Tanya Lukin Linklater

The practice of Tanya Lukin Linklater is at once an exploration and articulation of insistence. Across works encompassing performance, video, installation, and writing, Lukin Linklater traces the expansive ways Indigenous knowledges, histories and structures have been embodied and sustained amidst colonialisms’ systemic dispossessions. Centering her focus in and through the body, her works map continuance as an iterative practice, often most powerfully enacted through relational gestures such as conversation, movement, listening and touch.

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Lukin Linklater presents An amplification through many minds (2019), a work that extends from her close engagement with a collection of Alutiiq/Sugpiaq and Unagan belongings originating from her homelands in southern Alaska and the Aleutian Chain, now held by the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley. This video follows Lukin Linklater and a trio of dancers through the process of developing a choreographic score for these displaced belongings that is subsequently performed in the museum’s storage vaults. A gesture towards both restoration and repatriation, this piece is accompanied by a series of new works on paper that index the artist’s presence through land and movement alike.

From November 9 to 11, Lukin Linklater will hold open rehearsals for a choreography she is developing in relation to these new works. Further details can be found here.

Tanya Lukin Linklater: My mind is with the weather is co-organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Oakville Galleries and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.

Biography

Tanya Lukin Linkater (Alutiiq, b. 1976, Kodiak Island, USA) works across dance, performance, video, photography, installation, and writing. Her recent exhibitions include the Aichi Trienniale; New Museum Triennial, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; Heard Museum, Phoenix; Chicago Architecture Biennial; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and La Biennale de Montréal. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Queen's University, holding a Master's of Education from the University of Alberta (2003), and a Bachelor of Arts from Stanford University (1998). Slow Scrape, her first book of poetry, was published by The Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism (2020). She lives and works in Nbisiing Anishinaabeg territory in North Bay, Ontario.