Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory…

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Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory has won this year’s Sobey Art Award for emerging artists.

The Iqaluit-based Inuk multidisciplinary artist received the $100,000 prize at a ceremony at the National Gallery of Canada on Saturday.

She is known for performing uaajeerneq, a Greenlandic mask dance that involves storytelling centred around three elements: fear, humour and sexuality.

In a news release announcing the award, Williamson Bathory said she uses her art to tell her own story and that of her family, which she says is one of “joy and celebration, awe and difficulty, beauty and destruction all at once.”

“In a time when we recognize that this Canadian soil bears the small bodies of many thousands of Indigenous children, in an era when we work through colonial institutions to keep our families safe in the pandemic and at a moment when the Arctic city I live [in] does not have potable water coming from the taps, I am proud to be recognized as I tell you the story of a momentous experience my family had on the land,” she said.

Source CBC NEWS