Love Songs to End Colonization
August 28, 2026 October 3, 2026 Co-organized by Open Space Arts Society and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, curated by Doug Jarvis, Open Space Executive Director, Tomas Jonsson, Tour Dad, and Toby Lawrence, AGGV Curator of Contemporary Art.This multi-site project takes place in Beacon Hill Park and at Open Space.
Artists Peter Morin and Jimmie Kilpatrick are friends who share an abiding love for karaoke and present it through their ongoing artistic collaboration, Love Songs to End Colonization, a participatory karaoke project founded in kindness, joy, futurity, and engaging a collective voice through singing. Repurposing popular love songs, this project critiques, confronts, and dismantles the historical notions and the current presence of settler colonialism and utilizes karaoke as a methodology for social change. Listeners are invited to perform a song, sing-along, clap, dance, or simply witness and soak in love and music to dismantle colonialism, one love song at a time.
“For those three minutes you are a star, and you feel like a star. And the people watching realize that they are watching a star. This performance is guided by those three minutes, and in those minutes we offer the singer a chance to reframe their relationship to colonization and the act of decolonizing in Canada.” — Peter Morin & Jimmie Kilpatrick
Performance
Friday, August 28 | 6-8pm
Cameron Bandshell, Beacon Hill Park
Artists Conversation
Saturday August 29 | 2pm
Open Space Arts Society, 510 Fort Street
Exhibition
August 29 to October 3, 2026
Open Space Art Society, 510 Fort Street
About the Artists
Jimmie Kilpatrick is a musician, writer, educator, and interdisciplinary artist based in Brandon, Manitoba. He’s been touring regularly and releasing records on Toronto’s You’ve Changed Records since 2009. Kilpatrick cut his rock & roll teeth in the early 2000’s, as part of the seminal east coast indie outfit Shotgun and Jaybird. He has appeared on recordings by John K. Samson, Christine Fellows, Joel Plaskett and By Divine Right. His 2011 release Transistor Sister was long-listed for Canada’s Polaris Music Prize.
Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan Ancestor Artists. Morin’s artistic offerings can be organized around four themes: articulating Land/Knowing, articulating Indigenous Grief/Loss, articulating Community Knowing, and understanding the Creative Agency/Power of the Indigenous body. The work takes place in galleries, in community, in collaboration, and on the land. All of the work is informed by dreams, Ancestors, Family members, and Performance Art as a Research Methodology. Peter Morin currently holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto.
Tomas Jonsson has curated, presented, and performed work in Canada and internationally. Tomas’ family came to Montreal from Denmark in 1969, living and travelling west until eventually deciding to stay in Calgary, where he was born in 1975. A large part of his practice has been unraveling and understanding this trajectory, and his relation to a place he now also knows as Mohkinstsis, among other names. Tomas is currently living in oskana ka-asasteki, also known as Pile of Bones, also known as Regina.
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