This essay questions the structural dynamics of the inclusion of Black and Indigenous artists into the Western art market, and explores how artists are intervening not just in content but in the very form, temporality, and ownership models of their work.
Edgar Calel, Installation view, Ru k’ox k’ob’el jun ojer etemab’el (The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge), 2021. Fruits and rocks, Proyectos Ultravioleta - Frieze London. Courtesy the artist and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City. Photo: Lisa Gordon
It’s easy to think of the international financial markets as the afterlife of the Dutch East India Company—the first colonial multinational corporation to sell shares. Yet, it seems harder to think of the Western art markets, which can commodify cultural objects and epistemologies, as belonging to that same history of colonialism and extraction.
The art markets’ interest in art and culture from the Global Majority in the past decade has been welcomed, which is understandable, yet not often questioned or challenged. One of the sore points of this financial relationship is that while the markets can no longer trade marginalized people as goods, they have the potential to trade their cultures and epistemologies as such. There is no governing body nor terms of conditions that regulate that; so how can we deal with it? What happens when Black and Indigenous artists intervene not just with content, but with form, temporality, and ownership models that defy the art market’s rules?
In the face of this conundrum, this text highlights dealing practices by Edgar Calel and Cameron Rowland that honor indigenous communities and the history of subjugation while setting a more ethical standard in the art markets. Their practices show that art is not simply in the market but rather it has the capacity to also challenge it and change its historical direction.
The discourse around the relationship, or lack thereof, between Global Majority artists and the Western art markets mostly revolves around questions of blind inclusion and meritocracy. Yet there are emerging conversations that critique said inclusion and how it does not necessarily change the structures it becomes part of. While it’s not a focus of mainstream conversations, non-Western art and artistic practices can have an intervention in institutions and markets that goes beyond the aesthetic and into the ontological, ethical and legal. This is becoming more and more urgent.
Edgar Calel, Installation view,Ru k’ox k’ob’el jun ojer etemab’el (The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge), 2021. Fruits and rocks, Proyectos Ultravioleta - Frieze London. Courtesy the artist and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City. Photo: Lisa Gordon
In Indigenous Kaqchikel thought, there's almost nothing that is done alone. All the things we do are done collectively, and that collectivity is what serves as the basis for discovering.
Born in San Juan Comalapa, a town of 40,000 people in Guatemala, Edgar Calel is a Mayan Kaqchikel visual artist who comments on the world through an indigenous cosmovision. “In Indigenous Kaqchikel thought, there’s almost nothing that is done alone,” said the artist. “All the things we do are done collectively, and that collectivity is what serves as the basis for discovering.” Calel often works with his immediate community in Comalapa, playing a significant role in his artmaking.
For this reason, his work The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge (Ru k’ ox k’ob’el jun ojer etemab’el) (2021), which is made up of a ritual and an installation featuring fruits and vegetables sitting on stones laid on the floor, was never intended to be sold. And the work cannot be considered finished until the ritual is performed by members of the Kaqchikel in private. Yet after Catherine Wood, a curator at the Tate Modern in London and the Tate Fund team asked about it, the artist and his gallerist Stefan Benchoam agreed to “loan” the work based on Mayan thinking and custom in the form of a “custodianship”. So, the Tate became the first institution to broker such deal during Frieze London in 2021, whereby they purchased the custodianship of the installation for 13 years, paying the artist for the work and making a donation to a Kaqchikel cause of Calel’s choice. After those 13 years, a new agreement and negotiation is supposed to be made with the artist and his community.
The importance of this deal is in how it demonstrates that artists can mitigate the at times predatory and extractivist interests of Western institutions by applying ancestral customs which support their community. Yet this also raises questions of whether certain parts of ancestral cultures should not be negotiated with Western institutions at all. “I am thankful to our ancestors for giving us the license and allowing us to spread their knowledge and wisdom in up to seven different places across the globe,” Calel told Artnet News in 2021, in reference to the seven versions of the work, sorted according to the number of stars in the Big Dipper constellation. Another question that arises is the issue of collectivity and authorship and whether Western institutions with their colonial history can be trusted to protect and respect traditions and cultures that have non-capitalist understandings of material life and that Western institutionalization once extracted and pillaged.
