This moment an endurance to the end forever
Tanya Lukin Linklater
with Sassa Linklater and Tobi Linklater 

09 October – 14 November 2020

At Trinity Square Video Co-presented in partnership with imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival

This moment an endurance to the end forever is an exhibition shaped in the living room of Tanya Lukin Linklater: an ever-shifting space that has witnessed gatherings of Omaskeko Cree families of North Bay, performances by Indigenous women, and now acts as a shared studio space for the artist and her two children. As a site for the transmission of Indigenous knowledge, this space holds a history of making work with children and sharing Indigenous knowledge of treaties through their connections to land, ancestors, and future generations.

Together, the works in This moment an endurance to the end forever gesture towards Indigenous learning and embodied practices in relation. The floral patterns of kohkom scarves and nautical knots of Alutiiq fishing customs frame Lukin Linklater’s video work and new digital commissions by Sassa and Tobias Linklater, continuing a multigenerational discussion of what treaties mean for family, and building agency within these histories for future inheritors.

Tanya Lukin Linklater makes performances and works for camera. She has shown at SFMOMA (2020), Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019), Art Gallery of Ontario (2017) and elsewhere. Slow Scrape, her first book of poetry, is forthcoming from The Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism. She is a member of the Native Villages of Port Lions and Afognak in southern Alaska and based in Nbisiing Anishnabek territory in northern Ontario.

Tobi Linklater plays basketball competitively and is a film and video major in his secondary school’s specialized arts program. He is 16 years old and Omaskeko Cree (Moose Cree First Nation) and Alutiiq (Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions). He has shown videos at Mercer Union (Toronto), 80WSE (New York City), and All my Relations Arts (Minneapolis).

Sassa Linklater is an old style fancy shawl and jingle dress dancer. She has performed in three works for video since 2011. She is 12 years old and Omaskeko Cree (Moose Cree First Nation) and Alutiiq (Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions). She has shown a video at All My Relations in Minneapolis.

https://www.trinitysquarevideo.com/exhibition-this-moment-an-endurance-to-the-end-forever/

Slow Scrape is, in the words of Layli Long Soldier, “an expansive and undulating meditation on time, relations, origin and colonization." Lukin Linklater draws upon documentary poetics, concrete-based installations, event scores, and other texts composed in relation to performances written between 2011 and 2018. The book cites memory, Cree and Alutiiq languages, and embodiment as modes of relational being and knowledge. The book unfolds a poetics of relation and action to counter the settler colonial violences of erasure, extraction, and dispossession. Slow Scrape can be read alongside Lukin Linklater’s practice as a visual artist and choreographer.

Slow Scrape includes an introduction by Layli Long Soldier, as well as a dialogue between Lukin Linklater and editor Michael Nardone.

- 6.5” x 9.25”
- 108 pg
- Interior Printed 1 Colour Risograph (Blue)
- Edition of 250

Author Bio

Tanya Lukin Linklater's performances, videos, installations, and writings work through orality and embodiment – investigating histories of Indigenous peoples’ lives, lands, and structures of sustenance. She has studied at Stanford University, the University of Alberta, and, presently, at Queen’s University, where she is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies. While Lukin Linklater's Alutiiq homelands are in southern Alaska (Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions), she has lived and worked in Nbisiing Anishnabek territory in northern Ontario, Canada for more than a decade. Slow Scrape is her first collection of poetry. 

Series Editors Nathan Brown and Michael Nardone

Design & Layout by LOKI

Published by The Centre for Expanded Poetics & Anteism

https://www.anteism.com/shop/slow-scrape-tanya-lukin-linklater

https://icavcu.org/exhibitions/commonwealth/

What do we share in common? Who is the “we” in “We the people”? How could we reimagine wealth and come together for common good?

Commonwealth explores these questions, and how our common resources are used to influence the wealth and well-being of our communities. Commonwealth is the outgrowth of a multiyear partnership between three dynamic, socially engaged contemporary arts organizations: the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU) in Richmond, Virginia; Philadelphia Contemporary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Beta-Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The project explores the historical concept of “commonwealth” and its legacy in each of the three locations. It asks whether it’s possible to unleash the collective power embedded in that term while recognizing its connection to exploitation and colonialism. The question of how people understand common wealth, and the tension between individual choice and collective wellbeing, has become all the more relevant in 2020, a year that began with earthquakes in Puerto Rico and has continued with the historic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Using the tools of culture — from critical conversation to writing, image-making, performance and even gardening — Commonwealth offers paths to understanding both the unequal structures that shape our lived realities and ways that people might come together to make the world more equitable.

The indoor/outdoor exhibition component of the project, opening at the ICA in September, 2020 will feature all of the new co-commissioned work by artists Firelei Báez, Carolina Caycedo, Duron Chavis, Alicia Díaz, Sharon Hayes, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Nelson Rivera, Monica Rodriguez, and The Conciliation Project (TCP).

#MuseumFromHome Online Screenings

September 2 – October 7, 2020

Streaming on the sfmoma.org homepage, for free, is a weekly rotating selection of SFMOMA video and performance commissions from the past decade.

Artists: Mike Mills, Nicole Miller, Rashaad Newsome, Mika Tajima and Tanya Lukin Linklater

September 30–October 7, 2020

Tanya Lukin Linklater: An amplification through many minds

Tanya Lukin Linklater visits Alutiiq and Unangan cultural belongings in the collection of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley. The artist developed a choreographic score with dancers for these displaced objects that explores temporal encounter as a form of repatriation and transcendence. This video features a private performance in the Hearst Museum’s collections storage and open rehearsals held at SFMOMA during the first weekend of SOFT POWER (2019).

https://www.sfmoma.org/theme/mfh-online-screenings/

Movement Research is excited to make available MRPJ 52/53 as a downloadable PDF. Please visit this form.

For this issue, Sovereign Movements: Native Dance and Performance, guest editor, choreographer Rosy Simas invited writer, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, to work with her. Together they assembled contributors from Native and Indigenous communities to reflect upon their practices, the historical conditions out of which they operate as well as movement, performance, and choreography as a socio-political project. Just as it is important for physical institutions to acknowledge that they sit upon occupied land of Native and Indigenous people, so too must institutions of history, practice, and epistemology acknowledge their occupation of knowledge and memory.

Throughout this issue, dance and movement is posited as a powerful strategy against settler-colonial mindsets and as an effective tool against erasure of Native and Indigenous cultural traditions. These pages discuss the importance of Native sovereignty and analyze various histories of resistance to settler-colonialism. Artists in the issue propose alternative artistic models to probe the roles of art and artists in society towards a more expansive constellation that fundamentally critiques the Western reward system in culture as well as the often celebrated cult of authorship. The cover and back cover of this issue invoke the history and intentionality of the Two Row Wampum Treaty from 1613 made between the Haudenosaunee and Dutch settlers. Two Row Wampum is considered a living treaty—a way for people to live together in peace and respect and to ensure that people meet to discuss issues that emerge.

A review of my project, The Harvest Sturdies, by Christina Schmid for In Review (a twin cities publication). This solo exhibition and performance took place at All My Relations Arts in what is called the American Indian Corridor in Minneapolis  in 2017.

http://inreview.org/the-harvest-sturdies/

Jacob Korczynski has written a review of Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery for Flash Art. You can read it here:

https://flash---art.com/2020/08/soundings-kitchener-waterloo-art-gallery-ontario/

Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts will open at the Belkin in Vancouver in September, 2020. You can read more about the exhibition here:

https://belkin.ubc.ca/exhibitions/soundings-an-exhibition-in-five-parts/