GLOBAL INDIGENOUS ARTS NETWORK
The Global Indigenous Arts Network (GIAN) is a research group dedicated to cultivating links between Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics, contemporary artists, and other cultural agents with the aim of forging long-lasting intercultural and inter-epistemic alliances within, and beyond, the global arts scene. GIAN aims to provide increased visibility to Indigenous situated knowledges as a means for decolonizing current Western-hegemonic ways of belonging and looking at the world. Echoing Tuscarora scholar Jolene Rickard (2017), GIAN recognizes the urgent need to take into account Indigenous knowledges in global art, art history, and visual culture studies in order to exercise an effective intervention on modernity / coloniality and its framing of Indigenous cultures within a hegemonic metanarrative of the West.
NEWS AND EVENTS
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RESEARCH SEMINAR
ARTISTIC EXPLORATION OF CONTESTED HERITAGE:
Unraveling Repatriation Journeys A Talk by Anna Castelli
Keynote Presenter: Anna Castelli (IULM University, Milan)
Tuesday, 25 November 2025; 18.30h.
Aula 208, Facultat de Geografia i Història, Universitat de Barcelona (C/ Montalegre, 6)
Free admission, in-person
This talk investigates the role of contemporary artists in the repatriation of contested heritage within Aotearoa/New Zealand’s bicultural museum system. Rooted in decades of Māori advocacy and a sustained critique of colonial museum practices, this system emerged in the late 20th century to integrate Indigenous authority into exhibition design, conservation methods, and repatriation protocols. The research focuses on key case studies where contemporary artists have engaged with museum structures, challenging entrenched narratives and amplifying Māori perspectives. Through works that merge cultural protocols with creative experimentation, these artists open spaces for dialogue, healing, and the reframing of historical memory. By examining these intersections of art, heritage, and Indigenous agency, the study highlights the potential of artistic practice to mediate complex restitution processes.
Denise Batchelor, Maureen Lander & Stìobhan Lothian, Ngaru Paewhenua, 2023. Photo Sam Hartnett. Courtesy of Te Tuhi.
RESEARCH SEMINAR
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Dialogical Pathways to Resistance and Epistemic Justice
Keynote Presenter: Giuliana Borea (Newcastle University)
Wednesday, 26 March 2025
Aula 204, Facultat de Geografia i Història, Universitat de Barcelona (C/ Montalegre, 6)
Free, in-person, certificate of attendance available
In the current global context, Indigenous peoples are facing numerous challenges resulting from historical and contemporary processes of domination and exclusion, including the longstanding plunder of natural resources in their territories, the epistemological extractivism, appropriation and reification of Indigenous knowledges-ontologies, and the systematic silencing of their ways of understanding and experiencing the binds between nature and culture. In this regard, this seminar aims to provide an interdisciplinary space to discuss and visibilise the centrality of Indigenous knowledges, Indigenous contemporary arts practices, and their diverse strategies of resistance when faced with these dynamics of oppression. The seminar seeks to foster deep reflections contributing to the production of epistemological and cultural justice which, in addition to helping restitute what has been taken, can also acknowledge, visibilise, and help to legitimise the knowledges and practices of Indigenous peoples as fundamental resources to face the social, cultural, and ecological challenges of the 21st century. This event aims to provide a space for mutual learning and critical dialogue that can contribute to producing interdisciplinary and transcultural collaborative networks. In addition to the guest presenters, seminar attendees are invited to a guided tour of the exhibition Amazònies. El futur ancestral (CCCB, open until 4 May 2025).
Photo credits: Theo Esthetu, Atlas Fractured, 2017
The increased visibility of the Indigenous in the framework of global contemporary art is marked by the recent inclusion in the "mega-exhibitions" (peripheral biennials or global salons, Documenta) of an increasingly bulky presence of artists from Australia, New Zealand, the Americas, Canada and the Nordic countries in the search for a global discourse of "Indigeneity", a term that comes from the adjective "indigenous" and the abstract suffix "eity", which indicates quality. The emerging discourse of Indigeneity leads us to establish a distinction between the idea of Indigenous as related to identity, and the notion of Indigeneity understood as a discursive formation, as a relationship that not only includes Indigenous peoples but also those who self-identify as non-Indigenous. Within this framework, in this course we will present the works and contexts of a series of Indigenous artists present in four major exhibitions: the 2017 Kassel Documenta, the 2022 Kassel Documenta, the 2022 Venice Biennale, and the 2023 Sharjah Biennale (United Arab Emirates).
SUMMER COURSE
MEGA-EXHIBITIONS AND INDIGENISM: Summer Course
Instructor: Anna Maria Guasch
POSTPONED
New dates to be confirmed
Free Online Course
(delivered in Spanish)