Tanya Lukin Linklater, Artist

The sky held me (rainfall on hands hair lips) is intended to be a series of springtime site-specific relational investigations taking place at High Park over the course of five days. Building upon the interdisciplinary practice of artist Tanya Lukin Linklater and her work in the 2022 Biennial, Held in the air I never fell (spring lightning sweetgrass song), these process-based open rehearsals will bring Lukin Linklater together with invited dance artists Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Ceinwen Gobert, Emily Law, Victoria May, and lisa nevada to generate resonant embodied inquiries. Bordered to the west by Grenadier Pond and covered in a system of wetlands, High Park is a place of synergy between land and water. During these sustained sessions, Lukin Linklater will lead a collective process in response to scores she has penned, as well as to the surroundings of High Park during the spring—a particularly generative season that invites us to take cues from the sky above us.

June 6-10, 2023. 

This program is presented with the support of Ontario Culture Days.

https://torontobiennial.org/programs/the-sky-held-me-rainfall-on-hands-hair-lips-2/

Hair Prints

Tanya Lukin Linklater

April 22 -July 29, 2023

Open Space

510 Fort Street, 2nd floor
Victoria

Opening: April 22

Open Rehearsals: April 26, 27 & 28, in gallery

with dance artist Ivanie Aubin-Malo

“In Spring 2022 I began a process of making dynamic mono-prints by coating my hair in natural pigments of blueberry, raspberry, strawberry, and blackberry and transferring them to archival paper. My hair fell, moved across, and was pressed into the paper following my body. Inspired in part by David Hammons’ Body Prints and Awilda Sterling-Duprey’s dance-drawings, these works register movement. In my thinking, Hair Prints cite nacaq, fully beaded Alutiiq/Sugpiaq women’s headdresses, and miksastotin, beaded Omaskeko or Eeyouch womens’ hoods. My relationship with these women’s garments include visits with them in museum collections, visits with knowledge holders and makers, and making performances and other works in relation to them. Berries, our plant relatives, are significant for my family, our extended relatives, and communities elsewhere on Turtle Island. Their interactions with hair continue to unfold forms and meaning” (Tanya Lukin Linklater, 2023).

Hair Prints is presented as part of the 2023 series Wayfinders, the ones we breathe with

Curated by Toby Lawrence

Throughout 2023, Open Space will present a series of exhibitions, residencies and events under the title Wayfinders, the ones we breathe with. Breathing together across the shared ocean in cultural, environmental and molecular exchange. Through the work of artists from coastal neighbours and nations across the Pacific Ocean, Wayfinders recalls ancient way finding practices utilizing the stars, wind, water and land markers to find paths across the sea and into the intertwined histories, practices, migrations and contemporary lives of adjacent homelands. 

This elongated program simultaneously nurtures the relationships that led to the development of this series and leaves space for the project to organically and intuitively build outward with interdisciplinary programming and collaboration, looking locally to communities on Vancouver Island and across to coastal neighbours. This intentional move recognizes the depth and transfer of knowledge as activated through relationality—essential in breaking open western colonial strongholds within exhibition making, de-centering singular narratives within art and curation, and implementing responsibility beyond personal subjectivity and worldview. Such relationality further extends to the land, the cosmos and ideas, while underscoring accountability and the dynamism by which learning takes place (Shawn Wilson 2008). As the curatorial lead for Wayfinders, I am tracing transoceanic through lines and interwoven modes of practice by way of conversations, connections and deep listening. Residencies and artist projects with Josh Tengan, Camille Georgeson-Usher and Tanya Lukin Linklater anchor the series. Further details and additional contributors to be announced.

DOCUMENTS 

READING PLATFORM

DARLING FOUNDRIE

MARCH 2, 2023 - MAY 14, 2023

DOCUMENTS is the publishing imprint of the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University, Montreal. Our aim is to publish work attesting to the multiplicity of practices, techniques, and modes of theoretical intelligence that inform contemporary poetics. If poetics refers to the theory of poetry (its forms, histories, critical categories) it is also the theory of poiesis (of making), and this larger field draws it beyond the boundaries of poetry as a specifically literary activity. As we study this tension between poetry and poiesis, we want to document its current transformations by publishing texts that have shifted and sharpened the focus of our attention to philosophical problems, embodied histories, political contradictions, artistic experiments, and scientific models of structure and form.

