About

Over the last decades, Indigenous people have radically transformed the socio-political landscape in the Andes and yet prevailing visual representations of indigeneity continue to assign them a place in the margins of society. These visual representations reproduce neo-colonial tropes that portray Indigenous people either as folkloric symbols of the past or as romanticised stewards of the environment confined to distant territories. Imagery of this kind re-inscribes essentialist stereotypes and undermines political, social, and cultural agency.

This practice-based project challenges these dominant narratives by creating new visual strategies and aesthetics to look through and envision contemporary Indigenous visual representations in the Andean region. It will explore the contours of and produce an alternative ‘Indigenous gaze,’ based on a research process of: analysing the works of Indigenous artists who challenge misrepresentations of Indigenous life; and creating visual representations, drawn from the life experience as a racialised Indigenous woman of Aymara origin.

From the photographs of Martin Chambi to the paintings of Venuca Evanán, Andean Indigenous artists have historically contested racist stereotypes and colonialism. In doing so, they have envisioned indigeneity not as a fixed essentialist social category but as an emancipatory social relation and identity of global relevance. More recently, Indigenous and black artists elsewhere including artists such as Wendy Red Star and Heather Agyepong have been responding to apparent and extreme inequality, social injustice and the pervasive afterlives of colonialism by building alternative visual languages and practices. This project builds on and contributes socially engaged art that will involve lens-based moving and photographic artworks. The project will also analyse contemporary Indigenous artwork, contextualised by historical visual narratives and drawing on recent debates in visual, cultural, Indigenous, and postcolonial studies. In a global context of anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, transforming the visual representations of racialised populations has become an urgent issue.