Events in the first gesture of Wood Land School: Kahatènhston tsi na’tetiátere ne Iotohrkó: wa tánon Iotohrha

 

Layli Long Soldier

A Line Through Grief (2017)
Poetry Performance & Installation

Saturday, 18 February, 2017
4 pm — 6 pm
 

A poetry performance and installation produced especially for Wood Land School: Kahatènhston tsi na’tetiátere ne Iotohrkó: wa tánon Iotohrha

 

With contribution of butterfly, feathers and stone by Scott Thomas, PhD.
 

Layli Long Soldier holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. She has served as a contributing editor of Drunken Boat. Her poems have appeared in The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review Online, and other publications. She is the recipient of the 2015 NACF National Artist Fellowship, a 2015 Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a 2016 Whiting Award in Poetry. Her work of poetry, WHEREAS, will be published by Graywolf Press this March, 2017. Long Soldier resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

 

Please see sbcgallery.ca for more details. 


Billie-Ray Belcourt's (Driftpile Cree Nation) 2017 essay, "The body remembers when the world broke open," is now up on the artseverywhere.ca webiste (Musagetes). 

 

Belcourt's analysis of "In Memoriam," my 2012 video, places it within a feral archive. 

 

Belcourt writes, "...In Memoriam plays up a form of corporeal excess that bubbles just below a collective “threshold of awareness” for those who most intimately bear the coloniality of the world. Lukin Linklater tells a story about how memory stalks the present, turning bodies into faulty containers for affect such that life becomes a catch-22 where ongoingness taxes. We might not get the big decolonial world we want, as it takes everything we have to adjust to the unruly vibrations of the past-present."

 

You can read the essay here:

 

http://artseverywhere.ca/2017/02/08/body-remembers-world-broke-open/

 

 


Wednesday February 1, 20177-9pm
NYU, Einstein Auditorium 

Barney Building

34 Stuyvesant Street, New York

 

Panel Discussion: Sovereignty: The Indigenous Present 

Duane Linklater (artist), with Tanya Lukin Linklater (artist),  Audra Simpson (Associate Professor of Anthropology at Columbia), and Jackson Polys (artist). 

This event is free and open to the public

A panel discussion on directions in Indigenous contemporary art. This will focus on Duane Linklater’s current solo exhibition From Our Hands at NYU’s 80WSE Gallery and Drawing a Line From January to December, structured as a single exhibition unfolding over the course of a year at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art in Montreal which will be renamed the Wood Land School for the duration of 2017 Contemporary civic institutions and social structures are built upon systems that have silenced, ignored and destructively classified Indigenous people, ideas and objects. In response to this history, Wood Land School calls upon institutions to give intellectual and physical labor, philosophical and physical space, time, and funds to support Indigenous ideas, objects, discursivity and performance. The Wood Land School was established in 2011, originating in Duane Linklater’s North Bay studio. It is an experimental space where Indigenous thought and theory are centered, embodied, mobilized, and take shape as practice through exhibition and pedagogy. Wood Land School does not seek to summarize Indigenous identity, but rather to honor specific, embodied expressions of inheritance and becoming. Its current members are Duane Linklater, Tanya Lukin Linklater and cheyanne turions with Walter Scott.

'We wonder, how do the relationships between theory, practice and pedagogy manifest across the complexity and diversity of Indigenous identities, and in relation to settler colonial positionings? What does it mean for a settler-colonial institution to unknow its power? What does it mean to memorialize and dream in relation? How to collectively tend to the becoming of the future?’ —Duane Linklater, Tanya Lukin Linklater and cheyanne turions with Walter Scott

 

Thursday, February 2, 2017, 7.30pm

NYU, Art History Department, 
3rd floor Silver Center room 300
100 Washington Square East, New York

In conversation: Duane Linklater (artist) and Hrag Vartanian (Co-founder and Editor-in-chief Hyperallergic.com)

Screening: Modest Livelihood, Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater, 2012

This event is free and open to the public

This was produced for and shown as a part of dOCUMENTA (13) - Jungen and Linklater present a 50 minute silent film shot on super 16mm film of two hunting trips in the Treaty 8 area, located in northeastern British Columbia, Canada.

This event is produced in collaboration with NYU Centre for Media, Culture and History and is co-sponsored by the Native American and Indigenous Students’ Group at NYU. 

These events are presented as part of 80WSE Gallery's ongoing exhibition by Duane Linklater titled From Our Hands, with Ethel Linklater (Trapper) and Tobias Linklater, on view through February 18, 2017. Working across installation, performance, film, and photography, Duane Linklater excavates histories to unearth folds and knots addressing cultural loss, recovery and sovereignty. This exhibition features a series of new works including a large-scale architectural intervention that runs through all five galleries. 80WSE Gallery in Washington Square is part of the Steinhardt School of Arts and Art Professionals. As always, 80WSE is free and open to the public. 

