Tanya Lukin Linklater, Artist

The Sobey Art Award announced the 25 artists longlisted for the award in 2021. 

I am pleased to share that I was selected as one of five artists longlisted in Ontario. The full list of artists can be found on the National Gallery of Canada website. 

https://www.gallery.ca/whats-on/sobey-art-award/artists-2021

From Inuit Art Quarterly:

"For the first time in its history, four circumpolar Indigenous artists appear on the Sobey Art Award longlist. Glenn Gear, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and Maureen Gruben all appear on the longlist for the 2021 prize—Gear is nominated for the Atlantic category, Linklater for Ontario, and Gruben and Bathory for Prairies and North.

This is also the first year that artists of any age are eligible for the award, which since its inception in 2002 has only been presented to artists under 40. Some artists are only beginning their artistic careers at the age of 35, so the removal of the age limit allows for a greater range of emerging artists to make the list.

Jury Chair Sasha Suda, who is also Director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada, said this year’s award received a record number of nominations, particularly from non-urban areas. “It has been an extraordinary privilege to learn about the amazing art being made from coast-to-coast-to-coast,” she said in the NGC press release."

https://www.inuitartfoundation.org/iaq-online/4-circumpolar-indigenous-artists-longlisted-for-sobey-art-award

The Heard Museum has launched Larger Than Memory: A Digital Experience. 

From the website:

Larger Than Memory: Contemporary Art From Indigenous North America presents works by contemporary artists working across the United States and Canada. Focusing on the two decades of 2000 to 2020, the exhibition highlights the significant contributions that Indigenous artists have made, and continue to make, by addressing critical dialogues taking place globally, engaging with challenging mediums and modes of production, and expressing a continuum of their respective cultural heritages while often entering into conversation with and revising the canon of art history.

The title of this exhibition is drawn, with permission, from Joy Harjo’s poem Grace, which contains the lines, ”I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.” This verse spoke to our intention for this exhibition, which is to present outstanding work by Indigenous artists while creating an opportunity for reckoning with the marginalization and misrepresentation of Indigenous people within the field of contemporary art.

For more information and to view the digital experience:

https://heard.org/larger-than-memory/

I am pleased to share that I will participate in “Soft Water Hard Stone,” the fifth New Museum Triennial opening in October, 2021. Forty artists and collectives from across the world have been invited. 

From the New Museum website/press release:

The title of the 2021 Triennial, “Soft Water Hard Stone,” is taken from a well-known proverb in Brazil: Água mole em pedra dura, tanto bate até que fura (Soft water on hard stone hits until it bores a hole). The proverb can be said to have two meanings: if one persists long enough, the desired effect can eventually be achieved; and time can destroy even the most perceptibly solid materials. The title speaks to ideas of resilience and perseverance, and the impact that an insistent yet discrete gesture can have in time. It also provides a metaphor for resistance, as water—a constantly flowing and often underestimated material—is capable of eventually dissolving stone—a substance associated with permanence, but also composed of tiny particles that can collapse under pressure.

In this moment of profound change, where structures that were once thought to be stable are revealed to be precarious, broken, or on the verge of collapse, the 2021 Triennial recognizes artists reimagining traditional models, materials, and techniques beyond established institutional paradigms. Their works exalt states of transformation, calling attention to the malleability of structures, porous and unstable surfaces, and the fluid and adaptable potential of both technological and organic media. The works included in the exhibition look back toward overlooked artistic traditions and technological building blocks, while at the same time look forward toward the immaterial, the transitory, and the creative potential that might give dysfunctional or discarded remains new life.

“Soft Water Hard Stone” is curated by Margot Norton, Allen and Lola Goldring Curator at the New Museum, and Jamillah James, Senior Curator, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA). Curatorial Fellow: Jeanette Bisschops.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue copublished by the New Museum and Phaidon Press Limited. The catalogue is designed by Elizabeth Karp-Evans and Adam Turnbull of Studio Pacific and includes contributions from Jamillah James, Margot Norton, Karen Archey, Eunsong Kim, and Bernardo Mosqueira, and features original interviews with all forty artists participating in the exhibition.

