Poet, performer, throat-singer and curator born in Montréal (Québec) in 1975.
Taqralik Partridge was born in 1975 in Montréal, to an Inuk father and a Scottish mother. She has fond childhood memories of several Arctic villages and has selected Kuujjuaq as her home. Taqralik returned to Montréal to study and stayed to work for the Avataq Cultural Institute, as its director of communications in the 2000s until launching full-time into an artistic career.
Taqralik Partridge’s performance art focuses on poetry describing Inuit life experiences in northern and southern Québec. She is a spoken word poet, performing live and incorporating throat-singing into her performances and YouTube recordings. In 2008, when conductor Kent Nagano and members of the Montréal Symphony Orchestra toured three Nunavik communities for the first time, she was on stage throat-singing with Evie Mark, a musician and teacher from Nunavik. The same year, she co founded Montréal’s Tusarniq, a festival of words, music and images showcasing indigenous artists. Taqralik was a featured artist onstage at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia and narrator for the 2015 audiobook edition of Minnie Aodla Freeman’s Life Among the Qallunaat (1978).
Taqralik Partridge’s writing has appeared in several magazines, Inuktitut, Makivik Magazine, Makivik News, Inuit Art Quarterly and Maisonneuve, where her short story Igloolik won first prize in the 2010 Quebec Writing Competition. In 2014, she was invited to be the guest editor of Canada’s prestigious literary magazine Arc Poetry Magazine. A former member of the Inuit Art Quarterly’s editorial advisory council, she was selected Editor-at-Large in 2019, the first Inuk to be hired in this position. In 2020, her collection of poetry curved against the hull of a peterhead was launched at the ArtsEverywhere festival in Guelph, Ontario.
Another Inuk first, in 2018, was her co-curation of an Inuit artists’ exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto called Tunirrusiangit, meaning “‘the gifts they gave us’”. Her visual art was part of the exhibition, Among All These Tundras at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University in Montréal in 2019. She was selected to be part of the Sydney Biennale (Australia) in 2020 and curated Qautamaat | Every day / everyday, a photography exhibition at the Art Gallery of Guelph, also in 2020. Taqralik Partridge will become the director of SAW Centre’s Nordic Lab: SAW, which was founded in 1973, is an artist-run centre focusing on performance and media arts, which is based in Ottawa. Taqralik Partridge will be heading the Nordic Lab as a new cultural centre in Ottawa, founded in partnership with the Canada Council for the Arts, promoting collaboration and exchange between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists when it opens in 2020.
Taqralik Partridge now lives in Canada and Kautokeino, Norway, in Northern Sápmi.