Nina Vincent

Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity 

Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity was a major exhibition, symposium, catalogue, and a series of knowledge exchange workshops that foregrounded the ways in which Indigenous contemporary artists addressed the themes of land relations, traditional knowledge, contact zones, and cosmologies in the circumpolar Arctic and Amazon. Although geographically removed, these regions are interconnected: both share histories involving social, cultural, economic, and aesthetic entanglements between Indigenous Peoples and European colonizers. The resulting contact zones are sites of adaptation, exploration, colonization, and exploitation, and today they inspire new forms of protectionism and self-determination. By way of these encounters between Indigenous artists, knowledge keepers, and writers, the project forged connections where Indigenous epistemologies emerged to tackle major issues of our present and future, particularly the intersections between land relations and climate change. In the context of the exhibition, it created a world where commonalities and solidarities across northern and southern hemispheres converged. The exhibition conceptually transformed the galleries at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, into a contact zone that underscored the ontological diversity and multiplicity necessary to live in a world that can encompass multiple worlds. It presented an opportunity to engage in relational curatorial methodologies that engendered transcultural solidarities. 

Biography 

Dr. Nina Vincent is an anthropologist at the National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN), the national body with overall responsibility for protecting Brazil’s cultural heritage. She earned her PhD, MA, and BA at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where her doctorate focused on the emergence of Brazil’s Indigenous contemporary art scene. In 2015, Vincent’s book “Paris, Maori. The museum and its others” was published by the Social Sciences National Association, and received the best dissertation prize. In 2017, Vincent received the Emerging Leaders in the Americas Program that enabled her to work for Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge at OCAD University on the Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity exhibition initiated by Dr. Gerald McMaster, where she would later become a co-curator of the exhibition at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto in 2022.