Edited by Nathan Brown and Michael Nardone, each text in the series is printed in an edition of 250 on the Centre’s Risograph MZ1090, bound and distributed by our collaborators at Anteism Books in Montreal.

For more information see: https://fonderiedarling.org/en/Documents

Arctic/Amazon Networks of Global Indigeneity 

published by Gooselane

Released March 2023 

Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity offers a conversation between Indigenous Peoples of two regions in this time of political and environmental upheaval. Both regions are environmentally sensitive areas that have become hot spots in the debates circling around climate change and have long been contact zones between Indigenous Peoples and outsiders — zones of meeting and clashing, of contradictions and entanglement.

Opening with an Epistolary Exchange between the editors, Arctic/Amazon then widens to include essays by 12 Indigenous artists, curators, and knowledge-keepers about the integration of spirituality, ancestral respect, traditional knowledges, and political critique in artistic practice and more than 100 image reproductions and installation shots. The result is an extraordinary conversation about life, artistic practise, and geopolitical realities faced by Indigenous peoples in regions at risk.

I participated in the exhibition and have contributed a short text to the publication. 

https://gooselane.com/products/arctic-amazon?_pos=1&_sid=a3ceaf7a7&_ss=r

Breaking Protocol arises from a series of private, unstructured conversations held over Zoom in 2021, to which Anishinaabek artist and 2020–2022 Borderlands Fellow Maria Hupfield invited a group of international Indigenous performance artists. Ranging from makers to stand-up comedians, these artists in turn invited other performers to join these conversations staged as a series of informal coffee breaks, creating an intimate virtual community grounded in trust and collaboration. At a time when performance and collective gathering were severely constrained, these intimate dialogues provided a space for critical thinking on performance as a means of embodying and activating Indigenous knowledge, and for thinking through accountability with Indigenous lands and peoples. Throughout these exchanges, themes of language, artistic process, sexuality, loss, and joy proliferate, as participants discuss performance as both theory and practice.

Forthcoming from Inventory Press and Vera List Center in spring 2023, Breaking Protocol brings together over twenty contributions by participants in these conversations whose works reflect diverse approaches to grounding Indigenous knowledge, sovereignty, and critical accountability. With photo essays, poetry, short stories, and other written reflections, the book illuminates processes of documenting performance, or the performative, through an Indigenous lens.

Ultimately, Breaking Protocol poses the questions: How do we translate performance as a living art form connected to specific bodies, peoples, and land, to book form while avoiding the pitfalls of the archive as a static object? What stories become political agents in the liberation of the archive from its colonial underpinnings and structure? What can we learn from Indigenous artistic modes of making and practice that art based in notions of place to open spaces for reciprocity and multiplicity?

Introduction by Maria Hupfield with contributions by Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, Pelenakeke Brown, Katherine Carl, Re’al Christian, Christen Clifford, TJ Cuthand, Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Akiko Ichikawa, Suzanne Kite, Charles Koroneho, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Jackson 2Bears Leween, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Cathy Mattes, Meagan Musseau, Julie Nagam, Wanda Nanibush, Peter Morin, Archer Pechawis, Rosanna Raymond, Skeena Reece, Georgiana Uhlyarik, Charlene Vickers, and Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, and an afterword by Carin Kuoni.

https://www.veralistcenter.org/publications/breaking-protocol

I have contributed a chapter, "A glossary of insistence," in The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada edited by Heather Igloliorte and Carla Taunton. 

This companion consists of chapters that focus on and bring forward critical theories and productive methodologies for Indigenous art history in North America.

This book makes a major and original contribution to the fields of Indigenous visual arts, professional curatorial practice, graduate-level curriculum development, and academic research. The contributors expand, create, establish and define Indigenous theoretical and methodological approaches for the production, discussion, and writing of Indigenous art histories.

