ABSTRACT
The themes of sovereignty, power and resistance provide an interface in understanding the relationship between visual criminology and Indigenous art. The discounting of Indigenous visual and cultural expressions as 'evidence' silences and avoids fundamental questions about the rule of law, sovereignty, land theft, genocide, murder, systematic defrauding and racial discrimination by governments and their agents. In discussing how a visual criminology might develop, Carrabine takes the work of Becker and Bourdieu to argue 'ultimately, the origins of artistic worth do not reside in the artworks themselves, but in the social institutions in which they are produced and consumed'. For both the European modernists and the settler colonialists, the meaning of Indigenous art, its cosmologies, and ontological and epistemological roots was largely beyond the settler and imperial imaginations. Indigenous images of penality challenge mass incarceration, but they do so in the context of a much longer history of the impact of various forms of carcerality inherent to the colonial project.
