Indigenism(s)/Indigeneity: Towards a Visual Sovereignty

Abstract

Indigenous situated knowledges are increasingly being recognized as an urgent voice in global debates on natural resources, sustainability, heritage, governance, representation, and social justice. This is also particularly true of the global art scene, where the recent 58th Venice Biennale (2019) and Documenta 14 (2017) have included contemporary Indigenous artists in a bid to "challenge existing habits of thought"1 and locate "the connections between coloniality and expression, place and power".2 Do these attempts on the part of contemporary art institutions to assert "Indigenous worldviews" effectively act as a counterbalance to the flattening processes of globalization?3 Or can they be questioned as the latest in modern/colonial forms of epistemological, cultural, and aesthetic extractivism? This themed issue of REG|AC, entitled "Indigenous Epistemologies and Artistic Imagination", aims to address the recent inclusion of "Indigenous thought" in the global art world by seeking to create links between nonWestern knowledges, Indigenous epistemologies and the artistic imagination, as well as alliances amongst its respective agents. Given the current world situation, in which migration, poverty, discrimination, and other social forces are compounded by natural disasters and anthropogenic climate change, Indigenous epistemologies have become an alternative for re-thinking what Arjun Appadurai has termed an "emancipatory policy" that could address the asymmetries in the distribution of resources, capital, and power under neoliberal, neocolonial global capitalism.