Bringing together scholars, curators, and artists from across the intersecting fields of Indigenous art history, critical museology, cultural studies, and curatorial practice, the companion promotes the study and dissemination of Indigenous art and stimulates new conversations on such key areas as visual sovereignty and self-determination; resurgence and resilience; land-based, embodied, and nation-specific knowledges; epistemologies and ontologies; curatorial and museological methodologies; language; decolonization and Indigenization; and collaboration, consultation, and mentorship.　

For more information:

https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Indigenous-Art-Histories-in-the-United-States/Igloliorte-Taunton/p/book/9780367856687

TANYA LUKIN LINKLATER AND TIFFANY SHAW | My mind is with the weather
25 FEBRUARY 2023 - 23 APRIL 2023
LOWER GALLERY

OPENING RECEPTION: 25 FEBRUARY 2023 | 7-9 PM

As individual artists and collaborators, Tanya Lukin Linklater and Tiffany Shaw contend with structural violence towards Indigenous relations and knowledges. Whether through architecture, video, performance, or craft, both artists gather from the practices of everyday life: song, breath, and movement, situating bodily gestures as continual actions of defiance and rebuilding.

Indigenous geometries, a central artwork of the exhibition, is a mobile and temporary structure that references the Alutiiq (southern coastal Alaska Native) homes of Lukin Linklater’s birthplace. A collaborative piece between both artists, Indigenous geometries is a modular architecture composed of spine-like curves of bent wood. Several of the wood spines lie on the floor, recalling the institutional dismantling of Indigenous social structures. The displaced spines rest in anticipation of the energy required for Indigenous communities to re-assemble languages, families, and selves. Throughout the exhibition, Indigenous geometries will be periodically activated by Blackfoot singers, asserting the connections between song, home, and resilience.

Lukin Linklater’s video, This moment an endurance to the end forever accompanies Indigenous geometries. Within the video, two spines from Indigenous geometries appear in Lukin Linklater’s home, a counter-stroke to the Canadian and US federal policies that have worked to dismantle Indigenous families. The video expands to consider the envelopes of atmosphere and gravity surrounding the earth. Structuring the video around the cycle of a single day, dancers feel the tones and qualities of their breath in the atmosphere as it expands ever outwards. Considering craft as an index of gesture and memory, Tiffany Shaw will present a new installation titled …and other unseen forces, a continuation of the title of the exhibition and its consideration of body and atmosphere.

This exhibition has been organised in collaboration with Oakville Galleries and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. An exhibition catalogue with new writing is due to be published in the Spring of 2023.

Curated by Adam Whitford, Interim Curator

OEI # 98–99: AURAL POETICS

Edited by Michael Nardone

With contributions by:
Raven Chacon, Lisa Robertson, Cecilia Vicuña, Dylan Robinson, Constance DeJong, Eyvind Kang, Gail Scott, JJJJJerome Ellis, Damon Krukowski, Candice Hopkins, Merlin Sheldrake, Amber Rose Johnson, John Melillo, Heather Davis, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Diane Glancy, Janel Morin + Peter Morin, Niiqo Pam Dick, Oana Avasilichioaei, Sophie Seita, Ame Henderson + Evan Webber, Patrick Nickleson, Dalie Giroux, François Lemieux, Simon Brown, Mitchell Akiyama, Carolyn Chen + Divya Victor, Michael Nardone, Marshall Trammell, Luke Nickel, Lauren (Lou) Turner, Valéria Bonafé + Lílian Campesato, Nicholas Komodore, Lewis Freedman, Tiziano La Melia + Ellis Sam, Ida Marie Hede + Steven Zultanski, Alexandre St-Onge, Danny Snelson, Brent Cox + Courtlin Byrd, Raymond Boisjoly, Max Ritts, Tom Miller, Daniel Borzutsky, Anne Bourne, and Marcus Boon

Designed by Eller Med A, with special thanks to Marte Meling Enoksen
Cover Image: “Plainsong” (2020), by Raven Chacon