Nicholas Galanin

Nicholas Galanin
Fair Warning: A Sacred Place, 2019, photographic prints and audio, 44 x 64 in each.
Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York.

In this photo and audio installation, Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂) asks the audience to imagine the future lives of Indigenous cultural heritage and communities that are often sold for profit in the cycle of cultural consumption. The photographs depict empty display cases from the Northwest Coast Hall at the American Museum of Natural History. Faint discolored silhouettes are all that remain of the belongings that filled the gallery. The audio recording consists of auctioneers collecting bids at sales of Indigenous art and material culture, issuing a “fair warning” before the hammer drops to close the sale. The pairing of hollow displays and auction transactions speaks to the theft of ancestral belongings from Indigenous communities by museums and private collectors alike. Yet the striking images of the empty museum hall also propose another potential future in which museum storage rooms are emptied and the collections returned to Indigenous communities. It is those source communities, as Galanin writes of the piece, who today maintain “the capacity to see without being seen, and the desire to exist without being fed upon.”

DESCRIPTION

Three white walls form a rectangular space directly to the left of the entrance, with four photographs by Nicholas Galanin hung flat on the walls. Each photograph depicts a glass display case inside a darkened museum exhibition hall. Inside each case are red words displayed on the fabric-wrapped walls. A sound cone hangs from the ceiling in the middle of the rectangular area, and a white bench rests on the ground directly beneath it.

ARTIST BIO

Nicholas Galanin (b. 1979) Tlingit/Unangax̂/Multi-Disciplinary Artist Nicholas Galanin’s work engages contemporary culture from his perspective rooted in connection to land. He embeds incisive observation into his work, investigating intersections of culture and concept in form, image and sound. Galanin's works embody critical thought as vessels of knowledge, culture and technology - inherently political, generous, unflinching, and poetic. Galanin engages past, present and future to expose intentionally obscured collective memory and barriers to the acquisition of knowledge. His works critique commodification of culture, while contributing to the continuum of Tlingit art. Galanin employs materials and processes that expand dialogue on Indigenous artistic production, and how culture can be carried. His work is in numerous public and private collections and exhibited worldwide. Galanin apprenticed with master carvers, earned his BFA at London Guildhall University, and his MFA at Massey University, he lives and works with his family in Sitka, Alaska.

ABOUT THIS PAGE

This webpage provides both images and description to render a virtual experience of each artist’s work. Below is an image gallery that includes installation shots and details of Nicholas Galanin’s installation. In-depth written descriptions that provide visual, auditory, contextual, and other sensory information are available below the image gallery.

Exhibition Photography © EFA Project Space/Yann Chashanovski