The Indigenous Turn

I offer these reflections to Blue Art Journal with the awareness of how rare it has been – until now – for Indigenous artists, curators, and thinkers to engage one another in a global yet culturally grounded forum. The phrase ‘Indigenous Turn’ signals a critical reorientation in contemporary art and curatorial practice.

It names a shift that has reshaped not only artistic production but also the interpretive authority through which Indigenous peoples are seen, understood, and engaged on the global stage. Like earlier scholarly ‘turns’ in the humanities – the linguistic, visual, or decolonial – the Indigenous Turn names a shift in perspective, but is one rooted in Indigenous epistemologies rather than external theoretical frameworks. It is not a trend or temporary correction, but a profound recentering of how art is made, circulated, and understood. At its core, the Indigenous Turn insists that Indigenous peoples are not simply the subjects of history or ethnographic study, but sovereign knowledge holders whose visual practices redefine categories of art, aesthetics, and cultural value.

In 1995, I curated the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with Edward Poitras, the first Indigenous/Métis artist selected to represent Canada. His installation, animated by the Trickster Coyote,¹ confronted identity, broken treaties, and environmental dispossession while affirming Plains Cree/Métis resilience. At that moment, the idea of a ‘global Indigenous’ was scarcely imagined. By ‘global Indigenous,’ I mean an emerging consciousness in which Indigenous artists, thinkers, and communities recognise themselves in relations across continents who are connected not through homogenisation, but through shared histories of survivance,² land-based epistemologies, and political struggle. Indigenous artists were rarely invited into the most visible art forums, and when they were, it was often through the interpretive lens of non-Indigenous curators. In the Pavilion, Poitras and I sought to shift that frame: to centre an Indigenous vision in the heart of the contemporary art world, insisting it be read on its own cultural and political terms.

At that time, Canadian media covered the exhibition well, but in the larger art world it went largely unnoticed. There were moments of international recognition: a live Japanese NHK television crew interviewed Poitras in the Pavilion, and a photograph of his Coyote appeared in La Repubblica the following day. After Venice, the show travelled to the Canadian Museum of Civilization and to Poitras’s own community. For me, these experiences confirmed that the international art world was not yet ready for an Indigenous presence – but it was the beginning.

The years that followed saw a growing presence of Indigenous artists and curators on the world stage. Australia first sent Aboriginal artists Rover Thomas and Trevor Nickolls in 1990, though under the direction of a 
non-Indigenous curator. In 1997, Aboriginal curators Brenda L. Croft and Hetti Perkins accompanied Emily Kam Kngwarray, Judy Watson, and Yvonne Koolmatrie to Venice. In 2005, Rebecca Belmore became the first Indigenous woman to represent Canada. Aotearoa presented Māori artists Michael Parekowhai (2011) and Lisa Reihana (2017), while in 2023 Sāmoan artist Yuki Kihara took the Pavilion. Most recently, the United States presented Jeffrey Gibson, while Australia was represented by Archie Moore.

Together, these moments signalled that Indigenous contemporary art was no longer positioned at the margins but was steadily claiming space in international conversations – not as a side current, but as a defining force.

In 2012, seventeen years after my time at Venice, I served as Co-Artistic Director of the 18th Biennale of Sydney – one of the world’s longest-running and most internationally visible exhibitions. That edition, along with its 2010 predecessor, brought together a significant number of Indigenous artists from Australia, Aotearoa, Canada, the Pacific, and beyond. This turn would soon inspire document 14 to include a sizeable number of Indigenous artists. Our framework in Sydney was guided by the principle of all our relations – a worldview shared by many Indigenous nations that recognises mutual interdependence with all beings. These biennales revealed that the Indigenous Turn was not merely about showcasing more Indigenous artists, but about reframing the intellectual and ethical terms through which global exhibitions are conceived. In this light, globalism was not conceived as an abstract network of markets or institutions, but as a lived web of relationships grounded in land, kinship, and reciprocity. Like the ocean, it connected without erasing the shores from which we come. Venice in 1995 and Sydney in 2010 and 2012 together marked early steps toward what we now call the Indigenous Turn.