Cameron Rowland, Bankrott, 2023. Indefinite debt. Reparations were paid to slave owners. Compensated emancipation allowed slave owners to retain the value they had assigned to the lives of slaves in addition to the profits they had extracted from slaves’ labor. Compensated emancipation in Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, Washington D.C., the British colonies, the Danish colonies, the Dutch colonies, and German East Africa paid slave owners for their loss of enslaved property. Slave owners and their financiers were provided monetary compensation, high-interest debt obligations, and indentured servitude as repayment. British compensation payments fueled the growth of British financial institutions that held outstanding plantation mortgages including Barclays, Lloyds Bank, and the Royal Bank of Scotland. The Haitian compensation debt, originally paid by formerly enslaved people to French slave owners, has been bought and sold by numerous banks including Crédit Industriel et Commercial, Crédit du Nord, Citibank, and ODDO BHF. These compensation payments continue to grow within European banks alongside the profits of the slave economy. The value of slave life, labor, and reproductive capacity remains integral to European financial institutions, corporations, universities, museums, and governments. Frankfurt am Main is the monetary center of the eurozone and houses offices of nearly every major European financial firm. The concentration of financial firms in Frankfurt am Main has enriched the city since the 17th century. A loan of 20,000 euros was issued to the Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst from Bankrott Inc., a company created for the purpose of holding an indefinite debt. Because it is a demand loan, no payments can be made until the lender demands repayment. Bankrott Inc. will never demand repayment. The debt will accrue interest indefinitely. It will increase at a rate of 18 percent each year, the highest rate legally allowable. The Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst is a city government department, Amt 45 i. For this reason this debt is owed by the city of Frankfurt am Main. As reparation, this debt is a restriction on the continued accumulation derived from slavery. As a negation of value, it does not seek to redistribute the wealth derived from slave life but seeks to burden its inheritors.
The deep links between colonialism and Western institutions go back centuries and this dynamic has unfortunately shaped all modern Western institutions in more or less visible ways. Cameron Rowland is an artist whose research makes these links more perceptible. At his 2023 solo exhibition Amt 45 i at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt, Germany, the U.S. American artist presented their investigation of how the city and institution have benefited from slavery. This happened despite Germany not having been a major player in the transatlantic trade of enslaved people, unlike Britain or the Tate galleries, which were started by Henry Tate using his private fortune made from the sugar business.
Through a series of conceptual installations with objects of historical meaning and legal interventions, Rowland revealed the ways in which institutions, including MMK itself, are entangled in historical systems of racialized exploitation. Central to the exhibition was Bankrott (bankruptcy), a legally binding loan through which Rowland’s corporation, Bankrott Inc., lent €20,000 to MMK indefinitely, at an annual interest rate of 18%. According to this agreement, in 20 years the museum will legally owe the artist’s company €1,256,518. While the museum would never have the intention of repaying, and neither does the artist demand it (for now), this loan stands as a perpetual financial obligation that indicates the historical debt that the institution owes to all people affected by the Transatlantic slavery. With this work, in the future the museum will be in theory financially bankrupt, to perhaps match its current moral bankruptcy for benefiting from slavery and making exhibitions about it. These practices in turn generate more cultural capital for the institution, rather than, actually repay this historical debt.
Loaning, rather than selling, is at the core of Rowland’s artistic practice. Their work highlights how ownership itself is part of the structure of racial capitalism and must be questioned and renegotiated as a concept. Their works are only available through loan agreements, typically for a limited period of time. Institutions or collectors can use the work but cannot own it, which undoes the whole notion of art as commodity or investment. This practice of refusing to fully comply with capitalism and institutionalization aligns with Black radical thought which in turn harks back to marronage.
For instance, Cameron Rowland’s New York State Unified Court System (2016) is a conceptual artwork that examines the intersections of incarceration, labor, and institutional complicity within the U.S. justice system. It comprises four oak courtroom benches manufactured by inmates at Green Haven Correctional Facility in New York State to stress how the court reproduces itself materially through the labor of those it sentences. The benches were acquired through Corcraft, the commercial brand of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision’s Division of Industries, which employs incarcerated individuals. The work cannot be sold but only rented for five years for the total cost of the Corcraft products that constitute it, which is what MoMA in New York did.
Rowland’s practice operates on four levels whereby: loaning replaces selling, rejecting the idea of art as a commodity; their contracts as artworks expose structural injustices; their use of legal systems mirrors how law perpetuates inequality; and financial debt as indicative of historical debt inverts power dynamics and burdens institutions even if only in theory.
There are potential moral and philosophical hangovers from these endeavors, however. The very fact that these institutions organize exhibitions about their complicity in systemic oppression can leave them feeling off the hook and no longer required to address any structural issues within their walls, let alone outside of them. This has become so glaringly clear across the Western world since 7 October 2023. On the other hand, these kinds of artistic gestures can make hostages of the visitors who are on the receiving end of said oppression; who may become emotionally dependent on the institution taking accountability in order to find resolution in the heinous and unforgivable historical dispossession brought by racial capitalism.
The practices of Edgar Calel and Cameron Rowland aren’t simply artistic gestures. They are ontological disruptions that open up possibilities for institutions and markets to account for their ongoing violent history. Simultaneously they encourage other artists to find reconciliation and regeneration through their ancestral traditions, while assessing what parts of us and our cultures don’t come with a price list; as some things just aren’t for sale, or are they?
Edgar Calel (1987) is a Kaqchikel Maya artist from Guatemala whose multidisciplinary practice explores Indigenous cosmologies, ancestral knowledge, and the ongoing effects of colonialism through installations, performances, and poetic gestures.
Cameron Rowland (1988) is a U.S. conceptual artist whose research-based practice exposes and subverts the economic and legal legacies of slavery, mass incarceration, and racial capitalism by reclaiming and re-contextualizing everyday objects and land through institutional and contractual critique.
Will Furtado is the Editor-in-Chief of C&AL.
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