The 'indigenous' subject is contentious and knotty, but it has recently become a buzzword in the art world. At Frieze New York last month (May 1-5, 2024), Brazilian indigenous artist Carmézia Emiliano exhibited paintings in the fair’s Focus section, depicting the landscapes and lives of the Macuxi peoples of the Amazon, on the borders between Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana. Record sales were seen at auction last year for Aboriginal artists, including Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, whose Water and Bush Tucker Story sold for $762,000, the highest price ever reached for Papunya boards. These paintings originated in the Northern Territory settlement of Papunya in the 1970s and are seen as the beginning of Western Desert painting. Meanwhile, at the 60th Venice Biennale, questions of Indigenous culture are also prevalent across several pavilions and Archie Moore’s Australia Pavilion—a vast hand-drawn genealogical chart of the artist’s First Nations connections spanning 65,000 years and an art installation focusing on the ongoing impact of Australia’s colonial past—won the prestigious Golden Lion.

It would be easy, given the market’s current appetite for 'Indigenous' Art, to be sceptical about a vast art exhibition that appears to lean into this label, but this interest in Indigenous culture and practices is also the corollary of a global struggle to decolonise and interrogate the western narratives of history commonly told in museums and galleries. In this context, the ambitious and sprawling scope of Indigenous Histories emerges as a brave, if at times paradoxical, attempt to unravel the limitations in understanding and contextualising Indigenous cultural practices within the very structures that have kept them out. I visited the second, slightly expanded iteration of Indigenous Histories at Kode in Bergen, Norway, following its run at the Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), São Paulo.

The exhibition focuses on seven mini-surveys of First Nations artists from South America, North America, Oceania and the Nordic, drawing together 285 artworks by 170 artists, made between 200 BC and the 21^st century. At Kode, the exhibition begins in the north, where visitors may be familiar with some of the animistic approaches of now world-renowned Sámi artists, their spiritual symbiosis with the environment emphasised through their adaption of natural materials (bone, wood, reindeer pelt, antlers) and as age-old techniques such as weaving, beading and metal casting. Photography is also an important medium for Sámi expression; a large-scale photograph captures Finnish artist Marja Helander as a hybrid being who squats in a forest at twilight, a reference to creatures found in the Sámi religion, who act as harbingers for humans. Suspended from the ceiling are examples of duodji, Sámi handicrafts originally made to be functional items, typically fashioned from wood, antlers or bones. A contemporary example venerating the ancestry of duodji traditions is found in a stunning, shadowy fringed fibre textile work, by Outi Pieski, Crossing Paths (2014), which, also hung from the ceiling, casts an otherworldly ambience over the space. In a similar tenor, a black and white 19^th century photograph by scholar Sophus Tromholt pays homage to master weaver Elen Clemetsdatter and her two young daughters, who wear mittens she has made. The documentary portrait is recast in a bright pink reindeer skin frame embroidered with bright tassels by artist Raisa Porsanger. It is an evocation of matrilineage and the knowledge held and passed on in families, the guardians of traditions.

From the off, however, one of the main problems facing this exhibition, which is divided bluntly into regional rooms, is its inability to really grapple with how to present works as anything other than art objects. Most of the works here were not created to be displayed and experienced in this way, but there is not much ambition to tackle this issue. The Peruvian presentation, curated by Sandra Gamarra, offers the most direct attempt. Focusing on Peruvian portraiture, half of the works in this room are purposefully hung upside down. This is intended to evoke the Quechua and Aymara concept of pachakuti, the transformation of time and space that has been necessary to many peoples around the world in order to peacefully co-exist with Western civilisation. Art, especially photography, in the Western sense, has been used as a weapon and force. This is demonstrated, for example, in a collection of passport photographs of Indigenous people sent to work in the Morococha mine in the mountains of Peru. The pictures were taken by Sebastian Rodriguez, who trained as a photographer for the mine at 10 years old. The photographs were a form of identification of the workers, who did not have the right even to vote. Seen here, the pictures bear witness to the transformation of the Indigenous people into industrial labourers.

Gamarra’s proposition pushes back against the Western gaze on Indigenous cultural artefacts as conquered objects for study or easy consumption. To truly understand indigenous cultures, the non-indigenous must also be radically transformed. I am not sure Gamarra’s upside-down gimmick really achieves this, but it provokes deeper thinking about how to meaningfully engage with the works on show here. What have these artists had to do in order to be seen and heard here?

A room on Mexico is the crowning glory of the exhibition, a gorgeous and carefully choreographed display that prompts profound questions about the nebulous nature of ‘Indigenous’ existence—a term rejected by many communities. Works of historic importance, such as the first known representation of traditional dress in painting, Ramón Cano Manilla’s Indian Woman from Oaxaca, 1928, depicts a dark-skinned Indigenous woman wearing a typical costume from the Oaxacan highlands. The painting with its lush tropical background and ornate details emanates an ideal of exotic female beauty, that is highly compelling—but its authenticity is soon undermined by what hangs beside it: a self-portrait by Maria Izquierdo, one of Diego Rivera’s favourite students, though long overlooked by her Mexican peers. Almost nude, the figure seems to be falling, or trying to stand up, her body set against an inhospitable desert landscape. Utterly opposed to but equally powerful as Manilla’s portrait, it tells a different story about the female Indigenous experience. In dialogue across the room is a work by Francisco Toledo, Self-Portrait 61, a constellation of Polaroid self-portraits with a multitude of expressions and gestures, destabilising the idea of a single, stable ego. Everything in this room is about how Indigenous people look at each other; it is about self-empowerment through self-expression.

A room of jaw-dropping Western Desert paintings (Australia) is also the most conventional hang in the exhibition, which belies the fact that these paintings hold a particularly complex intertwining of colonialism, art and Indigenous culture. Western Desert painting evolved in the 1970s from the government settlement Papunya, the last place colonial settlements were established in Australia under its controversial policy of assimilation of Aboriginal peoples. School teacher Geoffrey Bardon is credited with encouraging primary school students in Papunya to create the traditional Dreaming (Tjukurrpa) patterns they made in the sand in paint onto small portable boards. The school became a studio and later the Aboriginal artists formed a co-op to make and sell their work, evolving and continuing a tradition that is now flourishing and recognised around the world. Dazzling paintings such as Narputta Nangala Judgadai’s Woman Spirit (2003) and Shorty Jangala Robertson’s Water Dreaming (2005) demonstrate incontrovertible artistry and flair, rooted in traditions and tangled with colonialism. Yet here, again, we are back in the realm of contemplating traditions as objects of beauty and awe, rather than engaging with other ways of looking. Indigenous Histories cannot seem to escape Western conventions and definitions of value.

Though steeped in specificities, the purpose of seeing all of these stories side by side together is to unfold a bigger, interconnected picture that becomes a rallying cry for solidarity and recognition of Indigenous life. A further thematic section explores indigenous activism around the world—though all of the work here is framed to an extent as political; a refusal to be erased, a demand to be remembered and, at times, it represents values outside the Western way of thinking. And it comes as Indigenous peoples’ rights, lands and cultures everywhere face obliteration through the ongoing impact of capitalism, colonialism and the patriarchy. Fundamentally, Indigenous Histories is a show about human relationships to the environment—how we are shaped by the environment and how it, in turn, shapes our relationships to one another, highlighting artists and lives that have been ignored for too long. I hope this is only the beginning.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its Editors.)