The Museum of Anthropology’s “Amazonia” exhibit curated by Nuno Porto is a celebration of the numerous indigenous communities located within the South American Rainforest through the sharing of their connections to both the people of Vancouver and the natural world. The display contains artifacts representing many areas of skills and purposes for indigenous culture, but I’ll be focusing this discussion on the green feathered “Kayapo” (Porto) items with their unique backstory in comparison to the rest of “Amazonia.”
This display explains that these objects were donated to MOA from the Royal British Columbia Museum with no information on their origin, names, or function (Porto). The exhibit also recognizes that these “orphan” artifacts aren’t uncommon and are in part due to deep colonization as a “way of silencing the people who made and used them, of excluding them from the conversation” (Porto). In the context of the exhibit in its entirety, I found that it gave an excellent representation of indigenous populations by opening a window to their cultural differences that allow others to reflect and learn from. However, the artifacts of “Kayapo” uncover a greater issue of numerous stories existing that are unable to be heard or witnessed due to either institutional underrepresentation or “self-silencing” (Porto).
This concept of silencing voices was a main focus during ASTU 100’s continuous work on archives and their ability to choose which groups or individuals to preserve and give a voice. I took this idea of institutions like museums and archives actively deciding who they are wanting to represent and I did research on other circumstances of minority underrepresentation. What I found was an article by Hannah Ellis-Petersen titled, How the Art World Airbrushed Female Artists from History, examining the longstanding behaviour of art museums gender inequality in terms of their lacking representation of the work from female artists. Ellis-Petersen argues that it is the role of major galleries to give a platform for artists to reach the public eye yet “it is still the case that the art that we consider to be the most valuable, in monetary but also cultural terms, is almost all by men.”
In the article, Ellis-Petersen mentions the beginnings of multiple primarily female artist based galleries to open up in order to give voices to women unable to compete against men because as said by curator and gallery director Frances Morris, “we have made a commitment to rethinking our collection, how we build it and the choices we make.” Morris is suggesting to the large impact curators have in what is or isn’t given a voice and therefore what stories are made more accessible to the public eye. I see the importance in noting that for the “Amazonia” exhibit of MOA, curator Nuno Porto has chosen to represent the “Kayapo” artifacts despite having little information when receiving them. The exhibit’s objective of “displaying the knowledge and craftsmanship of some of the groups who reside in the region” (Porta) is excelled in that they make the decision as a curator to include those who’ve been silenced by others.
Works Cited:
Ellis-Petersen, Hannah. How the Art World Airbrushed Female Artists from History. The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 6 Feb. 2017
Porto, Nuno. Amazonia: The Rights of Nature. Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, British Columbia, 14 Feb. 2018.
