Tanya Lukin Linklater
(Sugpiaq), Kodiak Island
An amplification through many minds
2019
2019
Single-channel projection with sound, 36:42 mins.
Collection of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, Purchase, 2023 (023.11) and collection of SFMOMA; Shawn and Brook Byers Fund for Women Artists; commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in cooperation with the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology
Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver
Projection description
The work is in relation to ancestral and cultural belongings from the artist’s homelands and Unangan communities in southern Alaska. