Hyperrealism and Other Indigenous Forms of ‘Faking It with the Truth’

Abstract

Truth,' a special collection of essays on new media art, ceremony, animation, sensory immersion, and other hyperreal interventions by Aboriginal and First Nations artists, curators, and academics. This essay introduces the contributing Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors who are working across this emergent field of cultural production. Developing key concepts in critical dialogue with Indigenous practice-based activism and history, it argues that works of the Indigenous hyperreal serve to challenge dominant frameworks of anthropology and canonical art theory. It provides historical and conceptual background for understanding the importance of these works as vital strategies of survival taking shape in neocolonial contexts across Indigenous territories of Australia and Turtle Island today. [Aboriginal art and new media, hyperrealism, Indigenous aesthetics]

Hamlet after Genocide: The Haunting of Soghomon Tehlirian and Empirical Fabulation

“…So does Tehlirian, I argue, treading the delicate line between the Hartmanian leap to critical fabulation and holding onto the concern with the “more traditional, social-historical questions of who did what, where, when, and why” (Kazanjian 2016: 135). If contemporary indigenous hyperrealist art forms “fake it with the truth,” (Biddle and Lea 2018), because this was seen as the most powerful way to expose the violence of settler colonialism, Tehlirian similarly calibrates how “artifice enables reality effects” 2006: 6) 25 . The empirical fabulist offers a new political and ethical mode of truth-telling, of making truthful statements about historical events and experiences that cannot be articulated otherwise 26…”

The Artificial as an Intelligent Indigenous/Indigenizing System

“…This harkens to what Faye Ginsburg (2018, 69) describes as the emergence of “an Indigenous uncanny”. Ginsburg argues that “the fabled visual evidence of the camera lens” can convey the "realities and ongoing impact of the destruction of the lives of Aboriginal people during European settlement,” and that these methodologies entail “‘hyperreal’ possibilities whose truth value is difficult to establish.” In this way, Indigenous artists working in camera‐based experimental modes can be said to be “faking it with the truth” (Biddle and Lea 2018), as they adopt these puported technologies of the "real" as means to engender otherwise unrepresented historical realities.…”

The Right to Change Co‐Producing Ethnographic Animation with Indigenous Youth in Amazonia

“…As an illustration‐based medium, animation allowed us to produce digital films while using Guillermo’s art and doing justice to this aesthetic, which would not be achievable through other techniques such as live‐action filming. Indeed, a growing number of Indigenous filmmakers are using animation to portray Indigenous stories (Biddle and Lea 2018, 7; Dowell 2018), and academic researchers have been co‐producing animated films with Huichol children in Mexico (Davenport and Gunn 2009) and video games with Huni Kuin people in Amazonia, inspired by their mythology (Meneses 2017). All of these projects—like the present collaborative research—are seeking ways of bringing together digital illustration techniques and Indigenous narratives, art, and aesthetics, combining emerging media with traditional Indigenous heritage.…”