Indigenous Time: The Photograph as Resurgence
Speaking of Photography in partnership with the Future Imaginary Lecture Series
Friday, February 10, 2020, at 18:30
Concordia University, EV-1.605
Performing ‘Emendatio:’ James Luna, Curated by the Smithsonian – National Museum of the American Indian, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, Italy, 2005. Photo: Jolene Rickard, 2005.
Jolene Rickard
Director, American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program
Associate Professor, Departments of History of Art and Art, Cornell University
Substantial work has been done by reading against the grain to lean towards a decolonization of the image, but photographs are still documents anchored in their own historical circumstance including the awareness or reception of the audience. Fundamentally the structure of analysis of the photograph continues to be anchored in predominately European or western ordering of time. As a technology it is not neutral and has its own logic of production as an agent of colonialism. What is the impact or uptake of Indigenous notions of time and philosophy in the analysis at the intersection of Indigeneity and the image? Launching from Johannes Fabian’s seminal work, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (1983) it is now time to reconsider the temporal space of photography to forge an Indigenous future. It’s time to decolonize time.
Jolene Rickard, PhD is a visual historian, artist and curator interested in the issues of Indigeneity within a global context. Highlighted projects include: The Creative Time Summit: The Curriculum, 8/2015 in conjunction with the 56th International la Biennale di Venezia; essay, “Arts of Dispossession,” in From Tierra del Fuego to the Artic: Landscape Painting in the Americas, Art Gallery of Ontario and Yale University Press, 2015; advisor to Sakahàn: 1st International Quinquennial of New Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Canada, 2013; Ford Foundation Research Grant, 2008-11; Te Tihi Scholar/Artist Gathering in New Zealand, 2010 and co-curator for the inaugural exhibition, Our Lives and Our Peoples for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C., 2004. She is from the Tuscarora Nation (Haudenosaunee), director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program and Associate Professor in the History of Art and Art Departments at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. and has a forthcoming book on Sovereignty.
