‘Centring the Indigenous’

Abstract

Recent years have seen numerous contemporary Indigenous artists contribute to global art exhibitions. A growing Indigenous-centred literature unpacks the particular critical agenda of this global Indigenous art, while also contextualising it in within the wider field of contemporary art. This article enters into dialogue with this literature through a close reading of a multimedia installation created for the Biennale of Sydney in 2012 by the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity. It introduces the theoretical concept of the ‘trans-Indigenous’ to situate this distinctive collaborative art in the context of global Indigenous cultures. Explaining this concept through a close reading of Postcommodity's work, the article outlines aspects of a shared Indigenous worldview found in the work. It then situates this trans-Indigenous relational art within the critical debates surrounding relational art, describing trans-Indigenous relational art as ‘double-edged’, incorporating both Indigenous commonality and an agonistic friction and unease in relation to the contemporary art context.