KNOW LIMITS
VISITORS TO THE Venice Biennale last year could hardly have missed the Golden Lion–winning installation Takapau by Mataaho Collective, a group of four Māori women from Aotearoa New Zealand who have been working together since 2012. A takapau is a Māori woven ceremonial mat; for their version at the Biennale, the group repurposed industrial tie-downs used in cargo transport to create weavings that bridged walls, dividing the room and creating patterns of light and shadow. If Takapau highlighted traditional Māori material culture and artisanal techniques, it also reflected Te Ao Māori (the Māori worldview) and mātauranga (knowledge): In the group’s 1000 Words text in these pages, they discuss how the concept of crossing thresholds is central to the way that the Māori see the world, and how woven patterns are not merely functional forms but vessels of ancestral stories.
As evidenced by the Biennale, the art world has recently begun paying more attention to a wide range of Indigenous aesthetics and communities (albeit with varying degrees of sensitivity). This month’s issue of Artforum highlights the work of artists and writers who deal with the subtler topic of Indigenous epistemologies, or knowledge systems, which have long been suppressed by colonizing powers. Collectively, they provide inspiration for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people trying to make sense of (or seeking alternatives to) exhausted and extractive Western epistemological frameworks.* As the political theorist Christine Winter—another woman from New Zealand—writes in her rousing essay here, these Western frameworks are “violent oppressive lies, carefully framed as logical, reasonable, truthful, and factual,” when in fact they, too, are “myths.” The other contributions suggest the rich possibilities of interrogating or surpassing their limits, including another 1000 Words by the poet and artist Layli Long Soldier, who reflects on language and sign systems in advance of the reinstallation of her sculpture Day Poem: Sun Mirrors, 2023, and the publication of her book We/Wé; a Spotlight essay by Christopher T. Green on the artist Kite, who proposes a culturally hybrid form of digital technology in her exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts (open through May 18) and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico (opening March 21); and a Checklist column with curator Jordan Poorman Cocker, who is reimagining curatorial work from an Indigenous perspective, as seen in the collection survey “American Sunrise: Indigenous Art at Crystal Bridges” (closing at the Bentonville, Arkansas, institution on March 23).
Needless to say, the topic of Indigenous epistemologies is related to the question of how we know and define the “other,” which emerges elsewhere throughout this issue. In his review of Amy Sall’s new book The African Gaze, Ayodeji Rotinwa remarks upon the limits of the very concept of “African,” which flattens disparate cultures. Philip Tinari’s feature essay on the art of Wang Tuo considers how the artist’s videos explore the contemporary Chinese “palimpsest” of past and present, self and other, native and immigrant. And in their take on the controversy over Ana Gallardo’s recent exhibition at Mexico City’s Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Fabiola Iza and Florencia Portocarrero identify the fault lines between the social practice artist, her collaborators, and her audiences.
Throughout these texts, the authors model how to bring nuance and rigor to conversations that can become polarized. Importantly, this kind of careful and critical thinking can also be urgent and polemical. The unstable social and political conditions in which we now find ourselves demand nothing less—including the ongoing epistemological crisis brought on by “fake news” and AI-generated deepfakes, and the escalating humanitarian crisis of anti-immigrant rhetoric culminating in egregious mass deportations. As we continue to define the role we can play in such a moment, we are compelled to consider the relevance and critical stakes of everything we publish. In this issue, that includes Sarah C. Schaefer’s Close-Up on Gustave Doré’s iconic image of anonymous prisoners (which provides a new perspective on the viral photographs of Luigi Mangione and the contemporary US carceral system) and Jonathan Odden’s review of a museum survey of Neue Sachlichkeit (which considers the intersection of aesthetics and fascism in an earlier moment). These efforts also are reflected on our website, where recent publications include Andrew Berardini’s moving, poetic rumination on the LA fires; Oskar Oprey’s extended review of Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s work with AI at the Serpentine Gallery in London; and Tyler Dean’s reflection on the sexual politics of Robert Eggers’s new film Nosferatu. Whether in print or online, we aim to continue offering texts that are both timely and thoughtful, relevant and reflective, critical and productive.
—Tina Rivers Ryan
* In this sense, this issue builds on our earlier critiques of the European Enlightenment: See, for example, the Summer 2018 feature “What is Enlightenment? Where, When, Who, What: Seven Responses.”
