Gazing into the representation of Indigeneity in Indigenous contemporary art

WEBINAR SERIES 2023 | The Indigenous Gaze: decolonising visual cultures

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GAZING INTO THE REPRESENTATION OF INDIGENEITY IN INDIGENOUS CONTEMPORARY ART: 

Reconciling via decolonizing aesthetics and curatorial practices?

Dr. Laura Singeot

From 2000 onwards, Indigenous contemporary art displayed a new reflective dimension : not only did artists represent their own perception of Indigeneity, but this also emphasized a change in curatorial practices as such pieces of contemporary art started to be integrated in and sometimes commissioned for primarily ethnographic exhibitions. From a colonial institution by excellence, the museum seemed to become also an agent for change: by implementing new curatorial practices, it enabled new voices to be heard and started to function as a teller of alternative histories, which definitely leave their imprint on the visitors’ experience of art.

After a brief overview of those curatorial changes, this webinar will consider how the fact of visualizing History in art comes as a way of re-writing or rather re-righting it, while also including other testimonies and voices. Artists choose specific historical themes they draw their inspiration from, but their very practice and the form they choose is also telling of a deep reflexivity on aesthetics. While drawing from a corpus of artists from Australia and New Zealand, I will argue that contemporary Indigenous art draws from the former European epistemologies of the Indigenous while exposing that European gaze and layering it with Indigenous prisms of perception – the «Indigenous gaze».

Webinar Session and Q&A moderated by Dr. Annalisa Laganà.

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About the Speaker

Laura Singeot is a researcher at CREA, Paris Nanterre Université and teaches English at university Paris Saclay. She is interested in the representations of Indigeneity in contemporary Indigenous literatures from Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand. She has also studied and published on Australian science-fiction, speculative and dystopic young adult fiction. She is also researching new museology and Indigenous visual art, focusing on its integration into global networks of creation, curation and reception.

[Moderator]

Annalisa Laganà is a historian of modern and contemporary art. After earning a master’s degree in Philosophy of Language dedicated to the analysis of verbal signs in Magritte’s writings and paintings, she undertook historical-artistic studies. She, therefore, acquired a master’s degree and a postgraduate diploma in History of modern and contemporary art. In December 2021, she gained a PhD in Art History at the Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici of the Università della Calabria (Italy) and the École normale supérieure of Paris, with a thesis entitled Le lettere d’artista. Vicende di un patrimonio nell’Italia dell’Ottocento. She currently teaches History of Modern and Contemporary Art for the course of Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage, DiBEST – Università della Calabria.

Image © Caroline Monnet, History Shall Speak for Itself II, 2018