Urban Earthdivers and the Immodest Messiah as Decolonial Worldmakers: The Art of Kent Monkman

The discussion explores the work of Kent Monkman in view of questions of indigeneity in the visual arts by drawing on the concept of the postindian created by the Anishinaabe author and theorist Gerald Vizenor and the figure of the urban earthdiver, where he re-imagines the earthdiving trickster of Native American Indian creation myths as mixed-blood contemporary worldmaker and decolonial agent of change. The propositions inherent in the work will be discussed in relation to notions of the post-abyssal and an ecology of knowledges by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and the conception of de-linking entailed in decoloniality, a particular and influential approach to decolonising put forward by Walter Mignolo.