Exhibitions exploring ancestral knowledge and colonial legacy at York’s Goldfarb Gallery

Andrea Carlson’s A Painting is a Coin and Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s When Water Embraces Empty Space are on view from May 23 to Aug. 2

The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery of York University is proud to present two powerful solo exhibitions by international artists: A Painting is a Coin by Andrea Carlson and When Water Embraces Empty Space by Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn. Both shows centre ancestral knowledge, legacy, and cultural continuity, offering politically resonant works that challenge colonial narratives.

Carlson explores land, language, and ancestral knowledge through layered paintings, drawings, prints, video and sculpture. Nguyễn examines the legacy of colonial collecting through the story of a 19th-century canoe from Papua New Guinea, his work following the spiritual return of the boat to the descendants of its makers. In response to Nguyễn’s project, the University has also begun reassessing its collection of cultural belongings from Papua New Guinea, now partially on view for the first time in a decade.

The exhibitions will share a public reception on Thursday, May 22, from 6 to 9 p.m., with both artists in attendance, along with Nguyễn’s collaborators from Papua New Guinea. When Water Embraces Empty Space and A Painting is a Coin will remain on display from May 23 to Aug. 2, 2025. For more information, visit The Goldfarb Gallery’s website.

Andrea Carlson: A Painting is a Coin

This exhibition, curated by Clara Halpern, is Andrea Carlson’s first solo exhibition in a gallery in Ontario. A Painting is a Coin brings together a complex arrangement of recent works — paintings, drawings, prints, video and sculpture — exploring topics that have fueled the artist’s practice for two decades: land, language, ancestral knowledge, future visions, deep time, cinema, stories, memorials and refusals.

Known for her expansive, multi-panelled works on paper, Carlson brings a layered approach to visual storytelling. Landscape plays a central role in this exhibition, particularly in paintings that stretch across multiple sheets of thick, hand-worked watercolour paper. Rendered in gouache, watercolour, inks, and oil, these fragmented, prismatic scenes challenge the “empty” vistas depicted in traditional landscape painting and their role in bolstering colonial justifications.

A Painting is a Coin also features a newly commissioned sculptural installation of wooden columns, continuing Carlson’s ongoing series inspired by effigy mounds — ancient Indigenous earthworks that can take the shape of lizards, turtles and cranes. Water too runs through the work and is the subject of a multi-screen video collaboration with Rozalinda Borcilă that explores Chicago’s wetland market and the monetization of these vital ecosystems.

Together, the art in this exhibition builds intricate matrices of meaning that are personal, politically charged and cosmologically expansive, reframing relationships and time, and highlighting traditions that have withstood colonialism.

Carlson is based in Gichi Bitobig (Grand Marais), Minnesota, and Chicago, where she is co-founder of the Center for Native Futures. Her research focuses on Indigenous Futurism(s) and the entanglement of cultural narratives and institutions. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the MCA Chicago, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and participation in Prospect.6 New Orleans, the Front Triennial and the Toronto Biennial. Her work is in the collections of the British Museum, the Walker Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Gallery of Canada.

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn: When Water Embraces Empty Space

Curated by Goldfarb Gallery director Jenifer Papararo, When Water Embraces Empty Space is the first presentation of Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s work in Canada. Known for multi-faceted video and sculptural installations that explore personal narratives of diaspora and post-colonial identity, Nguyễn turns his attention to a singular, historically charged object for this exhibition: a 15-metre-long, late 19th-century canoe from the Island of Luf in Papua New Guinea.

Held in the permanent collection of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, the canoe’s provenance became the subject of a 2021 book, The Magnificent Boat (translated into English in 2023) by journalist and historian Götz Aly, who questioned the legitimacy of the canoe’s acquisition by a German trader. Nguyễn’s work positions this contested cultural belonging both as a relic and a vessel for intergenerational memory, survival and reclamation.

At the heart of the exhibition is The Encounter, a 72-minute video capturing a powerful moment: the reunion of three descendants of one of the canoe’s makers — Stanley Inum, his son Fordy, and nephew Enoch Lun — with the boat in Berlin. The film documents their emotional first encounter with the elaborately carved canoe, including a whispered critique of how the sails were incorrectly displayed, comments that lay bare colonial misunderstandings and misrepresentations.

The exhibition includes a multi-channel video installation, photographs, and hand-carved sculptures tied to the descendants’ ongoing project to build a replica canoe using measurements taken during their Berlin visit. A video offers insight into this reconstruction process. In these works, When Water Embraces Empty Space moves past documentation as it re-imagines pathways of return.

Nguyễn is a recipient of the Joan Miró Prize (2023). He has participated in major exhibitions including the Asia Pacific Triennial, the Whitney Biennial, the Sharjah Biennial and the Berlin Biennale. Recent one-person shows include The New Museum, Fundació Joan Miró and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa.

From the Visible Vault 2: Papua New Guinea cultural belongings

In parallel to Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s exhibition, Goldfarb director Jenifer Papararo is investigating York University’s own holdings from Papua New Guinea — 49 cultural objects donated in the late 1970s by architectural historian Thomas Howarth. A selection of these cultural belongings will be on view in the gallery’s Visible Vault study centre as part of a broader inquiry into their provenance.

“Nguyễn’s project and research as a whole has fostered a deeper conversation about responsibilities of cultural stewardship and the role we can play in ensuring these objects came to us ethically and, if not, being a process of repatriation,” says Papararo.

The objects were brought into the University’s collection as a significant gift, considered to be a valuable teaching asset with the stated intention of being displayed publicly. Since their exhibition in 1979, they have been presented only once in 2014,  until now.

The Goldfarb will host Nguyễn’s collaborators from Luf, Stanley and Fordy Inum, Enoch Lun, and Kireni Imwe Jean Sparks-Ngenge, for the reception of When Water Embraces Empty Space and hope to gain their knowledge of the belongings in York’s care. Creating new intersections of cultural dialogue, their visit includes studio exchanges with Indigenous artists in Toronto and Vancouver, and a meeting with curators at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. When Water Embraces Empty Space has opened a vital space for conversations around cultural stewardship, memory, and the ethics of museum collections, while centring the voices of those most directly connected to the stories these objects carry.