Institutional Critique: Inclusion Without Redistribution

In recent years, biennales, museums, and universities have embraced the ‘Indigenous Turn’ as a sign of openness. Yet too often this recognition functions as inclusion without redistribution. In other words, recognition is not the same as structural change; visibility does not substitute for sovereignty. The presence of Indigenous artists is celebrated, but the structures that excluded them remain intact. A single commission cannot undo centuries of dispossession or the marginalisation of Indigenous languages and epistemologies. At times, the global art world invites Indigenous artists as a way of displaying its own liberal credentials – a politics of visibility that leaves power relations unchanged.

National pavilions in Venice operate as extensions of state power. To represent a country is both an artistic act and a form of cultural diplomacy. When an Indigenous artist is selected, the optics are powerful: it suggests reconciliation, diversity, even decolonisation. Yet the resources to mount such projects – fundraising, sponsorships, diplomatic support – are often out of reach for Indigenous communities themselves. The artist is celebrated, but the underlying asymmetry remains.

For Indigenous art criticism, the challenge is to press institutions to go beyond representation and to transform their infrastructures. What would it mean for a museum to devote its acquisitions budget primarily to Indigenous works, or to repatriate holdings while investing in Indigenous-run institutions? What would it mean for a biennale to cede curatorial authority entirely to Indigenous leadership, or to redistribute resources to communities? Without such commitments, the Indigenous Turn risks becoming another trend – absorbed into the circuits of contemporary art without altering the terms of exchange.

Arctic/Amazon

The transformation of global Indigeneity was vividly staged in Arctic/Amazon, an exhibition I co-curated at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto in 2022, which brought artists from the circumpolar Arctic and the Amazon basin into dialogue. Conceived through an epistolary exchange, reciprocal visits, and shared ceremonial encounters, it prioritised relationships over timelines. A symposium in the fall of 2019 began building these relations, while the biggest barrier – language – proved less important than the desire to connect.

Although the artists came from distinct zones, what they shared was a worldview in which land, rivers, skies, and animal worlds are living relatives. Sámi duodji traditions in Outi Pieski’s practice spoke across climates to Amazonian weaving by Olinda Silvano, underscoring the specificity of each people’s relationship to land and water. Tanya Lukin Linklater and Amazonian filmmakers Morzaniel Ɨramari and Gisela Motta with Leandro Lima alike use dance as embodied testimony: Lukin Linklater re-enacts earthquakes and activates ancestral belongings, while Ɨramari, Motta, and Lima show shamans dancing with spirits to sustain balance and heal the earth. Pia Arke and Uýra similarly mobilise the body as a site of resistance and transformation: Arke confronting colonial silence by embodying the Greenlandic landscape in Arctic Hysteria, and Uýra inhabiting a ‘walking tree’ persona shaped from organic materials to link Indigenous ontologies with ecological activism.

Together, these works reveal how performance can reclaim histories and activate new relations between body, land, and cultural continuity. In many ways, Arctic/Amazon offered a self-determined model of what the ‘global Indigenous’ could be: a cross-territorial collaboration rooted in Indigenous law, reciprocity, and care. Its methodology prefigured the heightened Indigenous presence at Venice in 2024, offering a vision of how global networks might be built from the ground up – like tributaries meeting in confluence rather than being channelled into a single course. Arctic/Amazon demonstrated that the Indigenous Turn is also a methodological turn: not a thematic grouping but a relational process rooted in reciprocity, ceremonial practice, and shared responsibilities.

Venice 2024 and Cyclical Temporality

By the time of the 2024 Venice Biennale, Indigenous artists appeared in national pavilions, collateral events, and thematic exhibitions in unprecedented numbers. The most visible moment came when Archie Moore, representing Australia, won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. His installation transformed the Pavilion into an immersive memorial, its walls inscribed in chalk with 65,000 years of Kamilaroi and Bigambul genealogies. Pools of black water reflected these names, evoking both ancestral depth and the unbroken continuity of Indigenous presence. The pavilion embodied a cyclical way of being and knowing: past, present, and future entwined in reflective waters, carrying memory forward while returning always to ancestral origins.

Another dimension of the Indigenous Turn lies in its critique of Western temporalities. Such temporalities do not merely revise art history, they reorder its foundations, insisting that Indigenous presence is not belated but continuous, contemporary, and sovereign. The global art world often measures value through novelty and rupture: the ‘new’ work, the ‘emerging’ artist, the cutting edge. Such linear historicism consigns Indigenous art either to a distant past or to the margins of contemporaneity. By contrast, Indigenous temporalities are cyclical, spiral, or seasonal. They carry forward ancestral knowledge while always returning to renew it.

