Nicholas Galanin at the Anchorage Museum, Alaska

Created to Hold Power (Intellectual Property) is a digital solo exhibition of new works by Nicholas Galanin.

The work recognizes the continual consumption and deficiency of colonial engagement with Indigenous land, bodies, languages and cultural objects. The exhibition challenges institutional authority and practices through photography, audio, video, sculpture and painting.

The exhibition includes multiple components: Fair Warning, a Sacred Place is a photo and audio series. Galanin says these images document “empty museum cabinets created to hold Indigenous power for captive display. These non-Indigenous institutions do not belong to this power, and this power does not belong to them.”

In the (Intellectual Property) photo series, works are carefully titled by Galanin to “humanize our connection to the uses of our intellectual property, and honor the cultural continuum of this knowledge, creativity and innovation.”

Architecture of Return, painted on deer hide maps an escape route for Indigenous objects held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The works in the exhibition engage abstraction, warning, escape, celebration, linguistic limitation, and insistence on holding up the continued presence, knowledge and value of Indigenous people.