Belonging and Unbelonging: Indigenous forms of Curation as Expressions of Sovereignty

Abstract

Indigenous art has been one of the most important vehicles for promoting intercultural understanding in Australia. It visualises Indigenous ways of seeing, knowing and experiencing the world. Indigenous forms of curation have been instrumental in creating these profound moments of intercultural connection, contributing to new theorisations of Indigenous art. This research project seeks to identify an Indigenous critical framework with which to apprehend the complexity of Indigenous art exhibitions. Through detailed case-studies of six exhibitionary projects by Indigenous curators, running from the Aboriginal Memorial of 1988 to barrangal dyara (skin and bones) in 2016, I demonstrate that Indigenous curation is not only an important political act of recognition and visibility, it is also deeply indebted to Indigenous cultural practices and philosophies. The projects chosen are situated within sites of high national and international value and through these case studies I chart a curatorial manoeuvre that I describe as ‘unbelonging’. Unbelonging is not a position of statelessness, but a deliberative model of both subversively unsettling and detaching from the imposition of statehood. In many instances, it uses the resources of leading institutions, but agitates to create self-determined spaces within them. Through a process of unbelonging to the state, to the institution, to disciplines and to history, Indigenous curators are rewriting their own ways of belonging. I understand Indigenous curation as not politically reactive to colonisation as is often presumed, but emerging from Indigenous political formations of governance and sovereignty, value and heritage, consensus and relation. By creating new and broadening complacent formulations of art and social history, identity, and museological practice and temporality, Indigenous curators have reshaped institutional and disciplinary cultures and have contributed to the strengthening of Indigenous art and culture.