Erica Lord, Artifact Piece, Revisited, performed in 2008 at the National Museum of the American Indian. Lord is Athabascan and Iñupiaq.

This performance reflects the ever-present theme of the exhibition of peoples and lived materials, that is such a conflict in indigenous aesthetic issues. For centuries Western bodies of academia meticulously “collected”, “gathered” (to use the conspicuous terms) materials for exhibition of the many “exotic” and “primitive” nations of the world. Such collections then added prestige to the visual rhetoric that the non-Native used/s to define and confine “Native”, for it is hard to imagine white collectors not having the colourful, popular picture of “Native” in mind. 

It is hard enough for objects that are defined by their use and by their makers - clothing, ceremonial garb, baskets, boats - to convey a people when they are not being lived in. But this work also shines a light on the more insidious topic in the exhibiting of peoples - the active collection and exhibition of human remains. The constant fight to repatriate human remains in museum and university collections around the world has often ignited opposition from the scientific community, that I can’t speak to (other than to say how can any individual or body, regardless of their purpose, claim to have rights to a person).

But let’s look at this from a curatorial perspective, for the vast majority of these remains are not actively studied. What, could exhibiting, collecting, hoarding away these stolen people seek to accomplish beside upholding the idea of indigenous cultures as stagnating at best, more often dead, and so the pretext of white superiority, because it lives on? Beside exciting an attraction to the macabre, that keeps alive both the myth of indigenous peoples as bloodthirsty, and especially the role of Native Americans as enemy, by conjuring up images of gore and warfare? And what does it say that this is the theme most highlighted in exhibition placards, the story of war, and not that in North America, orders were sent out by courts that Native Americans should be killed and their bodies taken, for extermination, and implicitly, for sport? That is the real bloodthirst.

And in this and any academic rhetoric, is lost the fact that  the exhibited material was a person, with a life entirely their own. In such exhibition design, the assertion is that - whether the material is human remains or lived objects - a fractional artifact from a single life can be made into an easily digestible visual, and expanded and held up as a representative first for a whole community, then a whole nation, then for all that falls under “Native American” then again for all that falls under “Native.” And so Lord places among the traditional clothing and jewelry, childhood photos, and in an entirely separate display are photos and objects that could in no way, visually, be called “Native” except that they belong to a Native person. But through ownership they are as native as the anorak and the body lying beside them. And the body one confronts is neither dusty and withered nor battle-torn, but warmly lit, healthy and peaceful. And still as a viewer one can’t know her by seeing her, though of course, one knows she is alive. She is still reduced to “exhibited material” and if she exists as a person it is to reject one’s “viewing”, to separate viewing from knowing. So when an exhibited person is as present as they possibly could be, and still one can not know them by viewing them, how can a withered piece of a person from another time be expected to speak for a multitude of living nations?

Related: Inuik at the 2nd Nordic Fashion Biennale in Seattle, Pia Arke at the permanent Greenlandic exhibition in the National Museum in Copenhagen.

Jessie Kleemann, performance still In Aron from Kangeq and a painting from Aron from Kangeq, Tupilak.

Aron from Kangeq was bedridden with tuberculosis and began depicting Greenlandic folktales, history and daily life in the mid-1800s, and he was soon ‘discovered’ by Danish researcher H.J. Rink, who encouraged him to start painting the same scenes, and they were accompanied by narrations of the stories. Most of his works were brought from Greenland, kept and forgotten in the Royal Archives, until a few years after Home Rule they were returned.

I am not sure if the painting shows the ‘creation’ of a tupilaq (an object that would be charged and given power to destroy an enemy) or of the tupilaq taking form of a walrus to kill its victim. There are a lot of Greenlandic stories that involve a person needing to be eaten by a wild animal to enter a different plane (one story of how to become a shaman says you must be eaten by a dog that is covered in anuses. The Mother of the Sea story says the old woman must be eaten by a polar bear and a walrus to reach the sea floor and clean the Mother of the Sea so that she will let people hunt the sea animals).

Obviously this is not the scene Jessie is depicting in her performance, which shows a shamanistic drum dance (opposed to the communal game or legal sorts that are more ‘appropriate’). Jessie’s work has many sides to it: the initial ‘meaning’ is she is resurrecting an image of life in Greenland produced when colonialism intruded little into the lives of Greenlanders, and reflective of years of tradition and social norms existing long before Western contact (nudity was much more common and accepted throughout daily life, for one thing). But she also challenges this image of the ‘free native woman’ that is quite romantic to liberal Westerners. She is a mighty archetype with no identity, and she is a means for those on the anti-colonialism side of the West to continue to make Greenlanders foreign in their own country, because most can not live up to the model. And then it is still the West which sets the models. So even in an image that would be arguably ‘pure’ - an Inuk woman reenacting a precolonial way of life - it is seen through the many layers of colonial misinformation from the Danish collectors of Aron fra Kangeq’s ‘exotic native’ paintings, to the liberal Western yearning for a ‘return’ to ‘native’ life, where ‘native’ is only ever defined by its opposition to the West.

Dennis Agerblad, installation at Faroe Islands Art Museum in 2009. Comments on masculinity, madness and the grotesque - and of the rigid seriousness of nationalism.