Mining the Colonial Imaginary: Art, Materiality and Ecological Critique in Contemporary Oceania

Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Pacific Art Association
The global climate emergency has led to numerous artistic attempts to reconsider the agency of objects and human relationships to them. In turning to Indigenous cultures, numerous thinkers have attempted to drawn on Indigenous ontologies in order to suggest alternate and mores sustainable models of object-subject relations. While movements such as new-materialism and object-oriented-ontology have yielded significant and self-reflexive insights into the ways in which subject/object dualism operates as a prerequisite for both neoliberal subjecthood and commodity capitalism, they have often served to mystify and homogenize Indigenous cultures. The papers in this panel present three diverse case studies that examine the ways in which contemporary artists in Oceania have engaged with the material and environmental incursions of colonialism. These papers explore the ways in which artists use the altered landscape as a site for the reconsideration of our relationship to the material world, revealing the fissures in an imperial project that sought to cast the colonies as sites of material and human exploitation.

Field of Study:






Chair:
Henry Francis Skerritt,Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia - hfs4f@virginia.edu
Discussant:
Katerina Teaiwa,Australian National University School of Art - katerina.teaiwa@anu.edu.au

Making (Room for) Earth in Hawaiʻi: Sean Connelly’s A Small Area of Land
Aaron Katzeman, University of California, Irvine
Time and the Art of Gunybi Ganambarr: Re-defining Country through Found Objects
Mary Magdalena Gagler, Independent curator and researcher