Re-Viewing The Evidence (2019), SPRING/BREAK, New York, NY

In 1996, the skeleton of the “Kennewick Man” was found in a river in Kennewick, Washington. The bones became the subject of an investigation by forensic anthropologists through intensive DNA testing. Inconclusive evidence about the ethnicity of the 9,000-year-old skeleton led to a defense, stoked by white supremacists, of an alternate history that natives were not in fact the first people on this land. DNA analysis and cranial morphology were brought against the oral history of the Umatilla people in court, and a struggle ensued for the right to rebury their ancestor. Native knowledge claims were completely unrecognized by the courts until advances in DNA testing eventually led to their corroboration, and the “Ancient One” was buried again in 2017. 

Though western scientific principles and epistemology have a veneer of neutrality, historically, these concepts of science and logic have repeatedly been weaponized to undermine the knowledge and livelihood of colonized people. The defense of objectivity provides a subtle and reliable tactic for the enforcement of imperial power. Oscillating between humorous and stark juxtapositions, the artists in Re-viewing the Evidence critique these colonial systems of knowledge and ethnographic impulses, exposing and subverting ethnographic fictions and imperial science. 

In their 2018 piece, The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets, filmmakers Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys investigate the Kennewick Man case. Culture Capture 001 (2018), a permutation of The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets, is a central work in Re-Viewing the Evidence. Sections of Culture Capture 001 are filmed amidst dioramas and vitrines at the Museum of Natural History. Through pulsating video collage, dissonances between sound and image, and performance, the artists undermine colonial power strategies enacted through exhibitions of indigenous “artifacts.” On the neighboring screen, works like Give It Back speak to the philosophy of The New Red Order (NRO), a “public secret society” formed by Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, working with self-identified “informants” in support of indigenous futures. Through their experimental video work, the artists engage with these themes in a subversion of the documentary form, through their practice of ‘anti-ethnography’.

Also on display in Re-Viewing the Evidence are the silicone masks worn in Culture Capture 001, collaborations by Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys from the series “Culture Capture/Defacement.” The series “Collections,” included in this exhibition, is made up of silicone masks, shaped to the heads of willing non-native “informants” and collaborators. The masks speak to the concept of the headhunter within the construction of the “savage,” a central image in anthropological depictions of native populations. Simultaneously, the display of these masks echo questions raised in Culture Capture 001 regarding the ethics of museum display and the false objectivity of the anthropological object. In their practice, the artists challenge the confinement of indigeneity to the past, and encourage the viewer to critique their own interest in “authentic objects,” freeing “artifacts” from their role in colonial-historical narratives. 

In her lecture-based piece “Everything I Say Is True,” Oglala Lakota artist Suzanne Kite, or Kite, examines the epistemological genealogies of western science and reimagines the mapping of time, space, and events through Lakota language and knowledge systems. She creates diagrams that morph from representations of Minkowski’s light cone to new ways of mapping the land, as well as records of historical events that occurred at Pine Ridge Reservation in the 1970s. Examining how western knowledge structures and state power re-shape what is mapped, Kite uses new forms of visualized data to address methods of resource extraction, writing of history, and the building of computers and technology. Objects from this series are displayed in Re-Viewing the Evidence, including a carbon-based topographic map, a display of documents on government programs, and vinyls from “Everything I Say Is True.” Kite’s video work Coin Trick plays on a loop with Give It Back.

Towards the rear of the exhibition, stanchions are erected, with some works positioned beyond the immediate reach of viewers. Evoking the language of museum displays, this physical boundary exemplifies institutional enactments of power. In each of the works on display in Re-Viewing the Evidence, the artists subvert received understandings of truth, revealing the farce behind these “objective” systems of knowledge and illuminating their role in upholding colonial regimes.