Moore’s Pavilion exemplified this temporal logic. Similar cycles can be seen in Sámi duodji, where each stitch connects maker to generations of craft; in Navajo/Dene sandpaintings, created, danced upon, and then erased; or in Shipibo-Konibo kené designs, where the visual pathways are re-inscribed, sung into being, and revitalised across the cycles of healing and life. These practices are not only aesthetic but theoretical: they insist that critique is not about endless forward motion but about circling back to responsibilities that are never complete.

Reciprocity in Practice

For Indigenous peoples, the idea of the ‘global’ has never been abstract. It has long been lived through kinship routes, trade networks, and cosmological understandings that link territories across what settler cartography divides. Our sense of the global has always been ancestral, relational, and rooted in place. Just as important is the difference between access and reciprocity in global Indigenous exchange. True reciprocity requires more than access – it requires accountability. Access opens the door; reciprocity determines how one walks through it. Without reciprocity, the global circulation of Indigenous art risks repeating the same extractive patterns that defined colonial encounter.

In practice, reciprocity takes many forms. Sometimes it is as simple as an artist returning from an exhibition and carrying stories back to their community. In other cases, it involves creating works that circulate globally while remaining grounded in ceremony and law at home. Indigenous artists often work through a ‘double address’: producing works legible in the languages of contemporary art while simultaneously speaking to community responsibilities. A weaving or carving shown in a biennale may be appreciated for its form, but within the community it functions as a vessel of teachings. Exchange in this sense is not a loss but a strengthening, provided it is guided by accountability.

Reciprocity also demands endurance. A collaboration does not end when an exhibition closes, nor does a relationship conclude when the catalogue is printed. For many Indigenous peoples, obligations unfold through cycles of return and renewal. Letters, visits, feasts, or ceremonies extend beyond the life of a single project, reminding us that art is not an extractive transaction but an ongoing relation. Without reciprocity, global Indigenous exchange risks becoming another iteration of colonial extraction. With it, however, every project becomes a site of return – a reweaving of relations that honours ancestors, nourishes communities, and carries knowledge forward.

Critical Reflections

Holistic worldviews, relational knowledge, and land-based learning are not only cultural principles, they are ethical frameworks. They guide how Indigenous art enters and transforms global circuits. A Māori or Kwakwaka’wakw carving, a Navajo/Dene sandpainting, or a Kayapó body painting does not need to be filtered through Western art history to be contemporary. It arrives with its own theory, lineage, and authority – like a canoe navigating the ocean by ancestral stars.

At the same time, the global West’s growing interest in Indigenous contemporary art – the so-called ‘Indigenous Turn’ – deserves scrutiny. On one hand, it signals overdue recognition that Indigenous artists are central within contemporary art. Exhibitions and biennales increasingly create space for our practices. Yet too often this interest risks reproducing extractive habits: celebrating the surface of Indigenous expression without fully committing to the responsibilities it entails. Genuine exchange demands accountable relationships with the communities from which works emerge.

I have witnessed meaningful reciprocity: artists and curators creating projects that return knowledge, build enduring relations, and affirm sovereignty. But I have also seen how quickly the global art world instrumentalises Indigenous presence as diversity optics without altering its structures of power. For the Indigenous Turn to be more than a passing trend, it must be grounded in responsibility – to land, to ancestors, and to living communities. Only then can global Indigenous exchange move beyond spectacle toward transformation.

From the Arctic to the Amazon, from Venice to the Great Ocean, Indigenous artists continue to chart their own currents through the global contemporary. The Indigenous Turn we are living through is not a temporary wave: it is a deep tide, carried by the waters and skies that have always connected our nations. The work ahead is to ensure that these connections are not merely symbolic, but sustained. We must build structures that allow Indigenous voices to lead, to critique one another in culturally safe ways, and to speak to the world in our own voices, without being reduced by translation. This is what Blue Art Journal makes possible. It extends the canoe, the vaka, the qajaq, the dugout across oceans, so that our stories travel with the integrity of their origins.

If the ‘global Indigenous’ is to endure, it will do so through reciprocity, respect, and responsibility – principles as constant as the water and the sky. The Indigenous Turn is therefore not simply a shift within the art world; it is a shift in how knowledge circulates, how relationships are made, and how sovereignty is enacted through visual and relational practices that exceed the limits of contemporary art discourse.