Image: Remai Modern, Saskatoon
Remai Modern in Saskatoon has opened ‘Carried by rivers, held by lands’, a group exhibition that gathers artist projects developed through exchanges, gatherings and site-responsive processes extending beyond the gallery. The exhibition runs in Connect Gallery from July 31 to December 6, 2026, and brings together works by Cooking Sections, Kultivator, Katarina Pirak Sikku, Katarina Spik Skum, Althea Thauberger, Marianne Nicolson with Dzawada̱ʼenux̱w First Nation community members, Laakkuluk Williamson and Jamie Griffiths.
The exhibition is described by the museum as moving between river and oceanic contexts, with works attending to the flows that sustain and unsettle life across ecological, cultural and economic systems. On the exhibition page, Remai Modern frames the project as grounded in reciprocity, continuity and resistance, and as proposing ways of living otherwise within and against the conditions of colonial capitalism and climate crisis.
Several of the projects are tied to long-running exchanges and collaborations. Cooking Sections’ CLIMAVORE project appears through ‘Bivalve Murals’, which the museum says signals an ongoing collaboration around adaptive food systems. Exchanges between Kultivator and Marianne Nicolson with the Musga̱maḵw Dzawada̱ʼenux̱w First Nation centre the rematriation of knowledge connected to stinging nettle and oolichan fishing. Katarina Pirak Sikku’s works trace Sámi histories of displacement along dammed rivers.
The exhibition also brings forward projects first presented through earlier phases of the initiative. Remai Modern says works by Althea Thauberger and by Laakkuluk Williamson and Jamie Griffiths, originally shown in the Connect Gallery, return in new relation to the broader constellation of artworks gathered here. The museum presents the exhibition as one that extends conversations unfolding across multiple years, locations and forms of exchange.
Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh, Co-Executive Director and CEO of Remai Modern, and Tarah Hogue, Adjunct Curator (Indigenous Art), are curating the exhibition with Maria Lind, Director of Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiruna. The exhibition is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Embassy of Sweden.
The exhibition page also points to related programming that expands the project beyond the gallery walls. A public gathering titled ‘Carried by rivers, held by lands: a Gathering’ is scheduled for September 11 and 12, 2026, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with a public forum led by Cooking Sections on Friday and a Saturday session in which participating artists gather with collaborators and community members. The museum’s August newsletter also notes that the gathering is intended to encounter the multi-year project as a whole.
Another commissioned project within the exhibition, Tanya Lukin Linklater’s ‘Storm song’, is presented separately as a site-responsive installation of sound, textiles and places of rest in the Gallery Lounge on Level 3 of Remai Modern, overlooking kisiskâciwani-sîpiy, the South Saskatchewan River. That work is scheduled to run from August 28 to December 3, 2026, and is described by the museum as centering Indigenous women’s knowledge and lived experiences of weather, land and memory across the Great Plains.
