top of page

GLOBAL  INDIGENOUS  ARTS  NETWORK

The Global Indigenous Arts Network (GIAN) is a research group dedicated to cultivating links between Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics, contemporary artists, and other cultural agents with the aim of forging long-lasting intercultural and inter-epistemic alliances within, and beyond, the global arts scene. GIAN aims to provide increased visibility to Indigenous situated knowledges as a means for decolonizing current Western-hegemonic ways of belonging and looking at the world. Echoing Tuscarora scholar Jolene Rickard (2017), GIAN recognizes the urgent need to take into account Indigenous knowledges in global art, art history, and visual culture studies in order to exercise an effective intervention on modernity / coloniality and its framing of Indigenous cultures within a hegemonic metanarrative of the West.

NEWS  AND  EVENTS

webENG_edited.jpg

RESEARCH SEMINAR

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES AND CONTEMPORARY ART

Dialogical Pathways to Resistance and Epistemic Justice

Keynote Presenter: Giuliana Borea (Newcastle University)

 

Wednesday, 26 March 2025

Aula 204, Facultat de Geografia i Història, Universitat de Barcelona (C/ Montalegre, 6)

Free, in-person, certificate of attendance available

In the current global context, Indigenous peoples are facing numerous challenges resulting from historical and contemporary processes of domination and exclusion, including the longstanding plunder of natural resources in their territories, the epistemological extractivism, appropriation and reification of Indigenous knowledges-ontologies, and the systematic silencing of their ways of understanding and experiencing the binds between nature and culture. In this regard, this seminar aims to provide an interdisciplinary space to discuss and visibilise the centrality of Indigenous knowledges, Indigenous contemporary arts practices, and their diverse strategies of resistance when faced with these dynamics of oppression. The seminar seeks to foster deep reflections contributing to the production of epistemological and cultural justice which, in addition to helping restitute what has been taken, can also acknowledge, visibilise, and help to legitimise the knowledges and practices of Indigenous peoples as fundamental resources to face the social, cultural, and ecological challenges of the 21st century. This event aims to provide a space for mutual learning and critical dialogue that can contribute to producing interdisciplinary and transcultural collaborative networks. In addition to the guest presenters, seminar attendees are invited to a guided tour of the exhibition Amazònies. El futur ancestral (CCCB, open until 4 May 2025).

Devenir Uni banner.jpg

RESEARCH SEMINAR

TRANSINDIGENEITY: Between Local Specificities and Global Complexities

Keynote Presenter: Ursula Biemann, Devenir universidad project

22 November 2023

Aula Jane Addams,

Universitat de Barcelona

Hybrid Event (in-person and online)

According to David Garneau (2020), Métis artist, curator, and critic, Indigenous art is an emerging category that extends and adapts First Nations Peoples’ ways of being and knowing to the contemporary moment and well beyond the sites of Indigenous territories of origin. Within this context, Indigenous peoples from around the world are increasingly seeking to establish connections in order to produce international networks and a collective consciousness. If, as jurist and Blackfoot First Nation elder Leroy Little Bear states, in Indigenous culture everything is under flux, then the concept of time is dynamic but without movement. This understanding of time evidences a complex form of relationality: visiting and revisiting, telling and re-telling, making and re-making, to the extent to which an Indigenous understanding of time makes it inseparable from bodies and places. In this regard, Chickasaw academic Chadwick Allen (2013) argues for a “trans-Indigenous” research programme within the field of Indigenous Studies that would allow for a site of enunciation embedded in the specificities of the local Indigenous while simultaneously grappling with the complexities of the global Indigenous. Following this spirit of establishing a simultaneous interplay between the synchronic, the diachronic, and the transdisciplinary by recognizing the mobility and multiple interactions of Indigenous peoples, cultures, histories, and texts, we invite artists, theoreticians, and researchers to participate in the Research Seminar “Transindigeneity: Between Local Specificities and Global Complexities”. Some of the key questions we aim to address are: What forms of local specificities inform and/or travel from local contexts to the global stage? How can Indigenous artistic production address this migration between the local and the global? What configurations do Indigenous ways of being and knowing come into play in the global art scene today? And what points of tension are evidenced through this displacement from local Indigenous realities to global points of contact between different indigeneities worldwide?

PastedGraphic-1.jpg
Photo credits: Theo Esthetu, Atlas Fractured, 2017

The increased visibility of the Indigenous in the framework of global contemporary art is marked by the recent inclusion in the "mega-exhibitions" (peripheral biennials or global salons, Documenta) of an increasingly bulky presence of artists from Australia, New Zealand, the Americas, Canada and the Nordic countries in the search for a global discourse of "Indigeneity", a term that comes from the adjective "indigenous" and the abstract suffix "eity", which indicates quality. The emerging discourse of Indigeneity leads us to establish a distinction between the idea of Indigenous as related to identity, and the notion of Indigeneity understood as a discursive formation, as a relationship that not only includes Indigenous peoples but also those who self-identify as non-Indigenous. Within this framework, in this course we will present the works and contexts of a series of Indigenous artists present in four major exhibitions: the 2017 Kassel Documenta, the 2022 Kassel Documenta, the 2022 Venice Biennale, and the 2023 Sharjah Biennale (United Arab Emirates).

SUMMER COURSE

MEGA-EXHIBITIONS AND INDIGENISM: Summer Course

Instructor: Anna Maria Guasch

POSTPONED

New dates to be confirmed

Free Online Course

(delivered in Spanish)

© 2023 by Global Indigenous Arts Network

Part of the research group VIGEO Visuality and Geoesthetics in the Age of Ecosocial Crisis, MICINN PID2022-1392110B-100

With additional support from Universitat de Barcelona and the Art, Globalization, Interculturality research group

GIAN final_edited.png
Logo UB_edited.jpg
AGILogo.png
RsARX80n_400x400.png

VIGEO VISUALIDAD Y GEOESTÉTICA 

EN LA ERA DE LA CRISIS ECOSOCIAL
I+D+i PID2022-1392110B-100

bottom of page