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Art and artists are intrinsic to modernism and colonialism, and therefore also predecessors and partners in decolonial movements. For society, art potentially offers a decolonised space in which to explore, expand and create place and identity, and reconsider hierarchies of knowledge, as well as enable the agency of excluded subjectivities. While there has been increased engagement with the legacies of colonialism and neocolonialism through contemporary art, there are still challenges in overcoming the epistemological histories and biases. By just inserting “colonialism”, “post-colonialism” or even “decoloniality” as a curatorial theme while maintaining eurocentric structures linked to modernity and capitalism, there is a real risk of re-enacting a form of neo-colonialism, by reinforcing power imbalances, denying autonomy, recreating a homogenous “other” and capitalising on extracted culture.
The centering of Europe through colonial processes is both mirrored to and bound to Occidental cultural hegemony, and the process through which Europe framed “The Other”. Orientalist aesthetics were bound closely to colonial expansion, as the arts were a way of visualising cultural difference, as well as depicting and therefore enforcing passive, backwards or exotic narratives on colonised subjects. 1 This is in addition to the very literal plundering of cultural items which were displayed in personal and private collections, building the Museum and the curatorial profession. People themselves were put on display, in the case of performers presented as curios in mock villages at great Colonial exhibitions. These shows were considered important or building national identity. The euro-centric narrative of Orientalism was so dominant it challenged any opportunities for self-authorship in how those bracketed within the concept of the Orient represented themselves.
Part of the machinery of colonialism was to extract cultural knowledge, and to smother indigenous “colonized forms of knowledge production, the models of the production of meaning, their symbolic universe, the model of expression and of objectification and subjectivity”. All aspects of cultural knowledge, from religion to language, were weaponised to mould the identity of the colonised into a form suitable for domination. Indigenous cultural and religious practices were transfigured via Judeo-Christianity.
Curatorial practices that evolved from the competitive collecting, management and public presentation of art, objects and ethnographic curio in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were part of the classification drive of western imperialism and colonialism. Materially items were traded or simply stolen, much under the narrative of rescuing artifacts at risk of destruction or decay.
This building and organisation of knowledge was undertaken from a very subjective western colonial world view, adding to an already imbalanced relationship between viewer and subject. These categorisations formed a eurocentric essentialist phenomenological process which excluded divergent, indigenous experiences and expanded understandings of gender, identity, social organisation, territory and even concepts of sense, space and time. It established a positional superiority of western knowledge, silencing, reducing or stealing indigenous knowledge. When on display, it made spectacles of cultures, their sacred objects, their dead, and even their living, performing their ‘otherness’ for gawking crowds.
But it wasn’t just the presentation of imported bounty that occupied the artistic appetites. Romantic era writers and artists explored new territories, taking part in the massive project of mediating the empire to the masses in a time before mass travel and telegraph, as well as imparting the benefits of civilisation on colonised subjects.
Victorian depictions of the British Empire in the arts were employed to construct a unified image of the empire, framing it’s diverse peoples and places under a homogeneous sense of exotic “other”. Depictions in literature and visual arts reiterated a racial hierarchy, presenting colonial subjects as uncivilised, irrational and backwards.6 Painting played an ideological role, with the work of a painting being considered to describe a scene in an aesthetically pleasing way, useful in papering over the ugliness of colonial reality, as well as portraying the myth of empty lands. The result of this picturesque form was a type of aesthetic sameness across territories, a homogeneous portrayal which matched the homogeneous idea of the colonies. The insertion of western concepts of beauty and aesthetic rendered invisible of the local, individual, and unique vistas, and perpetuating an aesthetic appetite for the rational and orderly landscapes and lawns of colonised spaces.
These collections of colonial “artifacts” still sit in western museums, and while there have been attempts to repatriate or re-interpret these items, this process fails if it does not fully address the systems of inequality and asymmetric power relationships that remain today. In 2018, Brussels reopened the Royal Museum of Central Africa, a museum built to house the collection of King Leopold II.7 Even with the declaration of a ‘decolonised’ exhibition, which detailed the colonial narrative and context of acquisition alongside the objects on display, the very act of display was a re-objectification of Africans. The museum itself was once the site of a former human zoo, fully highlighting the cultural violence and trauma housed within its walls. Trace back the legacy of most European museums, and you will find some murky colonial connection, which poses a problem for many museums and collections who have had to evolve their mission and whitewash their history, and especially those who face calls for restitution of looted artifacts.
The infiltration of the aesthetics of colonialism into the everyday experience at an unconscious level has meant it plays a significant role in the colonial matrix of power.
