Art, Truth & Reconciliation

By Gerald McMaster

Chapter

Rebecca Belmore, Apparition, 2013

A woman clad in t-shirt and jeans kneels. Her mouth is taped with a piece of duct tape.

In her deceptively simple video performance Apparition, Anishinaabe interdisciplinary artist Rebecca Belmore (b.1960) kneels with duct tape over her mouth, removes it, and remains silent. It operates as a profound critique of the ways in which Indigenous languages and voices have been forcibly suppressed, especially through the residential and day school systems. The work’s silence is not absence; rather, it signals what has been lost, what is at risk, and what persists beyond the enforced muteness. As such, it unfolds as a quiet yet potent meditation on language loss, colonial erasure, and the embodied residue of silence.

Belmore’s articulation of silence is deeply layered. The duct tape, a symbol of forced silence, evokes the institutional policies that punished students for speaking their mother tongues. Removing it does not automatically bring back voice or belonging, for the artist remains silent, making visible the long shadow of imposed muteness. This silence reflects both individual and communal histories: the personal sense of displacement, loss of ancestral speech, and collective cultural trauma. Yet, it also becomes a site of resistance. By remaining present in silence, Belmore disrupts normative expectations of what testimony or reconciliation should look like—audible confession or formal declaration.

A photograph of a woman in a white t-shirt dancing is mounted on a board pierced by small lightbulbs.

Visually, Apparition employs restraint. The minimal staging, with a painted backdrop and her body centred, directs attention to presence versus absence, voice versus silence. The duration of the four-minute video feels stretched in its silence, creating space for reflection and discomfort. The viewer is forced to stay with Belmore in her unvoiced mourning; in that shared time, empathy or recognition becomes possible but not guaranteed. Crucially, Apparition demands more than personal lament. It points to structural harms: the residential schools’ deliberate eradication of language, culture, and identity. Belmore’s choice not to restore speech even after removing the tape emphasizes that apology or reconciliation cannot simply re-enable what was lost. Structural supports, such as language revival, cultural affirmation, and educational change, are necessary.

Apparition aligns with many of Belmore’s performance works, including her groundbreaking The Named and the Unnamed, 2005. Belmore does not dramatize violence but dwells in aftermath, memory, and relational loss. That dwelling exceeds mourning. It is an insistence on what the schools were designed to destroy: the conditions of mino-bimaadiziwin, the Anishinaabe understanding of living well, in right relation with the land, language, community, and future generations.

The viewer emerges from Apparition unsettled because Belmore refuses to give false closure. The work holds open the questions of what it means to speak, to be heard, and to reclaim what was forcibly silenced. For Indigenous Survivors and communities, Apparition becomes more than art—it becomes an act of recognition, mourning, and insistence that language, voice, and presence matter.

Art, Truth & Reconciliation

Rebecca Belmore, Apparition, 2013

Collection of A New Generation of Art