Post #75
Connected Knowledge as Resistance to Deficit and Dominance
Figure 1. Installation shot of Anitta! – Above All Negations at Feheley Fine Arts in fall 2021. Photograph from Feheley Fine Arts.
In Dr Julie Nagam’s course Public Art: Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures, artist and educator Mark Igloliorte joined our class over zoom to discuss his artistic practice, his Inuit culture, and his upcoming work for Nuit Blanche Toronto. During this discussion, he spoke of the interpersonal, intrapersonal, and cultural negotiations that informed his artworks exhibited in Anitta! – Above All Negations at Feheley Fine Arts in fall 2021.¹ These pieces are material evidence of Igloliorte's engagement and hesitation to engage with Inuktitut; a language that holds so much cultural knowledge and personal significance for many Inuit, along with the realities of colonial violence and systemic racism. Igloliorte acknowledged his discomfort in engaging Inuktitut. Past encounters left Igloliorte with residual feelings of not knowing enough and not being enough that affect a hesitation to engage. In working his way through this murky territory, he identifies the failures and influences of "deficit thinking," an anthropological and colonial inheritance that presupposes scarcity to elicit competition, imposing a hierarchy of access.² To resist deficit thinking that perpetuates gate-keeping and re-asserts colonial categories, Igloliorte intentionally engages Inuktitut, a little bit at a time, to re-situate his relationship with the language through modes of representation that he understands and that gives him comfort.
This deficit thinking is proximate to bell hook's ethics of dominance that Alyssa Fearon details in “A Scarborough Love Ethic.”³ Deficit thinking positions certain individuals as rightful holders of information, property etc. These holders have a level of cultural, economic, political or social dominance over those that do not meet the requirements established for access. This critical analysis does not imply that boundaries and limitations should not exist; boundaries serve a necessary and sometimes provisional purpose, as seen in instances of cultural appropriation. However, their enactment should be guided by empathy and respect, qualities antithetical to ideologies of deficit and dominance.
In Grant Kester's essay “Conversation Pieces The Role of Dialogue in Socially-Engaged Art,” he paraphrases from Women's Way of Knowing (1986) that connected knowledge built on conversational modes of exchange can privilege empathy to yoke oneself to another.⁴ By working to understand the perspectives of another, the interlocutor necessarily situates the other person in context, acknowledging that who they are is socially embedded and cannot be held to a universalized standard.⁵ This identifying exercises our capacity for empathy, redefining the self and our interpersonal relationships to reach across boundaries and differences and see another as a person.⁶ In this sense, connected knowledge defies deficit thinking and dominance, expanding individual capacity for empathy.
As Leah Sandals acknowledges in “Why I Care(d) About Nuit Blanche,” Nuit Blanche pushes art systems out of their comfort zone.⁷ As a public event, it requires that artists, curators, and organizers extend their thinking beyond themselves, or the limitations of the familiar, to reach out and empathize with the wants and needs of diverse public bodies.⁸ Janine Marchessault, in "Wonder, Stargazing, and Utopia," draws on Édouard Glissant to affirm that this connectivity is dependent on our collective ability to “...put places of the world in contact with places of the world.”⁹ Integral to this effort towards empathetic connectivity, and as Hiba Abdallah suggests in "Everything I Wanted To Tell You: Collaborative Practice in Public Space," we have to let go of predictable outcomes and accept that collaborating and connecting can be difficult.¹⁰
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1 “Upcoming exhibition: Mark Igloliorte,” Feheley Fine Arts, accessed on May 29, 2022, https://feheleyfinearts.com/upcoming-exhibition-mark-igloliorte/#:~:text=language%20and%20skateboarding.-,Anitta!,view%20virtually%20at%20feheleyfinearts.com.
2 Deficit thinking was an ideology Mark Igloliorte discussed with the our class in May 2022.
3 Alyssa Fearon, “A Scarborough Love Ethic,” in Holding Ground : Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures (Tkaronto, Canada: Public Books, 2021), 52-53.
4 Grant Kester, "Conversation pieces: The role of dialogue in socially-engaged art," in Theory in contemporary art since 1985 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 82-83.
5 Kester, "Conversation pieces,” 82.
6 Kester, "Conversation pieces,” 83.
7 Leah Sandals, “Why I Care(d) About Nuit Blanche,” in Holding Ground : Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures (Tkaronto, Canada: Public Books, 2021), 71-72.
8 Leah Sandals, “Why I Care(d) About Nuit Blanche,” 71-72.
9 Janine Marchessault, “Wonder, Stargazing and Utopia,” in Holding Ground : Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures (Tkaronto, Canada: Public Books, 2021), 172.
10 Hiba Abdallah, "Everything I Wanted To Tell You: Collaborative Practice in Public Space," in Holding Ground : Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures (Tkaronto, Canada: Public Books, 2021), 63.
Bibliography
Abdallah, Hiba. "Everything I Wanted To Tell You: Collaborative Practice in Public Space." in Holding Ground : Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures. Tkaronto, Canada: Public Books, 2021. 58-63.
Fearon, Alyssa. “A Scarborough Love Ethic.” in Holding Ground: Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures. Tkaronto, Canada: Public Books, 2021.
Kester, Grant. "Conversation pieces: The role of dialogue in socially-engaged art." in Theory in contemporary art since 1985. Wiley-Blackwell, 2004: 76-100.
Marchessault, Janine. “Wonder, Stargazing and Utopia.” in Holding Ground : Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures. Tkaronto, Canada: Public Books, 2021. 170-183.
Sandals, Leah. “Why I Care(d) About Nuit Blanche.” in Holding Ground: Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures. Tkaronto, Canada: Public Books, 2021.
“Upcoming exhibition: Mark Igloliorte.” Feheley Fine Arts. Accessed on May 29, 2022. https://feheleyfinearts.com/upcoming-exhibition-mark-igloliorte/#:~:text=language%20and%20skateboarding.-,Anitta!,view%20virtually%20at%20feheleyfinearts.com.
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Grace Braniff