Speechless

In Speechless, Luger provocatively interprets and creatively amplifies the problematic colonial history and the contested concept of cargo cults from an Indigenous perspective. The title further underscores the fact that, in the words of Luger, “communication is at the root of all ritual and technological development.” The concept of cargo cults underpins the installation—a phenomenon that developed as a result of military campaigns sending cargo to foreign lands inhabited by Indigenous people. This happened in the South Pacific, for instance, when the US military was based there during World War II. Cults formed around the supplies that arrived from the sky, when in fact it was colonizing forces occupying Indigenous lands. The exhibition asks important questions relating to human agency, language, and implements of control. Who gets to speak? Who has to bite their tongue? Whose messages are muted? What meanings remain to be decoded? Luger asserts that the concept of the exhibition “flips the Western gaze back on itself to reflect that in present day North American culture, we are all in a cargo cult.”