2 - Decolonial and Indigenous Curatorial Theory and Practice in Brazil

Summary

Moving on from the introduction to the appearance of Indigenous contemporary and contemporary Indigenous visual art discussed in Chapter 1, the current chapter focuses specifically on debates in Brazil around decolonial and Indigenous curatorship, as well as discussing related exhibitions, both in major art institutions, Indigenous community-based museums and other pop-up events. It then goes on to propose a set of ‘decolonizing methodologies’, in Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith's terms, for the exhibition of Indigenous art that can help us to see how Indigenous curatorial agency might function in an exhibition, using examples from the ‘British’ (post)colonial settler world in the first instance before contextualising those methodologies as they might be said to occur in the context of Brazil. It should be noted, before proceeding, that this choice to contextualise and gain critical leverage via the study of examples from the ‘British’ (post)colonial settler world has been selected not because Brazilian Indigenous contemporary art is derivative of, or particularly inspired by, this context, but that, given the thriving Indigenous contemporary, and particularly electronic, art scene in countries such as Canada, this approach can offer useful examples of Indigenous curatorial practice that are largely lacking elsewhere.

DECOLONIAL CURATORIAL THEORY AND PRACTICE IN BRAZIL

Given that, as Anishinaabe-Ojibwe scholar Sonya Atalay underscores, ‘Museums, collecting, anthropology, and archaeology were developed within, and are deeply entrenched in, a Western episte-mological framework and have histories that are strongly colonial in nature’ (597), the curatorship of exhibitions of Indigenous artefacts in hegemonic institutions needs to be handled extremely carefully in order to start to provoke the decolonisation of those institutions rather than shore up the status quo. The same can be said of the exhibition of Indigenous art in mainstream art galleries. A discourse around the possibility of decolonisation and the nature of decoloniality has been circulating since the beginning of the twenty-first century in Latin American(ist) circles and constitutes one of the most significant and complex philosophical challenges to dominant currents of thought to come out of the field of Latin American Studies. Most notably, these thinkers seek to move beyond theorisations of postcolonialism that, in their view, do not sufficiently address the ongoing ‘coloniality of power’, in Aníbal Quijano's terms, that con-tinues to structure all aspects of life in places that have experienced colonialism.