Introduction

Summary

This volume proposes the first in-depth academic study of curatorial practice with respect to Indigenous art in present-day Brazil. In particular, it focuses on the exhibition of Indigenous contemporary art, as distinct from either traditional or contemporary Indigenous art; that is to say, Indigenous art that engages with genres of contemporary art, including, most notably, electronic, digital and new media artforms. The production and exhibition of Indigenous contemporary art has been booming in Brazil in recent years, with a few select, self-identifying Indigenous artists receiving quite significant national, and some international, recognition. There has also been an almost exponential growth in exhibitions focusing on or prominently including such works. However, there has been, to date, very little scholarship on this matter, and still less on the question of appropriate forms of decolonial curatorship that promote Indigenous agency with regard to the display of such art.

There have been a number of very recent academic publications in Portuguese or Spanish that touch on the subject of this monograph. Indigenous curator Sandra Benites and Spanish-born curator Pablo Lafuente co-authored a brief but insightful article in the Mexican journal Terremoto (2019) on their curatorial experience with the 2018 ‘Dja Guata Porã: Rio de Janeiro Indígena’ [Dja Guata Porã: Indigenous Rio de Janeiro] exhibition at the Museu do Rio [MAR; Rio Museum]. This contrasts productively with Lucas Sargentelli's MA dissertation (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2019) on the curation of a pop-up Indigenous art exhibition at the urban Indigenous ‘village’ Aldeia Maraká’nà in Rio de Janeiro as a follow-up and response to the more institutional ‘Dja Guata Porã’ exhibition. The year 2019 also saw the publication of two survey texts – a doctoral thesis by Luis Roberto Andrade Quesada and an article by anthropologist of art, Ilana Seltzer Goldstein (‘Da “representação das sobras”’) – that reference a wide range of exhibitions of Indigenous or ‘Indigenist’/’pro-Indigenous’ art that have taken place in the country in recent years, though without a systematic focus on curatorial practice per se.