Art and artists are intrinsic to modernism and colonialism, and therefore also predecessors and partners in decolonial movements. For society, art potentially offers a decolonised space in which to explore, expand and create place and identity, and reconsider hierarchies of knowledge, as well as enable the agency of excluded subjectivities. While there has been increased engagement with the legacies of colonialism and neocolonialism through contemporary art, there are still challenges in overcoming the epistemological histories and biases. By just inserting “colonialism”, “post-colonialism” or even “decoloniality” as a curatorial theme while maintaining eurocentric structures linked to modernity and capitalism, there is a real risk of re-enacting a form of neo-colonialism, by reinforcing power imbalances, denying autonomy, recreating a homogenous “other” and capitalising on extracted culture.
The centering of Europe through colonial processes is both mirrored to and bound to Occidental cultural hegemony, and the process through which Europe framed “The Other”. Orientalist aesthetics were bound closely to colonial expansion, as the arts were a way of visualising cultural difference, as well as depicting and therefore enforcing passive, backwards or exotic narratives on colonised subjects. 1 This is in addition to the very literal plundering of cultural items which were displayed in personal and private collections, building the Museum and the curatorial profession. People themselves were put on display, in the case of performers presented as curios in mock villages at great Colonial exhibitions. These shows were considered important or building national identity. The euro-centric narrative of Orientalism was so dominant it challenged any opportunities for self-authorship in how those bracketed within the concept of the Orient represented themselves.
Part of the machinery of colonialism was to extract cultural knowledge, and to smother indigenous “colonized forms of knowledge production, the models of the production of meaning, their symbolic universe, the model of expression and of objectification and subjectivity”. All aspects of cultural knowledge, from religion to language, were weaponised to mould the identity of the colonised into a form suitable for domination. Indigenous cultural and religious practices were transfigured via Judeo-Christianity.
Curatorial practices that evolved from the competitive collecting, management and public presentation of art, objects and ethnographic curio in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were part of the classification drive of western imperialism and colonialism. Materially items were traded or simply stolen, much under the narrative of rescuing artifacts at risk of destruction or decay.
This building and organisation of knowledge was undertaken from a very subjective western colonial world view, adding to an already imbalanced relationship between viewer and subject. These categorisations formed a eurocentric essentialist phenomenological process which excluded divergent, indigenous experiences and expanded understandings of gender, identity, social organisation, territory and even concepts of sense, space and time. It established a positional superiority of western knowledge, silencing, reducing or stealing indigenous knowledge. When on display, it made spectacles of cultures, their sacred objects, their dead, and even their living, performing their ‘otherness’ for gawking crowds.
But it wasn’t just the presentation of imported bounty that occupied the artistic appetites. Romantic era writers and artists explored new territories, taking part in the massive project of mediating the empire to the masses in a time before mass travel and telegraph, as well as imparting the benefits of civilisation on colonised subjects.
Victorian depictions of the British Empire in the arts were employed to construct a unified image of the empire, framing it’s diverse peoples and places under a homogeneous sense of exotic “other”. Depictions in literature and visual arts reiterated a racial hierarchy, presenting colonial subjects as uncivilised, irrational and backwards.6 Painting played an ideological role, with the work of a painting being considered to describe a scene in an aesthetically pleasing way, useful in papering over the ugliness of colonial reality, as well as portraying the myth of empty lands. The result of this picturesque form was a type of aesthetic sameness across territories, a homogeneous portrayal which matched the homogeneous idea of the colonies. The insertion of western concepts of beauty and aesthetic rendered invisible of the local, individual, and unique vistas, and perpetuating an aesthetic appetite for the rational and orderly landscapes and lawns of colonised spaces.
These collections of colonial “artifacts” still sit in western museums, and while there have been attempts to repatriate or re-interpret these items, this process fails if it does not fully address the systems of inequality and asymmetric power relationships that remain today. In 2018, Brussels reopened the Royal Museum of Central Africa, a museum built to house the collection of King Leopold II.7 Even with the declaration of a ‘decolonised’ exhibition, which detailed the colonial narrative and context of acquisition alongside the objects on display, the very act of display was a re-objectification of Africans. The museum itself was once the site of a former human zoo, fully highlighting the cultural violence and trauma housed within its walls. Trace back the legacy of most European museums, and you will find some murky colonial connection, which poses a problem for many museums and collections who have had to evolve their mission and whitewash their history, and especially those who face calls for restitution of looted artifacts.
The infiltration of the aesthetics of colonialism into the everyday experience at an unconscious level has meant it plays a significant role in the colonial matrix of power.
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