Photography's Enduring Life

A Hundred Years of (De)colonial Imaginaries of North American Indigenous People

Abstract

Museum Kunstwerk hosted a special exhibition that explored Native American photographic portraiture and questioned its ambivalent status as both fine art and a powerful political tool. Displaying the works of two US-american artists, Edward Sheriff Curtis and Will Wilson, the exhibition not only bridged a century of different modes of representation, but also confronted irreconcilable (de)colonial imaginaries: Curtis’ non-Indian point of view on the one hand, the Native American perspective of the Diné photographer Wilson on the other.