combining material from a preliminary report drafted by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, press coverage, blogs, site visits, interviews, extracts from Ontario Tourism promotional literature, and Group of Seven biographies. The narrative seeks to reconsider the landscape as a social and potentially nationalistic territory, rather than a natural phenomenon that transcends cultural difference.