Bureau of Aesthetics: Native Art Department International (Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan)

Walking into the Native Art Department International (NADI) Bureau of Aesthetics, I am immediately greeted by the rhythmic sound of jingles. They are coming from There is No Then and Now; Only Is and Is Not (2018), a projection of Bronx-based artist Dennis RedMoon Darkeem dancing in an empty theatre in his powwow regalia. At the end of each loop, his statement reads across a black screen, “I feel like everyone has had a hand in defining Native people, except ourselves.”

When Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan began planning for the first Canadian solo exhibition of their long-term collaborative project, they could not have has been closed to the general public since its opening in March, and there is something strangely familiar about entering a room full of Indigenous creative excellence that has been silenced. This is of course through no fault of Mercer Union—who had expected to run the show until the end of May and host a full month of performances by Hupfield—but being in an empty gallery reminds me of entering archives and seeing shelves of carvings, paintings, and masks that have been left mostly on their own. It is that exact culture of curating—one that projects reductionist assumptions onto the work of Indigenous cultural producers—that NADI does so well at satirizing and dismantling. The show emphasizes kinship, relationality, and methods of disruption, all of which seek to liberate the confines of so-called authenticity and classification that are so ingrained in a colonial approach to art history and exhibition.