In New Show, Lingít Artist Nicholas Galanin Shows What Decolonization Actually Looks Like
[...] "Interference Patterns," at SITE Santa Fe opens with something that the multidisciplinary Lingít and Unangax artist posits is uniquely American: a scream. [...]
[...] When visitors engage the work by screaming, it is disruptive across the museum.
[...]
'kʼidéin yéi jeené (You're doing such a good job)', [...] features Galanin speaking off-camera in Lingít in words of support, love, care, endearment, and affirmation to his son, whose delighted face centers the screen. The video is paired with Loom, [...] mimicking a totem pole; it is constructed out of children's desks and deconstructed chairs carved with Lingít formlines in pencil. The work references the long history of North American residential schools that forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families in order to assimilate them into white American or Canadian culture. Adjacent to that work is Indian Children's Bracelet, a pair of small handcuffs engraved with clan tattoos, another reference to the prison-like detainment these schools inflicted upon their Indigenous students. [...]
[...] In the process of making the video, he taught himself to speak Lingít. "I was relearning a language that was removed from my culture via forced assimilation and colonial violence as near as my father's generation,"
[...] The Value of Sharpness: When It Falls (2019), an array of 60 porcelain hatchets decorated with Delftware floral motifs and gilded edges that hang in an arc, as if just thrown, from clear threads. [...] Break in Case of Emergency, [...] porcelain sculptures of fire axes encased in glass boxes. The axes, like the hatchets, represent "the tools we have been given in replacement by an oppressive government," Galanin explained. Purely decorative and fragile by nature, they cannot save or protect or provide. "The real value of the hatchets is that, when they break, there will finally be a sharp edge that we can utilize as a tool," he added.
[...] Another porcelain work, American Talking Stick, is shaped like a police baton, sarcastically contrasting Indigenous talking sticks—used at large gatherings—with the tools of police violence, wielded against protesters and marginalized peoples.
[...] Galanin made that solidarity tangible when he and Merritt Johnson asked the National Gallery of Art to remove their sculpture from its current exhibition on contemporary Indigenous art. They asked the museum to do so "due to US government funding of Israel's military assault and genocide against the Palestinian people,"
Nicholas Galanin's Exhibition Shows What Decolonization Looks Like – ARTnews.com
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