2022
Liliana Conlisk Gallegos (curator)
The Future Past VS. Coloniality: Decolonial Media Art Beyond 530 Years
Many of us may be knowingly or inadvertently functioning as agents upholding the logic of coloniality, but if we do not understand how we are doing this, or what coloniality is, we are most likely continuing a legacy of imposed violence, because decoloniality requires continuous efforts and consciousness.
The 2022 ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community’s online exhibition, "The Future Past vs. Coloniality: Decolonial Media Art Beyond 530 Years," selected 19 works by 29 artists addressing overlapping issues of coloniality affecting humanity worldwide through the intersection of art and technology. Curated by artist and educator Dr. Liliana Conlisk Gallegos, the exhibition proudly demonstrates its political commitment and integrity. It foregrounds and celebrates voices from First Nations, Indigenous communities, and the Global South—perspectives from people who have long extended and enriched digital and technological arts
for the purposes of decoloniality, community building, advocacy, activism, redefining the relationship between the arts, sciences, identity, and culture.
Neoliberalism has not slunk away to a dusty corner in Capital’s bunkers. Extractive processes continue as the climate changes, e-waste mountains grow, and wars are fought on land and in boardrooms over ownership of rare earths and other resources needed to make the machines of the 21st century. The social factory grinding the gears of greed captures bodies, imaginations, cultural heritages, and relationships. Like dreams, divination, and spellcasting, art can suggest other ways of thinking, being, and doing with others.
What we have in favor is our pens, our cameras, our artwork, and communities to keep record of this history which is otherwise covered up. We will always continue organizing ourselves, taking the only option we have, the decolonial one. Another thing we have in favor is our collective indignation, and yes, also our anger and discontent.
The inspiring works in this exhibition deploy a range of media and strategies, including AI, sensorial experiences, digital storytelling, and stereoscopic micro imagery, to recount social histories and political situations, and to activate alternative futures. Margins, which of course were never really margins except to colonialist eyes, are ever more central to the planetary work ahead.
Digital, oral, and visual formats have spoken specifically to Indigenous cultures in ways in which Eurocentric perceptions are yet to fully grasp...our past is the future which the colonialist world only thinks they are now
“discovering”.
https://decolonial-media-art.siggraph.org/exhibition/