This Is Not Our Waste

July 26, 2025 – October 5, 2025
Art Gallery of Peterborough

Image: Oleepika Nashalik

At the edge of the Arctic, where melting permafrost cracks open ancient earth and cruise ships drift past like ghosts, a group of artists is sounding the alarm.

Positioned at the intersection of art, politics, and resistance, this exhibition confronts the ecological and cultural unraveling of Panniqtuuq, a remote Inuit community on the east coast of Baffin Island. Featuring work by Inuit artists Madeleine Aasivak Qumuataq, Jupa Ishulutak, Kawtysie Kakee, Annie Kilabuk (1932–2005), David Kilabuk, Talia Metuq, Oleepika Nashalik, and Malaya Pitsiulak, alongside settler artist and researcher Micky Renders, the show is a raw and urgent call to attention.

As the climate crisis accelerates, Panniqtuuq faces a brutal confluence of warming ice, rising sea levels, ballooning military presence, and an onslaught of industrial waste. The exhibition doesn’t flinch. Instead, it reframes the narrative—these are not just victims of colonial neglect, but witnesses and truth-tellers exposing a system built on consumption and erasure.

Through painting, sculpture, photography, tapestry, and digital media, the artists challenge the imposed logic of disposability and reclaim the right to land, memory, and clean air. The works are bold, deeply felt, and unapologetically political.

At its core, this is an exhibition about sovereignty—over stories, over land, and over the future. It asks, piercingly: Who defines waste in the Arctic? And who is left holding the trash?

Madeleine Aasivak Qumuatuk is a respected knowledge holder, translator, and cultural activist who was born, lives and works in Panniqtuuq, NU. A feminist force for Inuit advocacy and wellness for over 30 years, she has served as Acting President of the Nunavut Status of Women Council, and Adviser to the Nunavut Impact Review Board (NIRB) and Consultant for Parks Canada. She has also consulted on many academic research projects, drawing on her vast knowledge of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (traditional Inuit knowledge). Qumuatuk was voted Nunavut Woman of the Year in 2011, and she credits her namesake with instilling in her strength and resilience. Her artwork reflects her deep connection to traditional Inuit life and her commitment to justice and advocacy.

Jupa Ishulutak captures the evolving realities of Inuit life, balancing tradition with transformation in his carvings. Ishulutak describes how making art is a means of survival. He is a third-generation carver and jewellery maker, and the father of eight children. His work explores themes of survival, adaptation, and resilience, incorporating imagery of wildlife, shamanic figures, and modern elements such as snowmobiles, airplanes, and houses. Ishulutak’s work highlights how Inuit maintain cultural identity while adapting to settler colonial intrusions and serves as a bridge between past and present, contributing to Inuit self-definition and continuity. He was part of the Arctic Adaptations exhibition in the Canadian Pavillion at the 2014 Venice Biennale in Architecture and his work is included in collections across Canada and beyond.

Kawtysie Kakee is a master weaver from Panniqtuuq (Pangnirtung), NU and the original collaborating artist for, Women Cleaning Sealskins. Kakee wove the eighth edition of the work, which is included in this exhibition. For over 50 years she has been working with textiles after beginning to work at the Panniqtuuq tapestry studio in 1975. Kakee’s was featured in Nuvisavik: The Place Where We Weave (2002), an exhibition at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, QC, that displayed artwork created in the Panniqtuuq studio to highlight the history of the region and artists’ involvement in their community. Her work has been exhibited at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Winnipeg, MB, the gallery at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, NS, and at the Upstairs Gallery in Winnipeg, MB.

Annie Kilabuk (1932 – 2005) was a skilled graphic and print artist, born at Qimmisuuq, a nomadic camp. She was 36 when she moved to the permanent settlement of Panniqtuuq. Kilabuk was skilled at embroidery, which led to designing and making dolls, toys and other crafts. She soon became well-known for her drawings and prints, which were often used as tapestry designs. The original image for, Women Cleaning Sealskins, began as a work on paper by Kilabuk. In an interview, Kilabuk said, “I have to do a lot of thinking before I put stories onto paper. I like to tell stories for future generations. My drawings will still be there even after I am dead.”

David Kilabuk is a photographer based in Panniqtuuq (Pangnirtung), NU who captures the stories of his home community through photography. He was selected as one of “Six Photographers to Watch” in the Winter 2016 issue of Inuit Art Quarterly. As the unofficial photographer of Panniqtuuq, his patience, skill and sensitivity as a photographer have, for over 25 years, resulted in iconic photographs of contemporary Inuit life and the surrounding natural world, appearing in Up Here Magazine, Nunatsiaq News, CBC North, Canadian Geographic, and included in the Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada. He won the Sovereign’s Medal for Volunteers (2017) and Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee Medal (2002) for both citizenship and photography.

Talia Metuq is an Inuk game developer, an organizer of the Makerspace movement in Nunavut, and the Community Engagement and the Special Projects Coordinator at Ampere (Pinnguaq Association). She designs programs that range from adult digital skills classes to youth camps in northern Indigenous communities, focusing on STEAM education that reinforces and supports traditional knowledge and practices. She studied at Fleming College (Haliburton), the Visual College of Art and Design (Vancouver), and Trent University (Peterborough). Metuq also enjoys beading earrings and designing traditionally inspired clothing through knitting and sewing.

Oleepika Nashalik is an Inuit artist whose powerful and expressive drawings and paintings contrast aspects of the traditional Inuit way of life with modern ways, reflecting on how the two cultures are bound together through contradicting material and cultural shifts seen in her lifetime, understood in a historical and geopolitical context. A renowned seamstress, Nashalik works with traditional methods using skins and furs to create contemporary designs, skillfully responding to external influences on Inuit culture and adapting them to her purposes.

Malaya Pitsiulak was born in Opingvik, an uninhabited Baffin Island offshore island and one of the last outposts—a day’s boat ride from Panniqtuuq. Pitsiulak grew up on the land where she received a traditional Inuit education from her father, master carver, artist and activist Lypa Pitsiulak. She is one of only a few female carvers in Nunavut, an excellent markswoman, fisher, and runs the last dog team in Panniqtuuq. One of her most significant carvings, made from the 200-pound skull of a bowhead whale, is part of the collection at the Qaumajuq Center for Inuit Art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Pitsuliak was also part of the Arctic Adaptations exhibition in the Canadian Pavillion at the 2014 Venice Biennale in Architecture. Her sculptures are included in many public and private collections, and she has been recently commissioned by the Government of Canada.

Micky Renders is a multidisciplinary artist from Peterborough, Ontario. Her career as an artist, activist, and educator spans over 30 years, for which she has received national recognition. This exhibition formed a major part of her interdisciplinary research-creation PhD dissertation in Environmental Studies from Queen’s University (2025). Renders was awarded the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Doctoral Prize for her work.

thewire