Overview

Drawing on contemporary Indigenous art practices, Aesthetics of Repair explores the collision of ceremonial protocols with visual forms of repair in the Pacific Northwest. Aesthetics of Repair analyses how the belongings called 'art' are mobilised by Indigenous artists and cultural activists in British Columbia, Canada. Drawing on contemporary imaginaries of repair, the book asks how diverse forms of collective reckoning with settler-colonial harm resonate with urgent conversations about aesthetics of care in art. The discussion moves across urban and remote spaces of display for Northwest Coast-style Indigenous art, including galleries and museums, pipeline protests, digital exhibitions, an Indigenous-run art school, and a totem pole repatriation site. The book focuses on the practices around art and artworks as forms of critical Indigenous philosophy, arguing that art's efficacies in this moment draw on Indigenous protocols for enacting justice between persons, things, and territories. Featuring examples of belongings that embody these social relations a bentwood box made to house material memories, a totem pole whose return replenishes fish stocks, and a copper broken on the steps of the federal capital each chapter shows how art is made to matter. Ultimately, Aesthetics of Repair illuminates the collision of contemporary art with extractive economies and contested practices of 'resetting' settler-Indigenous relations.

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9781487522667

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Reviews

"""Challenging what art is and does, Aesthetics of Repair brings together a compelling series of studies of Northwest Coast art as relation, transaction, and mobilizing agency across an expanding contemporary field. Against reductive reconciliatory promises and vacuities, this book positions the work of art as material care, obligation, and justice, yoked to unsettled histories in the making by artists and activists today.""--Jennifer L. Biddle, Director of emLAB (the Ethnographic Media Lab), Arts, Design & Architecture, University of New South Wales ""With theoretical insight and nuance, Eugenia Kisin traces out the world-repairing capacities of the aesthetics and materialities of Northwest Coast art within the historically shifting entanglements of settler-state violence, the brutal extraction of cultural and natural resources, the art market and anthropology's influence, neoliberal heritage regimes, and the Canadian TRC following the exposure of the residential schools. This book demonstrates with immense sensitivity how close attunement to the efficacies and transformative powers of objects and the ways these may embody, animate, and re-enchant Indigenous histories and sovereignties means recognizing injury and loss while avoiding the romanticism of redemptive and conciliatory narratives.""--Patricia Spyer, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, Geneva Graduate Institute"

""Challenging what art is and does, Aesthetics of Repair brings together a compelling series of studies of Northwest Coast art as relation, transaction, and mobilizing agency across an expanding contemporary field. Against reductive reconciliatory promises and vacuities, this book positions the work of art as material care, obligation, and justice, yoked to unsettled histories in the making by artists and activists today.""--Jennifer L. Biddle, Director of emLAB (the Ethnographic Media Lab), Arts, Design & Architecture, University of New South Wales ""With theoretical insight and nuance, Eugenia Kisin traces out the world-repairing capacities of the aesthetics and materialities of Northwest Coast art within the historically shifting entanglements of settler-state violence, the brutal extraction of cultural and natural resources, the art market and anthropology's influence, neoliberal heritage regimes, and the Canadian TRC following the exposure of the residential schools. This book demonstrates with immense sensitivity how close attunement to the efficacies and transformative powers of objects and the ways these may embody, animate, and re-enchant Indigenous histories and sovereignties means recognizing injury and loss while avoiding the romanticism of redemptive and conciliatory narratives.""--Patricia Spyer, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, Geneva Graduate Institute

Author Information

Eugenia Kisin is an associate professor of art and society at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

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