International Art World and Transnational Artwork: Creative Presence in Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain at the Venice Biennale

Abstract

Drawing from and contributing to the International Relations (IR) aesthetics literature, I analyse how Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s 2005 Venice Biennale performance-based video installation Fountain is an enactment of creative presence at an intersection of international and transnational politics. Belmore’s aesthetic method of engaging with water as a visual interface between the artist and viewer, by projecting the film of her performance onto a stream of falling water in the Canadian Pavilion exhibition, offers a method of understanding and transforming settler colonial power relations in world politics. I argue that Belmore’s artistic labour and knowledge production is an expression of Indigenous self-determination by discussing how Fountain is situated in relation with Indigenous peoples’ transnational land and waterway reclamations and cultural resurgences as well as the colonial context of the international art world dynamics of the Venice Biennale. My analysis of Belmore’s decolonial sensibility and political imagination with respect to water contributes to IR aesthetics debates by foregrounding the embodiment of knowledge production and performance artwork as a method of decolonisation.