 

Selected Biography:

Duane Linklater is Omaskêko Cree from Moose Cree First Nation in Northern Ontario. Born in 1976, he holds bachelor's degrees in fine art and Native studies from the University of Alberta (2005) and a master's degree in film and video from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College (2012).Solo exhibitions include; From Our Hands, Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, Toronto (2016); Salt 11: Duane Linklater, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City (2015); ICA@50: It means it’s raining, ICA, Philadelphia (2014); Decom­mi­ssion, Maclaren Art Cen­tre, Bar­rie, Ontario; Learn­ing, Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto; Some­thing about encounter, Thun­der Bay Art Gallery, Ontario; Grain(s), in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Tanya Lukin Lin­klater, Images Fes­ti­val co-pre­sen­ta­tion with Museum of Con­tem­po­rary Cana­dian Art, Toronto; and Sec­ondary Expla­na­tion, The New Gallery, Cal­gary (all 2013).

Tanya Lukin Linklater's performance collaborations, videos, photographs and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is compelled by relationships between bodies, histories, poetry, pedagogy, Indigenous conceptual spaces (languages), and institutions.

Audra Simpson is the Associate Professor of Anthropology at Columbia. Her primary research is energized by the problem of recognition, by its passage beyond the aegis of the state into the grounded field of political self-designation, self-description and subjectivity. She also examines the borders of time, history and bodies across and within what is now the United States and Canada. Simpson is a close associate to Linklater and Mohawk Interrupts: political life across the border of settler states is a seminal text for this recent body of work. 

Jackson Polys is a visual artist who lives and works between Alaska and New York.  His work reflects examinations into the limits and viability of desires for indigenous growth. He began carving with his father, Tlingit artist Nathan Jackson, in high school, and has worked as a visual artist based in Alaska as Stron Softi, with solo exhibitions at the Alaska State Museum and the Anchorage Museum.

Hrag Vartanian is editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic, a publication he created in 2009 in response to the changes in the art world, publishing, and the distribution of information. Breaking news, award-winning reporting, informed opinions, and quality conversations about art have helped Hyperallergic reach over 1 million readers a month. In addition, he has curated projects, exhibitions and has organized public events since 1997. Beyond his writing, he is an avid photographer and collector of photographs. He is committed to serious, playful, and radical storytelling that pushes the boundaries of writing.

For more information about the exhibition please see:

NYU STORIES

New York Times

Art Forum

New Yorker

Art in America


For the duration of 2017, SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art will be renamed and operate as the Wood Land School. This is the continuation of a conversation, and it is the forging of new relationships. From an initial position of Indigenous self-determination and collectivity, we situate ourselves as impacted upon by forces both nurturing and destructive; we work to be aware of our own participation in dispossession; and we consider our capacity to articulate new ways of being in relation. Structured as a single exhibition unfolding over the course of a year, Wood Land School: Drawing a Line from January to December recognizes the power of line to mark history and invoke memory, proposing a line without beginning or end as a space to collaboratively imagine Indigenous futurity.

 

Contemporary civic institutions and social structures are built upon systems that have silenced, ignored and destructively classified Indigenous people, ideas and objects. In response to this history, Wood Land School calls upon institutions to give intellectual and physical labour, philosophical and physical space, time, and funds to support Indigenous ideas, objects, discursivity and performance. In Wood Land School’s six-year history, it has come into relation with many kinds of institutions through a framework of treaty, wherein we have accepted and shared in the responsibilities of realizing these many projects. Foregrounding Indigenous history and presence on this land now known as Canada, in a place now known as Montreal, Wood Land School: Drawing a Line from January to December attempts to create a space of critical reflection and re-imagination, where the tenets of treaty—mutual accountability, reciprocity, relation across difference and stewardship of resources—can be enacted.

 

Wood Land School is an experimental space where Indigenous thought and theory are centred, embodied, mobilized, and take shape as practice through exhibition and pedagogy. Wood Land School does not seek to summarize Indigenous identity, but rather to honour specific, embodied expressions of inheritance and becoming.

 

The scope of the contexts we operate within and in relation to include the historical, which is akin to theory, and the contemporary, which is akin to practice. Wood Land School aims to be a space for listening, where we can tend to the urgency of current conditions as they unfold—both systemic and material—with an eye to how (and how else) these circumstances can shape our everyday lives. It operates with an awareness that settler colonialism is ever present, enacted in and on Turtle Island in various forms. Wood Land School is the theorization and practice of centering Indigeneity. Our primary relationships are Indigenous to Indigenous, which includes land and non-humans. We also extend our conversations with and to other communities and publics, working in and through a treaty relationship, to re-frame conversations in a way that centres Indigenous agency. The impact of this project will be determined by many viewers over time.

