Kinngait: from Kenojuak to Shuvinai
An Extraordinary Encounter with Fantastic Art

Organized as part of the exhibition An Inuit Art Cooperative in Canadian Great North.  Kinngait, Nunavut – The Claude Baud and Michel Jacot Collection, this meeting is all about the encounter with Inuit art from Kinngait. Collector Claude Baud, curator and general manager of the West Baffin Cooperative, William Huffman, and curator of the Canadian Cultural Centre exhibition, Catherine Bédard, will discuss their experience of this encounter, and how each has lived it, individually, and chosen to share it with the public.

Inspired by the collectors’ sensitivity, passion and respect for the formal power, bestiary, symbolic figures and spirit of Inuit art, the exhibition brings together nearly 130 works associated alternately by artists, themes, or by stylistic and formal structures or resonances. 

Without claiming to circumscribe the complexity of the community it exhibits, this exhibition focuses on almost 50 years of production at the Kinngait Studio, on the vision of two collectors who are strangers to this context but deeply admiring of it, but also on the sensitive, critical and indispensable issue of the relationship with the other, understood here in both directions, in a reciprocity shifted in time and space. It deals with art in Kinngait, from the early years of the founding of a printmaking studio lost in the vast lands and extreme climate of Canada’s Far North, completely isolated from the world, to the international success that characterizes it today. 

The meeting will address issues of proximity and strangeness, our vision of the extraordinary and fantastic confronted with what we perceive of the Inuit art exhibited here, but also the real and concrete context of local production, as well as the challenges and repercussions of the international dissemination of Kinngait art.

This exhibition and this event are organized in partnership with the West Baffin Cooperative in Kinngait, Nunavut.