September 21 – December 1, 2019

259 Lake Shore Blvd East

Adrian Stimson, Iini Sookumapii: Guess who’s coming to dinner?, 2019, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. On view at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019). Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy Toronto Biennial of Art.
Adrian Stimson, Iini Sookumapii: Guess who’s coming to dinner?, 2019, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. On view at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019). Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy Toronto Biennial of Art.
Adrian Stimson, Iini Sookumapii: Guess who’s coming to dinner?, 2019, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. On view at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019). Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy Toronto Biennial of Art.
AA Bronson, A Public Apology to Siksika Nation; and Adrian Stimson, Iini Sookumapii: Guess who’s coming to dinner?. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. On view at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019). Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy the Toronto Biennial of Art.
AA Bronson and Adrian Stimson visit the Old Sun Residential School, now a community college, on Siksika Nation reserve, March 25, 2018. Photo: Ben Miller.

Stimson’s installation and performance is generated in close dialogue with residential school survivors and leaders in Siksika. Revealing the layers of colonization and Indigenous resistance in his community, Iini Sookumapii: Guess who’s coming to dinner? centers on a dining room table, complete with a British colonial place setting and a light procured from the Old Sun school. The table serves a double function: it reconstitutes the conditions under which Siksika Nation members gathered to first consider Bronson’s proposal for an apology, while replicating the spare furnishings of a residential school. The installation features school portraits of residential school students, providing a personal dimension to the institutionalization of assimilation.

Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art.

Bio

Adrian Stimson

Adrian Stimson (Siksika / Blackfoot, born in 1964, Sault St. Marie, Canada) holds a BFA from the Alberta University for the Arts, Calgary, and an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon. Adrian is an interdisciplinary artist who exhibits nationally and internationally. He was awarded the 2018 Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts and the 2017 Hnatyshyn Foundation REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award. Adrian’s works are included in collections including the British Museum, London, UK; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina; and the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton.

Exhibition Site

259 Lake Shore Blvd East

The life of this nondescript building reveals the area’s economic history. Its first tenant in 1945, the Standard Chemical Company, produced methanol, formaldehyde, and charcoal. A railway line to the south tethered the site to the movement of goods. By 1954, the building was divided into a warehouse and a showroom, a configuration that remained intact over the course of various leaseholders, including oil and electrical supply companies and a series of car dealerships. (The advertising of its most recent tenant, Volvo, is still visible on the façade.) This building’s fate is indeterminate, as real estate development is increasingly filling the voids left by industrial decline.

259 Lake Shore Blvd East
Toronto ON
M5A 3T7