Maureen Gruben

Aidainnaqduanni (Inuvialuktun for ‘We are finally home’) presents three old, deteriorating polar bear rugs that Gruben brought back to the Arctic after they were gifted to her by a southern museum. They have been paired with industrial survey tripods found among the detritus abandoned in Tuktoyaktuk by oil companies in the 80s. Draped over these large tripods, the bears recover a three-dimensional presence. Their gaze can now directly meet a viewer’s, though their internal architecture has transformed from organs and bone to industrial equipment—a change that offers a ‘post-animal’ counterpart to increasingly pervasive theories of the post-human. The assemblage was installed on the ice outside the artist’s house in Tuktoyaktuk as the ocean grew still during the 2020 freeze up. This act returned the bears to their home environment after they had spent many years on an unrecorded journey that took them as far south, at least, as Vancouver. Gradual shifts took place during the week-long installation, rendering it as close to durational performance as static sculpture. Thick frost coated the bears’ fur while ice accumulated and cracked around their base, as overflow washed in and froze in layers, slowly shifting the bears’ positions on their tripods so that their faces tilted up towards the sky.

Survey tripods relate to the night sky in that both stars and industrial equipment have been used as tools for charting land, often with the goal of claiming ownership and mastery over it. In their constant, predictable arcs the stars have helped us to understand our position on land and water and in so doing have allowed us to travel vast distances across both. Knowing where we are can also help us find our way home again. This idea has resonance in terms of reclaiming language and traditional knowledge of vital interspecies relationships that ancestral lands support. The work generates complex narratives around tensions between land as home and land as finite industrial resource. Enmeshed with global, even planetary, themes Aidainnaqduanni, with its returned bears, also offers a simple, concise glimpse into a beautiful specificity of place: for much of the arctic year home is a dazzling layer, equally harsh and fragile, between stars and ice.