1 - Indigenous Art and its Curation in Contemporary Brazil

Summary

Some would argue that there is no such thing as Indigenous art and that it is wrong to try to divorce it from Indigenous worldmaking practices. However, for better or for worse, very few contemporary Indigenous communities in Brazil have no engagement at all with the hegemonic ‘Western’ capitalist society that surrounds them on all sides. Indigenous people thus exercise their creativity not only in the context of community-facing worldmaking practices but also in that of (generally) outward-facing visualisations and performances of identity, with half an eye trained on spotting opportunities to gain visibility for their cause in wider society, challenging popular stereotypes and discriminatory practices, and another half on the market, be that for ‘arts and crafts’ or for ‘Art’ with a capital A, and all this without losing sight of the joy of creativity itself. Yet, while there may now be increasing numbers of Indigenous people in Brazil who are willing to self-identify as artists, traditional or contemporary, such artists interface with an art world and market that are still overdetermined by their colonialist origins and tacit racial exclusions.

This is an art world still very much in the thrall of Euro-American values and trends. It has opened up to Indigenous art just fractionally, to the extent that it seeks to include and consume Indigenous artists and their works as part of a generally tokenistic, exoticising or politicising ‘Global’ or ‘Indigenous Turn’ (García-Antón, 8). And it frames such inclusion as a postcolonial trend of ‘transnational transitionality’ (Smith, ‘What Is to Be Done?’, 16) that fails to dismantle established power dynamics, and that thus typically also leaves Indigenous people very little scope for exercising agency in the curation of exhibitions of Indigenous art. The door to hegemonic art institutions is ajar, but not wide open to radical change of the status quo as yet, and while truly activist curatorial practice may choose to avoid museums and galleries altogether, there is also an ongoing need to attempt to decolonise such institutions by tackling the ways in which Indigenous art is curated.

This chapter proposes to briefly explore the nature of Indigenous art and the ethnographically informed way that more traditional forms have typically been exhibited in Brazil.