Emmi Whitehorse, a Diné Indigenous artist, primarily works in abstracted large-scale poetic landscapes of the US Southwest. Whitehorse’s Cópia (2023) is a two-panel landscape painting that activates the beauty and chaotic tension of rupture. Whitehouse highlights the native ecologies using a traditional Diné/Navajo concept known as Hózhó, which emphasises the interconnectedness of land and people to achieve harmony and beauty. Whitehorse’s works on paper and canvas embody the spiritual temporalities of the Diné that reads the landscape as a symphony through time. It’s a jolting score composed with natural harmonies and the discordant unnatural disruptions from rapacious postcolonial excavations on Indigenous land. In Outset, Launching, Progression (2015), Whitehorse responded to natural oil and gas fracking in Navajo territories. She followed the displacement and exploitation of Indigenous communities on Diné territories surrounding her upbringing. Whitehorse’s sensorial landscape mark-making techniques, presented through mystifying compositions, illuminate alternative strategies for preserving Indigeneity and resisting colonial violence and extraction.
This is the first time the work of Emmi Whitehorse is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Tracy Fenix
