Reconfigurations of Time: Reflections on the Exhibition, Arts of Resistance: Politics and the Past in Latin America, UBC Museum of Anthropology

Abstract

This article reflects on the exhibition Arts of Resistance: Politics and the Past in Latin America, showing how the project challenged common representations of Central and South American art and history by displaying local, often Indigenous, ways of managing cultural heritage, as well as some of the ways that ancestral knowledge and popular arts are used to document and resist political realities. Furthermore, it argues for the overt politicization of museological and exhibitionary perspectives using radical cosmopolitical theory. Through this framework, I argue for the political significance of the art forms included in the exhibition that champion local philosophies and positions in the face of various forms of marginalization.

Amazonian Activism for European Museum Audiences: Critical Reflections on the Development of an “Amazonia” Exhibition at the National Museum of World Cultures, the Netherlands

“…For the exhibition, “Arts of Resistance” at MOA, UBC, Osorio Sunnucks invited two members of a Shipibo‐Konibo women's art collective, Olinda Silvano (Reshijabe) and Silvia Ricopa (Ronincaisy), who were born in the Ucayali riverine region in Peruvian Amazonia but who now live in Lima, to create an 8 by 3 metre multi‐sensory kené mural. The exhibition explored the ways Indigenous and popular artists use historical images and ancestral and local knowledge to document or mobilize against contemporary political struggles and injustices (Osorio Sunnucks, 2021). While much of the content of the exhibition was explicitly violent or activist, the project also championed more subtle forms of cultural resistance.…”