Description
In Iqaluit in the Canadian Arctic, one of the front lines of global heating, a number of Indigenous artists have spent the past decade critiquing mainstream understandings of climate change. Through film, music, performance art, and literature, a loosely connected group of Inuit artists have questioned the role of the state and international institutions in governing climate change in favour of radical decolonial frameworks. This presentation will ask how Inuit artists have been engaging in discourses on climate change and how their work is intervening in the politics of the planetary crisis. It will also ask how a decolonial approach to understanding climate change can help to move beyond a framework grounded in states and institutions and towards a genuinely planetary politics.
I will analyse several key works by the experimental performance artist Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, an Inuk artist based in Iqaluit, whose work frequently engages with climate change and the lineages of imperialism and colonialism in the Arctic. I will draw on the scholarly work of Glen Coulthard, Kyle Whyte, and Anna M. Agathangelou, to ask whether Bathory’s work fits into a decolonial framework of self-recognition and whether it identifies the climate crisis as an intensification of already existing colonially induced environmental change. I hope to argue that Bathory’s artworks intervene in the politics of the climate crisis and offer a radically decolonial vision for our planetary futures.
Key words: climate change; art; indigeneity; decoloniality.
