Nicholas Galanin at the EFA Project Space, New York

SPECULATIONS ON THE INFRARED
Curated by Christopher Green
EFA Project Space, New York, NY
January 30–March 6, 2021

Speculations on the Infrared explores tactics of speculative Indigenous futurism that foreground and redeploy the subsumed and repressive nature of the settler state’s relationship to colonized peoples as a potential tool of sovereignty. Considering infra- as “below,” as in the spectrum below visible light, but also that which is “further on,” the works in this exhibition speculate on the latent desires for Indigeneity and the subaltern Indigenous DNA of the settler national identity and mythos. Considering how such undercurrents might be aestheticized while viewing celebrations of visibility and inclusions with skepticism, the contributors imagine how sovereign structures, relations, and visions might be erected upon the rubble of what is, from an Indigenous perspective, already a post-apocalyptic colonial landscape. 

While Indigenous futures, pasts, and presents intermingle and manifest in many material and visual forms, those which recognize and unearth the buried strata of despoiled treaty relations, fabricated secret societies, and rampant cultural extraction that found the settler colonial condition are best suited to propose new sovereign structures to build upon the colonial detritus. Working from the premise that Indigeneity underpins the colonial nation state’s identity formation and its most base cultural desires, the work in Speculations on the Infrared suggests that there is a strategic decolonial position to be gained from that subaltern power.

Artists:
Demian Dinéyazhi'
Nicholas Galanin
Kite and Devin Ronneberg
Alan Michelson
New Red Order (Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Jackson Polys)
Unicorn Riot
Lyle Wilson