ABOUT THE TRIENNIAL

The New Museum Triennial is the only recurring international exhibition in New York City devoted to emerging artists from around the world, providing an important platform for a new generation of artists who are shaping the current discourse of contemporary art and the future of culture. The first edition was initiated in 2009 with “Younger Than Jesus,” organized by Massimiliano Gioni, Laura Hoptman, and Lauren Cornell. The second Triennial, “The Ungovernables,” was organized by Eungie Joo in 2012. The third Triennial, “Surround Audience,” was organized by Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin with Sara O’Keeffe and Helga Christoffersen in 2015. The fourth Triennial, “Songs for Sabotage,” was organized by Gary Carrion-Murayari and Alex Gartenfeld with Francesca Altamura in 2018.

For more information, including a full list of artists, please see the New Museum website:

https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/2021-triennial-soft-water-hard-stone

Commonwealth has published a conversation between Tiffany Shaw-Collinge and I in Issue 3. "Three volumes, mainly in digital format, include networks of content linked to the Commonwealth project" organized by Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Beta-Local and Philadelphia Contemporary.

Our conversation, first convened by Beth Weinstein informally and edited by us for the publication, includes notes and interjections by co-curators, Stephanie Smith and Noah Simblist. Tiffany and I discuss Indigenous geometries, 2019. I also wrote a short text regarding This moment an endurance to the end forever, 2020, a new work for camera and a commission for Commonwealth. 

http://commonwealths.art/tanya-lukin-linklater-and-tiffany-shaw-collinge/

Godfre Leung has written a long form essay, "Tense: On Tanya Lukin Linklater's We wear one another," for the inaugural issue of Reissue (January 2021).

ReIssue is an interdisciplinary art writing platform focused on shaping and sustaining a contemporary west coast discourse rooted in critical engagement with experimental art practices.

You can read the text here:

https://reissue.pub/articles/tense-on-tanya-lukin-linklaters-we-wear-one-another

“Out of the unbearable and seemingly unspeakable, ground is broken. We feel for one another.”

Layli Long Soldier's introduction to Slow Scrape was published in the inuagural issue of o bod magazine (December 1, 2020). You can view the text here:

https://www.obodmag.com/magazine/slow-scrape-introduction-layli-long-soldier

Indigenous Movement: A Discussion

Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University 

January 13, 2020, 6 – 7:30 pm

Via Zoom webinar 

Writer and curator Candice Hopkins moderates this conversation, which brings together Commonwealth artists Tanya Lukin Linklater and Tiffany Shaw-Collinge with Vanessa Bolin, an activist, singer, and leader of the Richmond Indigenous Society; it will be introduced by Commonwealth co-curator Stephanie Smith.

This panel is inspired by two works presented in Commonwealth. Lukin Linklater, an artist who often works with dance and choreography, has designed space for Indigenous performance in collaboration with architect Shaw-Collinge. The ICA’s exhibition pairs their 2019 sculpture, Indigenous geometries, with Lukin Linklater's newly commissioned performance for camera, This moment an endurance to the end forever.  

To register:

https://icavcu.org/events/indigenous-movement-a-discussion/

For Constellations, Contemporary Indigenous Art from the Americas, Catherine Wood, Senior Curator, International Art (Performance) at Tate Modern, was in conversation with Tanya Lukin Linklater during a studio visit in October, 2020. You can view the video here:

https://muac.unam.mx/constelaciones/programa/cronotopos/conversacion-con-la-artista-tanya-lukin-linklater

Candice Hopkins, Senior Curator for the Toronto Biennial, included an essay, Repatriation otherwise: How Protocols of Belonging are Shifting the Museological Frame, in Constellations' digital forum. The essay discusses Tanya Lukin Linklater's project, We wear one another, for Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts and can be found here:

https://muac.unam.mx/constelaciones/assets/docs/enssays-candicehopkins.pdf

Constellations, Contemporary Indigenous Art from the Americas was organized by the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (MUAC), through its Extraordinary Lectures Series on Critical Museology and on Aesthetics, Politics, and Critical Historiography of Contemporary Art in México and Latin America. There were three thematics: Geopoetics, Chronotopes and Enunciations.