Preserving [Spectral] Knowledge

Abstract

GLAM professionals face practical and ethical challenges when tasked with the preservation and maintenance of intangible Indigenous artworks. Indigenous knowledge is often communicated in the form of embodied performance: it is transmitted through ceremonies, rituals, oral tradition, and lived experience. In approaching such material through a postcustodial lens, and invoking the Records Continuum Model (RCM), practitioners must appreciate the human body as a form of archive. By examining contemporary North American Indigenous artists’ interventions on the colonial archive, GLAM professionals may be better positioned to understand the embodied archive, complex spectral indigeneity, and the challenges of institutionalizing these dense conceptual materials. This article examines the work of Jordan Abel and Rebecca Belmore, two contemporary Indigenous artists, and considers how their performance practices serve as instructive, revisionist, and revolutionary articulations of archival bodies. [This article is a revision of the paper that won the 2022 Gerd Muehsam Award. The award recognizes excellence in a paper written by a graduate student on a topic relevant to art librarianship or visual resources curatorship.]