Wednesday February 1, 2017, 7-9pm
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: