Public - Volume 27, Issue 54, 2016

Art that uses non-traditional media and emerging technologies, specifically the electronic or digital, has the potential to create and nurture a distinctive ‘public space’ for the articulation of alternative Māori worldviews. Although a growing number of publications focus on contemporary Māori art practice, no specific attention has yet been given to the swelling numbers of Māori practitioners operating in the field of digital media. This essay contextualizes my earlier research in the wider framework of Māori digital art and seeks to explain a kaupapa Māori creative practice.

For many years The Banff Centre was known to be instrumental in supporting the creation of many Indigenous curatorial, visual art and media art initiatives from the early 90s. This interview with Dr. Sara Diamond sheds insight and make links to her background with the B.C. labour movement, her early practice as a social activist and video maker, her close friendships with several noted key Indigenous artist frontrunners and the lead she then took to continually include and expand the presence of Indigenous artists and thinkers, our worldviews and communities at The Banff Centre from 1992 to 2005.

The concept of the ‘future imaginary’ seeks to capture the ways people imagine the futures of their societies. This article considers how Indigenous artists from North America and Oceania have used digital media to illustrate such possible futures from an Indigenous perspective. The review of their work forms the basis for a preliminary analytical framework for understanding different types of imaginings and the cultural and political work they do in expanding the possibilities of future action by Indigenous communities.

LEFT_CHANNEL is a compilation of experiments of digital image manipulation of archival film sourced from the Prelinger Archives and the NFB. Some of the footage was obtained with the collaboration of Wapikoni Mobile during the 400th anniversary of Quebec. This video was shown as part of a multi-channel installation in the ARCTIC NOISE project as well as the ISUMAGINAGU exhibit during the Asinabka Festival.

This essay considers the intersectionality between the field of art history focused on the subject category of Native American or Indigenous art and Indigenous Studies. Methodological gaps in the field of art history are discussed through the canonical genre of landscape art with a comparative reference to key exhibitions; Land Spirit Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada, (1992), The West As America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920, (1991), Submuloc Show/Columbus Wohs (1992), Our Land/Ourselves: Contemporary Native American Landscape (1991) and Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Artic (2015). The aestheticization of the colonization of the Americas as represented in the genre of landscape art is interrogated as a form of historical violence that needs to be decolonized within the field of art history.

Originally performed live in a club environment, this performance was later documented in a studio. It’s an autobiographical work that is a physical representation of decolonization of the self, the body, spirituality and sexuality.

An interview with artist Lisa Reihana about Tai Whetuki, House of Death Redux, 2016 created as her exhibition work for the prestigious New Zealand Walters Art Prize, Toi o Tamaki, Auckland Art Gallery, 2016. Interview by Megan Tamati-Quennell.

In this brief essay I will attempt to discuss the theoretical debates between sovereignty/self-determination and recognition/emancipation as it relates to Indigenous and global theoretical positions. The above debate will be framed through selected artworks such as, in Pursuit of Venus by Maori artist Lisa Reihana, and Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s web-based Vancouver song lines project. This paper will be building on the idea that Indigenous engagement with digital and new technologies is unequivocally contemporary, and that their artwork is not stuck in the anthropological past for Indigenous artists working in this medium.

The history of Canadian arctic culture has been predominantly informed through the work of non-Inuit anthropologists, academics, art dealers, curators, and collectors. A continuous cycle of restricted access has led to sustained discriminatory and misinformed representation of arctic life and culture in the media. Although broadband is opening the information highway, as long as restricted northern internet access remains, southern systems of control over Inuit voice and representation will be maintained. Through modern telecommunication technologies, social networking has become an important medium for Inuit self-representation, artistic expression, community advocacy, and activism in a historical narrative that has been dominated by a westernized, southern voice.

In early August 2016, Inuit artists Stephen Agluvak Puskas and Isabella-Rose Weetaluktuk co-curated an original format film festival in Montreal, produced in partnership with Concordia University, the FOFA Gallery and Terres en vues festival. For three evenings in a row, the FOFA Gallery’s outdoor courtyard, which opens onto one of the city’s busiest downtown streets, offered up Inuit ‘country’ food (traditional cuisine like raw seal meat and arctic char), music, Inuit games, and film and video. Each evening featured a series of short and feature films directed by or produced in serious collaboration with Inuit, arranged under three distinct themes; Unikausiit (history), Nuna (land) and Pimmariktuq (resilience). This interview is a conversation between Inuk art historian Heather Igloliorte and Puskas and Weetaluktuk, in which the co-curators reflect on the experience of creating the film festival.

This paper is a three-way conversation between anthropologist Jennifer Biddle and the artists/collaborators of the intercultural new media installation The Phone Booth Project (2012), Curtis Taylor and Lily Hibberd. The discussion considers the importance of this collaborative, community-based, art work in terms of its capacity to reveal Martu Indigenous media history and counter-memory in the greater contemporary context of a national ‘digital divide’.

Within a brief historical review of Native American digital and new media practices, this article closely examines Diné artist Will Wilson's eyeDazzler: Trans-customary Portal to Another Dimension (2011). This work features a rug made of 76,050 glass beads inspired by a 1970s wool Eyedazzler rug his grandmother wove. In the center, the artist inserted two black and white QR codes. When scanned the code links to a short video that effectively conflates the digital (hand) with the digital (media). Using Steven Loft's (Mohawk/Jewish) and Angela Haas's (Cherokee/German) methodological models, this paper argues that Wilson's work enhances the capability of a handwoven Navajo rug to reflect and project itself as a webbed network of knowledge. Considering how the work implicates Diné cosmologies and ecologies, eyeDazzler affirms indigenous North Americans' longstanding propensity for dynamic, multi-dimensional, and interconnected worlds. This conclusion challenges art and cultural institutions that perpetuate incongruence between modernity and Indians.