 

We wonder, how do the relationships between theory, practice and pedagogy manifest across the complexity and diversity of Indigenous identities, and in relation to settler colonial positionings? What does it mean for a settler-colonial institution to unknow its power? What does it mean to memorialize and dream in relation? How to collectively tend to the becoming of the future?

 

—Duane Linklater, Tanya Lukin Linklater and cheyanne turions with Walter Scott

 

Biography

 

Wood Land School is an ongoing project with no fixed location or form. First instigated by Duane Linklater, Wood Land School: Drawing a Line from January to December is organized by Duane Linklater, Tanya Lukin Linklater and cheyanne turions, with Walter Scott.

 

In its malleability, Wood Land School seeks critical engagements within the realms of representation, film, contemporary art, land and politics in Turtle Island and beyond. It emerges out of Linklater's investigation into Indigenous artists based in northern Ontario in the 1970s, whose work engaged both ancient and contemporary Indigenous art forms. Each iteration of Wood Land School carries forth a commitment to address the lack of structural inclusion of Indigenous people, both historically and in the now, in a multiplicity of institutional spaces. It is a conceptual and physical space for Indigenous people, with Indigenous people deciding its directions, structures and functions. An important additional component of Wood Land School is the inclusion of non-Indigenous people who are invited to engage with the complex realities of Indigenous artworks, experiences, ideas and spaces.

 

Wood Land School began in 2011 with the making of a small exhibition of works selected by Linklater in a small office/studio space located above the Necessities convenience store (selling “Native Crafts, Fireworks, Cigarettes”) on Nipissing First Nation in Northern Ontario. This location was transformed into the Wood Land School, an open and contemplative space for the present. This activation and investigation of space is an ongoing and never-ending task that must be portable, because walls should not obstruct the circulation or behaviour of ideas. Since then, Wood Land School has taken many forms including residencies, seminars, film screenings and discursive happenings shaped by many participating artists, writers and thinkers along the way.

 

Previous iterations of Wood Land School include the following:

 

Wood Land School: Exhibition, Nipissing First Nation, Ontario, 2011

with Raymond Boisjoly, David Horovitz, Duane Linklater, Tanya Lukin Linklater and Walter Scott

 

Wood Land School: What color is the present? The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, 2013

Facilitated by Brian Jungen, Duane Linklater and Wendy Red Star

 

Wood Land School: The Exiles, Artscape Gibralter Point, Toronto Island, Ontario, 2013

Facilitated by Duane Linklater

 

Wood Land School: On 12 Years a Slave, Art Metropole, Toronto, Ontario, 2013

Facilitated by cheyanne turions

 

Wood Land School: In the land of the Head Hunters, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, 2014

with Raymond Boisjoly, Marcia Crosby and Duane Linklater

 

Wood Land School: Critical Anthology (symposium), Or Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia, 2016

with Raymond Boisjoly, David Garneau, Richard Hill, Candice Hopkins, Amy Kazymerchyk, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Liz Park, Postcommodity, Walter Scott and cheyanne turions

 

Wood Land School: Thunderbird Woman, Plug In ICA, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 2016

with Jamie Isaac and Duane Linklater

 

Wood Land School: Critical Anthology (publication), Or Gallery and SFU Galleries, Vancouver, British Columbia, forthcoming

with Raymond Boisjoly, David Garneau, Candice Hopkins, Amy Kazymerchyk, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Liz Park, Postcommodity, Walter Scott, cheyanne turions and Jordan Wilson


You can read Kari Cwynar's feature article, Tanya Lukin Linklater's Choregraphy of Space, in Inuit Art Quarterly here:

 

http://iaq.inuitartfoundation.org/29-2-choreography-lukin-linklater/

 

 


Nancy Webb wrote a short essay, "Slay, Okay," for Luma Quarterly, Issue 6, Volume 2 (Fall 2016) about my work, Slay All Day, a web commission for the Remai Modern that launched August 1 of this year. She references Beyoncé's Formation, bell hooks and Inuit athletics. You can find the essay here:

 

http://lumaquarterly.com/issues/volume-two/006-fall/slay-okay/

 


Honoured that my work, In Memoriam (2012), is referenced by Billy-Ray Belcourt in "Provincializing Oxford: Notes from the Beast's Belly - October 12." Please see his phenomenal writings generally ... and specifically this entry here:

 

https://nakinisowin.wordpress.com/author/billyray94/

 


The catalogue for A Parallel Excavation, 2016 was published by Art Gallery of Alberta and is available on Amazon. With an essay by Tiffany Shaw-Collinge and Erin Sutherland and writings by Duane Linklater and Tanya Lukin Linklater.