Belatedly and Finally: The Early Time of the Indigenous in the Concurrent Contemporary

Abstract

This essay discusses the uneasy process of mediating material that is assigned the term “Indigenous” and its variations, including “folk,” “customary,” “ethnic,” “Aboriginal,” and “First Nation,” among others. These terms are, in turn, set against a range of dominant rubrics, such as “national,” “modern,” and “Western”—a contrast that may catalyse assimilation or incite resistance. This fraught process plays out in various ways through the writing of art history, the curating of contemporary art, and the organisation of a national modern art collection and representation of living traditions. This essay shares the unease, as well as the productive effort, in struggling with these problematics, which implicates the very condition of nature and the well-being of the species. It annotates experiences in two specific settings: the nation-state and the contemporary biennale. This reflection on practice is intended to initiate conversations on how the Indigenous is constitutive of the cultural politics of curation and the methods of telling time in crafting a context deemed (art-) historical. In this engagement, the curatorial gesture is troubled by lateness as well as by timeliness in reclaiming an earlier moment of creative life that is finally rendered as a contemporaneous cosmology.