Artists
Myre, Nadia
(In)tangible Tangles, 2021
Courtesy: Nadia Myre
Nadia Myre is an interdisciplinary, Montreal-based artist whose work primarily explores Indigenous histories and identities, as well as historical and contemporary Indigenous resistance. As a member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, an Algonquin First Nation, she is personally descended from survivors of European-colonial expansionist violence.
Myre’s work [In]tangible Tangles (2021) features framed prints of photographed moccasins she selected from the database of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The artist has cropped and color-inverted them. The resulting, X-ray-like image recalls fluoroscopy, the procedure used to detect hidden, subsurface layers in paintings.
For Myre, neither photography nor X-ray constitute objective scientific methods or even innocent imaging techniques. In the context of colonial expansion, they were used to systematically document and map Indigenous living spaces.
Framing and sculpted coloring give the photographs an object-like quality: the moccasins look as though they had just been set down and were simply waiting for two feet to slip back into them. This palpable absence points - with the clarity of a void - to the missing bodies of the people who once wore these shoes. They bear witness to the violence of European colonization, which effectively annihilated entire tribes and peoples. The recent discovery of mass graves containing the bones of children on the premises of former state-run boarding schools for the Indigenous people of Canada show once again the unimaginable scale of this violence.
Myre’s work is a decolonial gesture that takes a critical stand on Western institutional practices of collecting, archiving, and historicizing. It addresses both the lack of comprehensive restitution and the relegation of objects from indigenous ways of life to natural history museums, which demotes Indigenous people to the status of an Other in contrast to Euro-civilized society. The artist reappropriates her ancestral artifacts by removing them from the context of the natural history collection and creating an alternative, discursive space that allows these objects to tell their own stories.
Text: Lena Reitschuster; englische Übersetzung: Amy Patton
Nadia Myre is an interdisciplinary, Montreal-based artist whose work primarily explores Indigenous histories and identities, as well as historical and contemporary Indigenous resistance. As a member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, an Algonquin First Nation, she is personally descended from survivors of European-colonial expansionist violence.
Myre’s work [In]tangible Tangles (2021) features framed prints of photographed moccasins she selected from the database of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The artist has cropped and color-inverted them. The resulting, X-ray-like image recalls fluoroscopy, the procedure used to detect hidden, subsurface layers in paintings.
For Myre, neither photography nor X-ray constitute objective scientific methods or even innocent imaging techniques. In the context of colonial expansion, they were used to systematically document and map Indigenous living spaces.
Framing and sculpted coloring give the photographs an object-like quality: the moccasins look as though they had just been set down and were simply waiting for two feet to slip back into them. This palpable absence points - with the clarity of a void - to the missing bodies of the people who once wore these shoes. They bear witness to the violence of European colonization, which effectively annihilated entire tribes and peoples. The recent discovery of mass graves containing the bones of children on the premises of former state-run boarding schools for the Indigenous people of Canada show once again the unimaginable scale of this violence.
Myre’s work is a decolonial gesture that takes a critical stand on Western institutional practices of collecting, archiving, and historicizing. It addresses both the lack of comprehensive restitution and the relegation of objects from indigenous ways of life to natural history museums, which demotes Indigenous people to the status of an Other in contrast to Euro-civilized society. The artist reappropriates her ancestral artifacts by removing them from the context of the natural history collection and creating an alternative, discursive space that allows these objects to tell their own stories.
Text: Lena Reitschuster; englische Übersetzung: Amy Patton