IMAGE: Taloi Havini and Stuart Miller, Sami and the Panguna Mine III, 2009. Inkjet print, Edition of 10. 80 × 120 cm. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer.

OCEANS OF EXCHANGE
Art, Indigeneity and the 21st Century Museum

Friday, February 2, 2018 | 10am – 2:30pm | Harrison/Small Auditorium
Indigenous curators, scholars and artists have increasingly sought to reframe the disciplines in which they work: disciplines which, for many years have maligned Indigenous practices by either exclusion or categorical confinement to the realms of ethnography, craft or “primitive” arts. This symposium brings together leading Indigenous artists, curators and scholars of the Australia-Pacific region to question the stakes and possibilities of these interventions.  How do Indigenous attitudes towards material objects offer new ways for considering the institutions that contain them? What role can museum collections play in revitalized Indigenous practices, and how can these institutions be active participants in the process of decolonization? How can these imperial containers of objects become active tools in the re-imagining of Indigenous pasts, presents and futures.
Speakers

• Julie Adams, Curator, Oceania, The British Museum
• Christine DeLisle, Assistant Professor, Department of American Indian Studies, University of Minnesota
• Taloi Havini, Artist, Bougainville
• Carol McGregor, Artist, Waithaurang/Australia
• Maia Nuku, Evelyn A. J. Hall and John A. Friede Associate Curator for Oceanic Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Visesio Siasau, Artist, Tonga

Moderator

• Henry Skerritt, Curator, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia

This symposium is presented by the Mellon Indigenous Arts Initiative, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, The Fralin Museum of Art, UVA McIntire Department of Art, and the Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures.

Taloi Havini and Stuart Miller, Sami and the Panguna mine III, 2009. Inkjet print, Edition of 10. 80 × 120 cm. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer.