Hinkiicims, Digitization Studio is a carefully staged image that depicts two Hinkiicims (wolf headdresses) in the collection of the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. They are arranged on a backdrop in the museum’s digitization studio, and are being handled by the museum’s collections coordinator in the immediate moments before (or perhaps after) their documentation. Hinkiicims consciously recalls the work of the so-called “Vancouver School'' of artists noted for their conceptually driven, intricately staged, large-scale photographs. The image is also self-reflexive in its consideration of the practice of photography itself and the medium’s implications in relation to documentation, indexicality, replication, framing, staging, and the ways in which the medium may be used to both decontextualize and recontextualize.

One of the Headdresses documented was originally stolen from the village of Maaqutusiis (also known as Ahousaht), and passed through the hands of a number of collectors throughout the country before finally arriving at the Museum of Anthropology. The other headdress is a commissioned recreation carved by the Haisla artist Lyle Wilson. Both the original and the replica (the former deemed “culturally sensitive”), are in storage, where they presently remain at the Museum. This institution, housing almost 50,000 objects from all around the world, located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded land of the Musqueam people, is considered “a place of world arts and cultures with a special emphasis on the First Nations people and other cultural communities of British Columbia, Canada.” Hinkiicims narrativizes this institution as a complex and ambiguous space of cultural collection, bringing to the fore conversations surrounding the rightful ownership of these masks and the ways in which institutions may at once separate objects from the communities and cultures of which they are an integral part, while simultaneously functioning to preserve and share them with broader audiences. These precarious conditions of collecting and anthropology reflect and correspond with the conditions of mutual immanence and of sharing space with one another in such a manner that is specific to the Northwest Coast and, more pointedly, to Vancouver.

Hinkiicims, Digitization Studio was commissioned by Capture Photography Festival for their featured exhibition, ‘Here and Now,’ at the Pendulum Gallery in Vancouver (March 27-April 28, 2023).

Installation images courtesy Capture Photography Festival.