Indian Theater 

June 24 – November 26, 2023 → Hessel Museum of Art 

Curated by

• Candice Hopkins

Indian Theater will explore Native North American art through the framework of performance, abstraction, and material experimentation that emerged from the Institute of American Indian Arts’ theatre department in the late 1960s. The first large-scale exhibition of its kind to center performance as the origin point for contemporary Indigenous practice, Indian Theater will feature over 100 works that engage notions of sound and instrumentation, dress and adornment, and the body and its absence by artists representing a range of geographies and cultural viewpoints, including Dana Claxton (Lakota), Ishi Glinsky (Tohono O’odham), Jeneen Frei Njootli (Vuntut Gwitchin), and James Luna (Payómkawichum, Ipai, and Mexican), among many others. The exhibition features key selections from Forge Project’s lending collection, archival materials, and newly commissioned activations by Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe) and Eric-Paul Riege (Diné).

Curated by Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), Forge Project’s Executive Director and CCS Bard Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies, this major exhibition celebrates the partnership established in 2022 with Forge Project to provide dedicated programming on key topics and methods in Native American and Indigenous studies throughout the Bard network. Indian Theater will be accompanied in the fall by the release of the first publication dedicated to the evolution of Native North American performance in contemporary art over the past 60 years, with newly commissioned essays and reprints of critical texts by leading Indigenous scholars and artists.

Exhibition artists: KC Adams (Métis), Asinnajaq (Inuk), Sonny Assu (Ligwiłda'xw Kwakwaka'wakw from Wei Wai Kum Nation), Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc), Rick Bartow (Wiyot), Rebecca Belmore (Member of the Lac Seul First Nation (Anishinaabe)), Bob Boyer (Métis), Dana Claxton (Lakota), TJ Cuthand (Plains Cree, Scottish, Irish), Ruth Cuthand (Plains Cree, Scottish, Irish, Canadian), Beau Dick (Kwakwaka’wakw, Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nation), Demian DinéYahzi’ (Diné), Rosalie Favell (Métis (Cree/ British)), Jeneen Frei Njootli (Vuntut Gwitchin, Czech and Dutch), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂), Jeffrey Gibson (Member of The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, and half Cherokee), Ishi Glinsky (Tohono O'odham), Raven Halfmoon (Caddo), Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill (Métis), Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians), Maria Hupfield (Ojibwe and a member of the Wasauksing First Nation) , Matthew Kirk (Navajo), Kite (Oglala Sioux Tribe), Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota), Tanya Lukin Linklater (Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions), James Luna (Payómkawichum, Ipai, and Mexican), Rachel Martin (Tlingit/Tsaagweidei, Killer Whale Clan, of the Yellow Cedar House (Xaai Hit’) Eagle Moiety), Kent Monkman (Cree member of Fisher River Cree Nation in Treaty 5 Territory (Manitoba)), Audie Murray (Métis), Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee), New Red Order (Adam Khalil (Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians); Zack Khalil (Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians); Jackson Polys (Tlingit)), Jessie Oonark (Inuk), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish member of the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Nation), Eric-Paul Riege (Diné), Walter Scott (Kahnawá:ke), Spiderwoman Theater, Charlene Vickers (Anishinaabe), Kay WalkingStick (Citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and Anglo), Marie Watt (Seneca and German-Scot), Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota), and Nico Williams (Anishinaabe)

For more information:

https://ccs.bard.edu/museum/exhibitions/719-indian-theater

Distance Studies at Images Festival

Nada El-Omari, Noor Khan, Elizabeth M. Webb, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Tanya Lukin Linklater

Curated By: Magdalyn Asimakis

Monday, April 17, 20237:00PM EDTLocationCanadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC)

1411 Dufferin Street, Unit D, Toronto, ON, M6H 4C7

Distance Studies traces a series of relationships that exceed linear space and time. This selection of works by artists and filmmakers Noor Khan, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Elizabeth M. Webb, Nada El-Omari, and Tanya Lukin Linklater ask, what does it mean to know someone? Must they be within arm’s reach? What can we access through shared spaces? Some pose inquiries around how physical distance blurs definitions of ‘home’, while others trace distances between inhabited spaces, and still others foreground memory and familial knowledge as something immediate. These films consider what haunts us, what we embody, and what we learn about ourselves through people and spaces that are absent, or once were.

, not like us. Not like us, (2022) will screen in this program. A description of the work:

Tanya Lukin Linklater began writing in relation to girlhood as a response to the attempted assassination of girls’ education activist, Malala Yousafzai, in Swat Valley, Pakistan in 2012. , not like us. Not like us, (2022) centres memory through dance, image, and text, and is a part of a larger series of investigations. With Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Ceinwen Gobert and Neven Lochhead.

https://imagesfestival.com/events/distance-studies

REIMAGINING INTERCONNECTEDNESS 

This is a co-presentation between Pleasure Dome and the CFMDC (Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre).

Join us for our second in-person screening of the year at Small World Music Centre in Toronto. Guest programmed by Clare Samuel, this screening features works Lynne Sachs, Elisa Gonzalez, Keisha Rae Witherspoon, Tanya Lukin Linklater, and Hao Zhou. Each film reflects different understandings and re-imaginings of what it means to be interconnected with each other and the world around us.

Part of Spring 2023

When: 6pm-9pm ET, MAY 23

Where: Small World Music Centre, Artscape Youngplace, 110 Shaw Street, Unit 101

Screening programme:

Lynne Sachs, Maya at 24, 04:27

Elisa Gonzalez, Freya, 22:13

Tanya Lukin Linklater, We Wear One Another, 25:13

Intermission

Keisha Rae Witherspoon, T, 13:50

Hao Zhou, Frozen Out, 5:00

Lynne Sachs, Film About a Father Who, 1:14:00

Following the screening, we will have a Q&A with the artist Lynne Sachs and curator Clare Samuel. The screening is free and open to the public. Everyone is invited to attend.

https://pdome.org/2023/reimagining-interconnectedness-in-person-screening-may-23-new-world-cinema/

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.

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/

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

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