June 19 – August 9, 2026
Love Song to End Colonization / Kanorónhkhwa’tshera Karenna’shón:’a Taká:taste ne Aionkhiia’tó:rarake
Curator: Tomas Jonsson
Peter Morin and Jimmie Kilpatrick
In the Gallery’s indoor vitrine
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 / Kanorónhkhwa’tshera Karenna’shón:’a Taká:taste ne Aionkhiia’tó:rarake, 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.
“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
This exhibition, on view in the Gallery’s vitrine, brings together ephemera and documentation from past performances. The exhibition is open to the public every day from 7 AM to 11 PM on the ground floor of the McConnell Library Building, at 1400 boul. De Maisonneuve W.
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 / Kanorónhkhwa’tshera Karenna’shón:’a Taká:taste ne Aionkhiia’tó:rarake, 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.
“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
This exhibition, on view in the Gallery’s vitrine, brings together ephemera and documentation from past performances. The exhibition is open to the public every day from 7 AM to 11 PM on the ground floor of the McConnell Library Building, at 1400 boul. De Maisonneuve W.
There is a light and it never goes out
Tomas Jonsson
Karaoke, like decolonization, is better approached with vulnerability, sincerity and joy. Time after time, Peter Morin and Jimmie Kilpatrick have breathed magic through song and laughter. They have performed together in wheatfields, museums, the Double Decker (AKA the Church of Karaoke), Universities, on sidewalks, in hallways and along shorelines. Through the ever-growing iterations of their project Love Songs to End Colonization, there is a quality that carries beyond the conviviality of a heartfelt rendition of I Will Survive. In naming this elusive quality, Peter and Jimmie still haven’t found what they are looking for. It is something more than words. There is a sacredness, a collective act of reframing.
Read moreKaraoke, like decolonization, doesn’t demand virtuosity. The gauntlet to the stage is a welcoming one, thrown down by the hosts and those gathered. Everyone that sings engages in this process differently, everyone has to go their own way, and these moments are punctuated by hoots and hollers when collectively recognized. We sing not necessarily in tune but attuned. We don’t appropriate the songs but inhabit them. As artist Kosisochukwu Nnebe notes, language is both a wound and a bridge.1 We sing the words we have. We bend the lyrics, make them do a different thing, subversively changing the DNA of the songs until they stop making sense. The resonance stays and grows in our bodies and voices. Karaoke light shines outward. In exchange for the gift of our songs, we receive in turn a shirt that reveals the truth: we are the love songs.
The window display of the Ellen is a frozen moment, a day in the life of an imagined gathering of singers, demonstrating the power of love. The glow of neon signs and the refracted light from a disco ball shine over a growing archive of ephemera: the ubiquitous song slips from past gatherings; mannequins adorned in the beaded blue jean jackets of Peter and Jimmie, and T-shirts made by karaoke collaborators, including Tania Willard, Kevin De Forest, Susan Blight with Melody McIver, and Veronica Wachter.
A loop of karaoke videos plays on a TV, their sound transcending the glass partition and encouraging passersby to join in and sing their hearts out. These seven tracks are featured on the vinyl record of Love Songs to End Colonization, the first-ever Karaoke double LP, also included in the display.
Love songs to End Colonization is in affinity with projects such as Rebecca Belmore’s Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother, Luis Jacob’s Flashlight and Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s yâhkaskwan mîhkiwap (light tipi), and her installation Why the Caged Bird Sings. These projects, and many others, revel in the small collective gestures that echo and amplify. In every iteration of Love Songs to End Colonization, each song is a match, we are each a spark. We join the little smoke that goes far as an eternal flame that is burning down the house.
Free of the gravity of colonialism, in a moonage daydream we form our own orbits and relations. What we gain is not the promised 15 minutes of fame, but the realization that we are all made of stars. Together we become a constellation, a galaxy. Basking under the neon lights rather than a spotlight, we are invited to let our little lights shine.
1 Kosisochukwu Nnebe, “Nna m, how do I say: ‘Language is both the wound and the bridge’?”in Articles: Field Notes, 15 December 2021, Artexte, accessed May 20, 2026, https://artexte.ca/en/articles/nna-m-how-do-i-saylanguage-is-both-the-wound-and-the-bridge/.
CloseJimmie 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.