Indigenous Art
Babo Pithoro: A Sacred Painting
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Siddharth Raje
In India there are more than 700 tribes and each one has own Deities. This makes cultural characteristics of India. Different tribes create variety of artistic paintings to worship deities. I refer to a live painting followed by the performance, dance and celebrated tradition of tribal folk art Babo Pithoro in Gujarat, India. Babo Pithoro is organic, iconic, and live in the indigenous tribes of India particularly in Rathwas in western belt of Gujarat, India. The ceremony and expressions of the Pithoro painting are believed to be sacred to bring the fertility, prosperity within the family, generations or to the community. The tradition of the painting is very ancient. This painting is a part of their religious life and family gathering. Pithoro painting is largest in the world. Who organizes the painting is the major question. It is generally organized by the family who has problems to be barren, loss of agricultural products and various family problems. Today the tribal people are passing through a critical transition. Today the educated tribal youths look to their own culture with a sense of dislike and yet do not feel comfortable in the new tides of changes sweeping the shares of tribal societies. We need to preserve and conserve this art which is on the verge of extinction.
Curating a Connected Future at the Art Gallery of Ontario: The Institutional Limits of (Un)Settling Urban Narratives
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Audrey Kwan
This paper will explore the efforts of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s (AGO) 2018 reinstallation of the J.S. McLean Centre to interrogate cultural hegemony in Canadian narratives— centering Indigenous, female, and other underrepresented voices. The works of Glenn Coulthard, Adele Perry, Leanne Simpson, and Julie Tomiak will inform my understanding of urban space as an important site in the deconstruction of settler–colonial narratives, and the power of institutions that reproduce such narratives. First, I will examine the exhibition within the context of the AGO’s history and inclusion (or exclusion) of Indigenous and other minoritized representations. Second, I will analyze how curation is used to destabilize colonial knowledge both in its visual elements and its process. How does this work deconstruct dominant narratives of Canadian history, reeducating Canadian publics through creative reinterpretation? Third, I will consider the physical, ideological, and emotional limits of the McLean Centre, emphasizing that transformative resistance from within the institution requires continuous effort. Drawing on Coulthard’s understanding of the ‘politics of recognition,’ I argue that the recognition of the voices at the McLean Centre is not the goal, but the beginning of a conversation that seeks to dismantle the roots of Western, heteropatriarchal colonialism. While the reinstallation does much to unsettle settler experiences of Canadian Art History, the work of Indigenous resurgence and resistance to colonial cities like Toronto is far from settled.
Art as a Way of Facilitating Social Change Processes
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elena Bastidas, Maria Victoria Luzuriaga Bastidas
As humans, our forms of communications are widely learned through our community, except for visuals. Visual information is the first and most important form of communication that spans universally throughout cultures and history. Images have an international language of their own, making them the most primal and interpretive source of information one can provide. In this paper, we introduce social polygraphy, a methodology used to facilitate social change processes. This methodology relies heavily on visuals, like drawing, mapping, and other diverse artistic expressions, to interact, initiate dialogue and participate in mutual learning with diverse populations. Engaging in social processes with populations that are different from our own, whether that be age, culture, background, or beliefs, can be extraordinarily challenging, especially if we are dealing with conflicting views. Through the process of social polygraphy, participants uncover the wealth of information and knowledge that resides in them, better understand the positions of others, and can find diverse ways of reaching a mutual understanding. We illustrate the steps of the methodology with a case from an Afro-Colombia community.
