Abstract

Responding to the explosive presence and participation of circumpolar art and artists in the global contemporary art world, this dissertation examines the transformative potential and influences of contemporary circumpolar Indigenous art, focusing on how they are reconfiguring institutional norms, cultivating ethical and caring spaces, and envisioning global futures. By exploring the intersections of ecopoetics, decolonizing aesthetics, and the concept of "How Institutions Think," this study unveils how Circumpolar art and artists have emerged as catalysts for social change within exhibitionary contexts. Through experimental poetic engagements with new materialisms, media, and performance, this dissertation addresses how circumpolar artists reconfigure boundaries, produce new narratives, and assert presence and collective existence in institutional spaces. Through an analysis of five seminal circumpolar exhibitions (post-2010s) at diverse institutions—a historic art gallery, an architectural research institute, two campus/university art galleries, and an Indigenous artist run-centre—this dissertation elucidates the historical, sociopolitical, and aesthetic impacts of this participation. Consequently, it investigates how circumpolar art, artists, and institutions coordinate to resolve the inner tensions that arise within the conditions of contemporary art and past representational discourse. This dissertation approaches expanded poetics as an underexplored genre of storytelling in Indigenous visual art, to tease out creative and conceptual potentials and reconfigurations of conventional discourses of aesthetics. An emphasis on ‘aesthetic action’, storytelling poetics as praxis, collapses the aesthetical-political binary and establishes how circumpolar artists affect and effectuate ‘presencing’ and collective existence in institutions. The incorporation of poetry and Indigenous institutional critiques throughout contributes to the scholarly record in this emerging field and addresses critical gaps in knowledge. This research contributes to the growing discourse on circumpolar ecopoetics by shedding light on the multifaceted ways in which circumpolar artists are reshaping institutions, mobilizing the rhetoric of decolonial love, and catalyzing climate justice towards a more just, liberating, and inclusive artworld and beyond. As such, the dissertation posits that the creative resurgence of expanded poetics diverts the historic ‘Arctic Gaze’ and repurposes it as a decolonizing instrument for aesthetic exploration, global environmental stewardship, and for advocating collective existence and co-existence.