Arctic/Amazon

The Arctic/Amazon project began a number of years ago when I was working on the 18th Sydney Biennale with Catherine De Zegher. At that time I was in contact with Aboriginal artists from different areas across Australia. One of my trips took me out to Alice Springs in Australia’s central desert, where I experienced first-hand the system of the Aboriginal art economy. 

I was not surprised by this newly emergent economy, but what I did find surprising was its resemblance to the Canadian Arctic art economy, which is supported by an art cooperative system begun in the 1950s by the Canadian Federal Government. It is a cash system, where artists are paid for their work at the end of each week. Savvy gallerists take trips to the North to collect works of art to be displayed and sold in their southern galleries found in Toronto, Montreal, or Ottawa. The system was intended to use art and creative practices as a way to replace traditional ways of sustaining oneself in the remote North. In contrast, Australia’s Aboriginal art market had begun during the 1970s with the Papunya community. The system was defined by local galleries, representatives of which would go out into select communities with large rolls of canvases. There they would leave them to be picked up later, or they would exchange a new roll for a completed one. Artists would fill up the rolls of canvas with imaginative and incredible works of art that outsiders would call abstract, yet the images were profoundly symbolic and filled with meaning. These galleries would divvy the paintings and then distribute them to the large commercial centres of Sydney and Melbourne

I soon discovered that the community of Papunya was the most well-known artmaking community of Alice Springs. I quickly began to compare it to Cape Dorset in Nunavut, Canada. At the same time, I thought about the two environments: both are quite at opposite ends of the earth; both are deserts of a certain kind; both have Indigenous peoples who have been able to survive the intensity of their climates; and both have and continue to have relations with outsiders—in other words, White people. I knew there was an exhibition project here somewhere, and it was only a matter of finding a like-minded soul with which to collaborate. Several years later I met the anthropologist Dr. Iris Edenheiser of the Grassi Museum in Leipzig, Germany, who had done her PhD research in the western Amazon, and it was she who convinced me that artists of the Amazon would be an equally important comparison. As we began to exchange ideas about the Amazon, negotiated through my interest in the Arctic, the idea of an exhibition of Arctic and Amazonian artists was born. 

Not long after these exchanges, Dr. Edenheiser was unable to continue. It was around this time when Dr. Nina Vincent came to Toronto on an Emerging Leaders in the Americas Program (ELAP) for six months.