The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts debuts exhibitions by Greenlandic and Amazonian Indigenous artists whose work narrates threatened worlds deeply rooted in nature.
At first sight, two new exhibitions at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe don’t have much in common. In fact, they seem to sit on opposite sides of the artistic, gender, and natural ecosystem spectra, never mind the world.
Womb of the Earth: Cosmovision of the Rainforest is a one-room exhibition that showcases weavings, embroidery, beadwork, paintings, and ceramics by three collectives of Brazilian Indigenous female artists who live in remote villages in the Amazon rainforest. Their artistic work represents their worries about the sacredness of their land, their ways of life, and the threat of deforestation.
These artists live in areas of Brazil that are so difficult to reach that they do not have access to galleries and museums, not even in their own country. MoCNA chief curator Manuela Well-Off-Man and her team became aware of the traveling exhibition when it was on view in Paris at Radicants, an international curatorial cooperative. The MoCNA exhibition is co-curated by Brazilian Indigenous curator Cristine Takuá (Maxakali) and artist-curator Anita Ekman, in consultation with Sandra Benites (Guarani Nhandeva).
Although most pieces in the exhibition, on display through July 19, 2024, are by individual artists, The Forest Is Our Future, Which Makes Us Grow—on a striking red fabric—is a collaborative work by Tiriyó, Katxuyana, and Txikiyana women. The tall beaded tree, with branches, a trunk, and an intricate system of roots, represents their communities’ source of life.
Where Womb of the Earth seems made of browns and reds, Arctic Vertigo, the solo exhibition by Inuit artist and filmmaker from Greenland, Inuk Silis Høegh, showcases blues of all shades, acidic green, off-fuchsia, and yellow. “The two exhibitions complement each other with warmer colors from Brazil, and the cooler palette from Greenland,” says Well-Off-Man.
Høegh’s exhibition displays a multi-media examination of the beauty of arctic and subarctic nature and the fear both can instill in us—two opposites that cannot but coexist. The centerpiece of the show, scheduled to remain on view through July 14, 2024, is the looped film installation The Green Land, directed by Høegh with sound by Jacob Kirkegaard, a Danish composer and sound artist who, as Høegh put it during a pre-opening talk at MoCNA, could make walls talk.
The slow-moving images of mountains, streams, and waterfalls—and the accompanying sounds—can cause a viewer to fall into a meditative state that simultaneously quiets and frightens the mind. The color green, which Høegh introduced into the environment with smoke and fluids as he was filming, mesmerizes but shocks, too. It’s beautiful, but not natural.
“It’s spring, it’s nature, it’s got all these positive connotations,” says Høegh. “But it’s also the color of something toxic at the same time.” Just recently, he says, the government of Greenland banned uranium mining. “So, this duality is what I tried to make the film about because sometimes we assume that we do something good and we think we know what the effect is, but we’re wrong.”
As viewers wander between Womb of the Earth and Arctic Vertigo, they may start taking note of similarities. Both exhibitions are by artists whose native lands are difficult to reach. The two depicted populations are small yet threatened. The inhabitants of these areas of Brazil and people who live in Greenland still do so with the consequences of European colonization by Portugal and Denmark, respectively.
When viewers walk back and forth again, they may become aware that colonization goes beyond one nation taking over another’s culture and mother tongue. For Womb of the Earth artists and their communities in the Amazon, colonization represents destruction and deforestation; for Høegh in Greenland, it represents, among other things, a potential contamination of the land and sea.
Well-Off-Man points out that both exhibitions are by artists who come from regions we hear about in the news, but whose communities we don’t hear from very often. “Also, both areas—the Brazilian Rainforest and the inland ice cap in Greenland—if we continue to destroy them, their destruction will affect all of us,” says Well-Off-Man. “They are so far away that it’s easy to forget how much they mean to the world.”
The two exhibitions meet, perhaps not coincidentally, in a third climate with its own winter and summer hues of gold, orange, and brown: the American Southwest, a geographic middle where the effects of climate change are undisputable with wildfires, a barely existing rainy season, and a drought that goes back centuries. As the crow flies, Greenland is roughly 3,000 miles away from Santa Fe; a little over 3,500 from the heart of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. And yet, both Greenland’s glaciers and the Amazon’s canopy, however fragile, are where the delicate balance sits.
