Katya García-Antón

CIMAM 2018 Stockholm, Day 1, Perspective 01: Katya García-Antón, Director, Office for Contemporary Art Norway.

Decolonisation in Art Institutions

Indigenous thinking and practices have attracted unprecedented interest across the international art world in the last years. Museums are increasingly reconsidering the globalness of their museological practices and acquisition policies. Art workers today (indigenous and non-indigenous) are facing the challenges of engaging meaningfully and ethically with Indigenous art and thought; navigating the modern and colonial framework of the museistic apparatus that have ignored, framed or misrepresented Indigenous practices; or simply changing of these parameters altogether. With this in mind various questions arise. Is it sufficient to widen the modernist art historical canon through the politics of inclusion, and who are these politics empowering in their midst? Are the concepts of decolonization, and the inscription of a global art history functioning as new colonial models with a renewed power to define Indigenous practices? Are these processes able to foster a reciprocal and cosmopolitan view of the world, one in fact that Indigenous communities have always inhabited? Should novel methodologies of word- and image-crafting be constituted to embody and empower the Indigenous discourses of the future? This paper will address decolonisation in art institutions as a daily practice.

Biography

Katya García-Antón is Director / Chief Curator of the Office of Contemporary Art Norway since 2014. She graduated as a biologist conducting field research in ecology and behavior in the Amazon and Sierra Leone, and transitioned into the arts with an MA in 19th and 20th century art history from The Courtauld Institute of Arts, London. Thereafter she worked at The Courtauld Institute of Art, BBC World Service (Latin American Broadcasts), Museo Nacional Reina Sofía Madrid, ICA London, IKON Birmingham, and as Director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain (CAC) Genève. She is responsible for more than seventy exhibitions of art, architecture, and design by practitioners worldwide. She was the lead curator of the Nordic Pavilion, Venice Biennial in 2015; curated the Spanish Pavilions at São Paolo Biennial 2004 and Venice Biennial 2011; as well as co-curated the Prague Biennial 2005, and the flagship exhibition Gestures in Time, Qalandiya International Biennial 2012. In 2015 she launched Critical Writing Ensembles, an ongoing platform stimulating research, and publishing of art histories beyond the Western canon (so far, including South Asia and Indigenous worldviews). She devised Thinking at the Edge of the World. Perspectives from the Nort in 2015 as an ongoing program of knowledge-building (symposium and exhibitions) addressing the histories of the North — including Arctic and environmental questions. The program facilitates the empowerment of Sami artistic practices and histories; catalyzing processes and projects aimed at dismantling colonial pasts and presents. Future programming will consider questions of ethics, social justice and the environment.