Paper Short Abstract:

Indigenous histories is a collective exhibition that invited indigenous curators around the globe to propose a curatorial approach of their art worlds. My aim is to reflect about contradictions and potentialities of this proposal in an institutional museum, regarding the process and its results.

Paper Abstract:

Indigenous histories is a collective exhibition organized by the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo and the Kode Bergen Art Museum. The show invited curators around the globe to propose a section based in the arts, images, objects, and visual cultural that could give the general public access of a fragment, curatorially organized, of the relations between Indigenous art and its representation through history in different territories.

The idea of comparison is central. Each of these researchers and artists lives and works in regions of the world where the interaction between indigenous and institutionalized art takes place in very different ways.

Indigenous populations are defined by a deep and ancestral relationship with territories that were invaded during the colonization process. Through a lot of resistance and struggle, practices, materiality and visual traditions have been transformed over the centuries, constituting narrative and visual paradigms that have been interiorized by academia and museums. The exhibition of works produced by indigenous artists thus presents possibilities for writing other histories of art from different discursive and formal markers, expanding the limits of what the art object is, its effects and powers.

My aim in this presentation, as an anthropologist, curator, and curatorial coordinator of Indigenous histories, is to think about how the show can be situated in this constellation of contradictions of exhibiting living objects in spaces that have historically treated them as dead, disturbing some of their assumptions, but also helping to strengthen these other narratives and histories of art.