Tate to improve Indigenous representation in its collection
Tate has launched a new initiative to bring more works by Indigenous artists into its collection with a four-year commitment from AKO Foundation to fund acquisitions from Sámi and Inuit art from Northern Europe.
Similar projects to research, collect and display the work of artists from other Indigenous communities in South Asia, Oceania and the Americas will follow.
Tate said in a statement that the initiative will build on recent acquisitions and custodianship agreements, to create a step-change in the number of contemporary artists from Indigenous communities around the world.
The first works to be acquired through the new fund will be Outi Pieski’s woven hanging installation Guržot ja guovssat / Spell on You! 2020 and its companion piece Skábmavuođđu / Spell on Me! 2024, created during her residency at Porthmeor Studios in Cornwall.
The artist has described how the laborious act of weaving these installations “references ritual, sacrifice, redress, atonement, and the contradictory forces in Sámi societies.”
This will mark the first time a Sámi artist has entered the collection. A large-scale exhibition of works by Pieski runs at Tate St Ives until 6 May.
“We are beginning to see greater recognition of Indigenous contemporary artists around the world, as this year’s Venice Biennale demonstrates so brilliantly,” said Karin Hindsbo, director of Tate Modern.
“Tate has long been dedicated to expanding the canon of art history and we can now take that work even further. I’m particularly delighted that Sámi and Inuit artists from Northern Europe – an area of artistic practice very close to my heart – will soon be represented in Tate’s ever-more-diverse international collection for the first time.”
Works by artists from a range of Indigenous communities have entered Tate’s collection in recent years, including Shuvinai Ashoona (Inuit, Canada), Abel Rodríguez (Nonuya, Colombia) and Edgar Calel (Maya Kaqchikel, Guatemala).
A joint acquisition programme with MCA Australia, supported by the Qantas Foundation, has enabled Tate to better represent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders art, as seen in Tate Modern’s recent exhibition A Year in Art: Australia 1992 and the month-long display of Embassy by Richard Bell (Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Goreng Goreng peoples, Australia).
In 2025 Tate Modern will stage the first large-scale Emily Kam Kngwarray exhibition ever held in Europe, organised in close collaboration with the National Gallery of Australia.
The AKO Foundation was established in 2013 to fund charitable causes that improve education, promote the arts and combat climate change. It has previously funded several exhibitions at Tate, including Olafur Eliasson (2019), the Turner Prize (2021) and Surrealism Beyond Borders (2022), as well as a programme of events at Tate Modern to coincide with the UN's climate change conference, Cop26, in 2021.