AbTeC Gallery is an Indigenously determined virtual exhibition space for contemporary art, located on AbTeC Island in Second Life. 

Presenting art made for the physical world within virtual environments brings many challenges: how to account for the conceptual, material, and cultural differences between the two realms; how to facilitate artist’s and curators’ engagement with the technology; and how to facilitate the public’s experience with the artwork. Our focus on Indigenous arts foregrounds specific challenges: how to create ‘Indigenous spaces’ in online art contexts; how to account for concepts such as territory, nationhood, tradition, safety, and representation; what cultural protocols are appropriate, and which must be transformed? 

AbTeC Gallery explores how Indigenous arts practices are evolving to take advantage of new networked technologies. The project will actively engage Indigenous artists in  exhibiting their artwork, culture, and knowledge in such spaces. In working collaboratively with the  artists to present their work virtually we will be able to ask critical questions around the maintenance,  transmission and evolution of cultural knowledges, agency, community, and self-determination faced by Indigenous peoples in the digital age. Through these explorations we will learn more about the  opportunities and challenges facing creators, curators and exhibition organizations wishing to  strengthen their capacity for supporting and increasing the presence of Indigenous artwork, culture and  knowledge in our ever-more ubiquitous online worlds.

In 2008, AbTeC bought an island in the massively multi-player online world, Second Life. We had been exploring the place for months already, and were realizing that to do what we wanted—teach courses in experimental digital storytelling, produce machinimas, and offer a safe on-line community space—real Indians had to use real money and buy ourselves some virtual land.

A few years later, having established AbTeC Island as our headquarters and studio in cyberspace, we built a gallery as a set for the TimeTraveller™ machinima series created by Skawennati. The story takes place, for the most part, in the year 2121 and it imagines that, by then, Montreal’s Musée de beaux-arts would have a gallery dedicated to early 21st century Indigenous art, indicating the significance of the present era’s renaissance of Native art and culture. To populate the gallery set, Skawennati turned to her community of fabulous Indigenous artists, asking them for works that would fit into the particular aesthetic of Second Life, which includes bright colours, strong graphic elements, and a certain cleanness found in digital spaces. Call it cyberealism.

Thanks to her colleagues’ generous response, the set was installed with an extraordinary collection of images, sculptures, and video. The resulting exhibition became an important focal point in the TimeTraveller™ story. But it was never treated like a “real” exhibition until the COVID-19 pandemic forced art galleries to close.  As exhibitions, festivals and other events began to go online, we at AbTeC realized that, thanks to more than two decades of experience creating online spaces, we were ready for this.