SESSION: Indigenous Subversions: Counter/Retrocolonization in Artistic Practice

This panel explores the shift from decolonisation to counter- and retrocolonisation, analysing how Indigenous and minoritarian art traditions, practices, symbols, and materials worldwide have responded to, influenced, appropriated, and subverted colonising cultures—both historically and in contemporary practice. What strategies are used to implement a counter- or retrocolonial approach? How do these methods allow us to reframe the history of art in new, diverse, and plural ways? What does it mean to engage with these claims?

The panel invites proposals for papers followed by a roundtable discussion that examine how artistic practices serve as a means to ‘turn back’ on colonial pasts, presents, and futures within a global comparative framework and discuss how artists from Indigenous and marginalised communities, including Amerindian, African, Afro-diasporic, Aboriginal, and Roma, seek visibility and voice in the global artistic scene. What are the most effective tools and urgent questions in efforts to redefine power relations? How do the experiences and aesthetics of marginalised peoples influence or reshape mainstream cultures? The panel welcomes discussions that address not only the potential of a decolonial discourse but also its limitations, aligning with calls for counter- and retro-colonisation as proposed by Indigenous and other marginalised communities themselves. We especially encourage collaborative and dialogic processes that actively involve scholars and artists from Indigenous and marginalised backgrounds, including initiatives developed through artistic residencies, long-term fieldwork, partnerships, and shared-making practices.

Session Convenors:

Paride Bollettin, Masaryk University & Universidade Estadual Paulista, Czech Republic

Caroline Menezes, BSP – Business and Law School Berlin

Julia Secklehner, Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Session Speakers:

Ani Lacy, University of Bristol

Colonoware and the Countercolonial Imagination

This paper examines the production of colonoware, earthenware made by enslaved African and Indigenous potters in the eighteenth-century Americas, as a critical site of countercolonial imagination. Within the restrictive economy of the British Empire, mercantile laws limited local manufacture to preserve metropolitan trade. Yet in plantation yards and coastal settlements, artisans gathered and fired local clays, creating vessels that sustained African and Native design vocabularies within a system that denied their makers recognition as artists.

The research asks how colonoware can be understood not simply as vernacular craft but as an act of subversion within imperial economies of visibility. Drawing on archaeological collections, museum archives, and art-historical analysis, the study integrates theories of material agency, Indigenous epistemologies, and Black Atlantic visual culture to explore how these vessels operated as both utility and testimony. Formal features such as coiled construction, burnishing, and firing in open hearths reveal a continuity of diasporic knowledge that reconfigured the meanings of labour, authorship, and belonging.

The paper argues that colonoware constitutes a countercolonial art history formed in the empire’s blind spot, an aesthetic lineage that transformed marginalisation into method. By repositioning these ceramics as intellectual and artistic interventions rather than anonymous artefacts, the study expands the geography of early modern art and challenges the disciplinary limits of what art history has chosen to see.

Ruoxi Li, Peking University

Veiled “Modernity”: Limitations of Decolonial Discourse in Female Imagery from L’École des Beaux-Arts d’Indochine à Hanoi

Established in Hanoi in 1925 by French academic painter Victor Tardieu, the École des Beaux-Arts d’Indochine was a key institution in colonial Indochina, where French colonial influence shaped artistic production, blending Sino-Vietnamese traditions with Western techniques. This study examines female imagery in student paintings to explore the limitations of colonial modernity and decolonial aspirations. While recent scholarship has celebrated the “modernity” in these images—marked by individualism and liberation—this research reveals how Orientalist market preferences, colonial pedagogical constraints, and patriarchal gazes obscured these potentials, rendering “modernity” superficial and homogenised. Moreover, these representations subtly engage in counter-colonial and retrocolonial subversion, while serving nationalist narratives that persist today. The research draws on archival materials from the French National Archives, including letters and course syllabi, alongside visual analysis of student paintings. It employs Edward Said’s Orientalism to critique the colonial gaze and explore how these works both reflect and subvert colonial ideologies. By deconstructing submissive female archetypes, the study highlights the contradictions in counter-colonial narratives and offers a new perspective on how modern Vietnamese art both challenges and reinforces colonial power structures. Ultimately, the paper calls for a reimagining of modern Vietnamese art—not merely as a reflection of national identity, but as a site of retro-colonial resistance, where the boundaries of modernity and decolonial agency are critically examined through power, gender, and representation

So Yin Dilys Tam, University of Chicago

Beyond Typologies and Archival Objects: Nadia Myre and Visual Lexicons in Flux

This paper examines the artwork of Nadia Myre (Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg), who galvanises archival materials and legal documentation as both medium and subject in critiquing Canadian juridical histories. Employing visual analysis, material culture studies, and exhibition history, I consider how Myre’s projects, Decolonial Gestures or Doing it Wrong? (2016) and Code Switching (2017), transform institutional records into sites of critical intervention, drawing on Paula Amad’s counter-archive theory to foreground a material, flux-oriented approach to visual jurisprudence.

Decolonial Gestures documents Myre’s attempts to reconstruct Indigenous-style crafts using colonial-era instructions, with the process captured in video, audio, and photography. The resulting unfinished objects visually enact the erasure and distortion of Indigenous traditions under Westphalian legal frameworks. In Code Switching, Myre reassembles clay pipe fragments from the Thames, its overlaid beadwork patterns blurring the distinction between colonial trade objects and Indigenous material culture and exposes coercive systems of cultural knowledge production.

Supplementing this perspective are Contact in Monochrome (Toile de Jouy) (2018) and Tell Me of Your Boats and Your Waters—Where Do They Come From, Where Do They Go? (2022), in which Myre extends her counter-archival practice by visually engaging with Indigenous sovereignty and the institutional archive’s affective gaps. In this, Myre exposes the instability and performativity of material archives and articulates a broader challenge to the dominance of typological visual lexicons in the emerging field of visual jurisprudence, instead proposing an understanding of law that is malleable and continuously (re)negotiated.

Kristina Bodrožić-Brnić, BSP Business and Law School & Shanê Adeílson Shanenawa, Shanenawa people

In the Space Between: Recreating Shanenawa Identity through Spiritual and Material Dialogue

This collaborative contribution explores how the Shanenawa people of Feijó, Acre, Brazil, recreate identity within the dynamic tension between ancestral continuity and cultural adaptation.

Co-authored by researcher Kristina Bodrožić-Brnić and Shanê Adeílson Shanenawa, vice-leader of the Shanenawa village and son of Pajé Shetehu, the work unfolds as a dialogic process rooted in lived experience and spiritual reflection. Through video exchanges, oral narratives, and documentation of artisan and ritual practices, the paper traces how Shanenawa creativity acts as a mode of counter-colonisation: a gentle but powerful act of self-definition and cultural continuity in a plural environment shared with Indigenous and non-Indigenous neighbours.

The project frames “art” not as an aesthetic product but as a relational practice—woven through forest, spirit, and community. Craft, song, and story become media of resistance and renewal, where adaptation to external influences never implies loss but transformation. The research questions fixed categories of tradition and modernity, instead proposing a living understanding of Indigenous art as a site of encounter, reciprocity, and spiritual ecology.

This project is intentionally open-ended—a living text that evolves in dialogue with the community, reflecting Indigenous epistemologies where knowledge is fluid, relational, and collectively shaped.

Finally, the project introduces an AI-assisted living memory archive, developed collaboratively with the community. Here, AI acts as a co-archivist, preserving oral histories, crafts, and songs while maintaining Indigenous data sovereignty.