THE FUTURE OF THE ART WORLD

Excerpt of one Dialogue out of 38 taken from »The Future of the Art World«
by András Szántó

LÉULI ESHRĀGHI - Curator, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada

ART & INDIGENEITY

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I want to start with some fundamentals. You belong to two Sāmoan clans. How does this heritage inform your life and work?

I belong to the Seumanutafa and Tautua clans from ‘Upolu Island and Savai‘i Island in the Sāmoan archipelago. The fa‘amatai governance system has existed for thousands of years and somehow survived German, American, and British colonialisms— a testament to the tenacity of a lot of folks back home. It is a cultural belonging that is strong and activated, whether we’re in the diaspora or at home. You can never cease to be responsible to territory, to people, to ideas. Wherever I go, I’m not representing, but I’m holding, carrying everyone I belong to with me, and trying to think through and act in the best way in terms of how I might honor them.

You’re a poet, artist, writer, curator. How do these things intersect in your work?

Sometimes I make artwork. Sometimes it needs to be an essay or an exhibition. My passions since I was a child have been languages and artistic expression. I saw languages and the arts as ways of understanding folks within their own worlds. I also benefited from working at the Indigenous artist- run center Blak Dot Gallery in Melbourne, which was founded in 2011. Blak Dot is intergenerational, so I was lucky to learn from people working in the field for twenty to thirty years, and people who were starting out but from different Indigenous cultures.

You once described yourself to me as a one- person Indigenous art, design, and relationality department at your museum. Tell me more.

The Musée des beaux- arts de Montréal has a very strong decorative arts and design collection, so I frame the position as Indigenous practices, inclusive of art, design, ceremony, protocols, knowledges, and relationality. This year, I am working with an intern, Katsitsanò:ron Dumoulin Bush, from the local Indigenous community across the river from Montreal, in Kahnawà:ke, so it’s not just me anymore. My position grew out of two Inuit curators who had different engagements with the museum prior to my being there. My role is to amplify and build outward. We are bringing attention to local Indigenous artists from the Rotinonhsión:ni Confederacy, Wendat Confederacy, W8banaki Confederacy, and other Indigenous nations in and around Montreal. Of course, I come from Oceania, so once I feel like we’ve honored local artists to a degree that is tenable, we can work on projects further afield.

I don’t want to make assumptions, but I have a feeling that if someone with your cultural belonging walks into a museum, they may experience it differently than I would. I imagine it as walking into a room, but the furniture seems to be in the wrong place.

I’m also an Aries, so...

So how would you like to move the furniture around, so to speak?

I think about that a lot. As we know, museums are slow- moving ships. As far as I can tell, we’re all on the same page around wanting to do the right thing, to go in the direction of being a culturally competent museum for local communities and communities further afield. But it does take somebody driving these changes for the institution. It can be as simple as changing the marketing language from “Come and discover Inuit art” to “Immerse yourself in work to better understand your neighbor.” I’m always thinking about five, ten, fifteen years in advance of where we are. We’re going to unpack Indigenous implications for the art world.

Before we go further, what does the term “art world” mean to you?

I think there are multiple art worlds. The Indigenous art world in which I’m primarily situated is semi- parallel to the mainstream art world. The Global North art world, of course, benefits from a lot of the advances of that wider discourse. One distinction is whether you see the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la terre as the beginning of Indigenous art arriving in mainstream Global North spaces, or if you see Te Maori, the wide- ranging 1984 Māori art exhibition that toured the Met, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the de Young, and the Field Museum, as that moment when some Indigenous peoples and practices become centered.

What major changes have you seen in the art world since you have been involved, when it comes to the visibility of Indigenous artists?

It’s really uneven in terms of arriving at a critical mass. You can have the National Gallery of Canada today with its fifteen Indigenous employees, or none at many other museums. Jeffrey Gibson’s US national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024 came twenty years after Canada and Australia had Indigenous artists representing their nations in the national pavilion. The Hãhãwpuá Pavilion was the first time Indigenous artists determined their representation in the Brazilian pavilion. Adriano Pedrosa, Amanda Carneiro, and others in their team have done a lot to platform Indigenous practices at MASP and in the Venice Biennale. But visibility is something that comes only with time. We are arriving at a more situated art- historical framework for Indigenous practices. People want to understand these cultures from within, as far as possible. Of course, there’s always the problem of translation. The first Inuit art cooperatives in Canada began in the 1940s. In Australia, Indigenous art centers were founded around the same time, mostly to make work for tourist markets. These later became the main economic powerhouses for Indigenous artists having some kind of agency and financial capacity, despite the repressive colonial policies of the time. Today, there are four major Indigenous art fairs in Australia alone, bringing in millions of dollars, but none in Canada. In the US there is of course the Santa Fe Indian Market, which I look forward to visiting.

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Header: Léuli Eshrāghi © Rhett Hammerton