Excluded or Exoticised? The European Gaze in Indigenous Spaces
Across Europe, North America and Latin America, the images of Indigenous photographers are emerging with renewed visibility in exhibitions, biennials and collections, calling us to reconsider, as Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo does, what it means to speak of ‘Indigenous photography’ in both historical and contemporary contexts. Through an interrogation of photographic and curatorial legacies shaped by colonial discourse, and the field of ‘contemporary art’ more broadly, he writes that the recognition of Indigenous artists should not become an excuse to perpetuate exoticisation, nor a pretext for evading responsibility for those who sustain structural relations of power.