BIO
Photo by Liz Lott, 2021
Tanya Lukin Linklater's performances, works for camera, installations, and writings cite Indigenous dance and visual art lineages, our structures of sustenance, and weather as an organizing force. She undertakes embodied inquiry and rehearsal in relation to scores and ancestral belongings in museums and elsewhere alongside dance artists, composers, and poets. Through collaboration, her work reckons with histories that affect Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences, (home)lands, and ideas. She continues to write in relation to what she has come to call felt structures.
Her presentation of current and new works for the BMW Tate Live Exhibition, Our Bodies, Our Archives, in London was cancelled due to the pandemic. As a member of Wood Land School, she participated in Under the Mango Tree - Sites of Learning, a gathering for documenta14 in Athens and Kassel. Tanya Lukin Linklater is represented by Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver.
Her forthcoming and recent exhibitions include the 14th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Aichi Triennale, Japan; Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver; Chicago Architecture Biennial; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Heard Museum, Phoenix; Jan Kaps, Cologne; La Biennale de Montréal; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Oakville Galleries, Ontario; New Museum Triennial, New York; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Toronto Biennial of Art; and Winnipeg Art Gallery.
In 2022 her iterative solo exhibition, My mind is with the weather, opened at Oakville Galleries and CAG (Vancouver). The exhibition opened at SAAG (Alberta) in winter 2023 expanding to include work by Tiffany Shaw. In 2025 the solo exhibition will be presented at the Wexner Centre for the Arts. A catalogue for My mind is with the weather designed by Studio Otami with contributions by Eungie Joo, Frances Loeffler, Layli Long Soldier, Tanya Lukin Linklater, and Beth Piatote is forthcoming.
She has worked alongside dance artists Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Ceinwen Gobert, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, and Emily Law, among others. In recent years she has worked in relation to composer and amplified violinist Laura Ortman, artist Duane Linklater, and artist/architect Tiffany Shaw.
Her first collection of poetry, Slow Scrape, was published in the Documents series by The Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism, Montréal in 2020 with a second printing in 2021. Talonbooks, Vancouver, published a second edition of Slow Scrape in 2022. Slow Scrape is, in the words of Layli Long Soldier, “an expansive and undulating meditation on time, relations, origin and colonization." Slow Scrape can be read alongside Tanya Lukin Linklater’s practice as a visual artist and choreographer. She has also published in periodicals and publications by galleries.
Tanya Lukin Linklater studied at University of Alberta (M.Ed.) and Stanford University (A.B. Honours). She is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen's University with supervision by Dylan Robinson. In 2018 she was chosen as the inaugural recipient of the Wanda Koop Research Fund administered by Canadian Art. In 2019 she received the Art Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. In 2021 she received the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Visual Art and was long listed for the Sobey Art Award. In 2022 The Wexner Center for the Arts announced that she was selected for an artist residency award with a solo exhibition planned for 2024.
Her Alutiiq/Sugpiaq homelands are in southwestern Alaska where much of her family continues to live. She is a member of the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in the Kodiak archipelago.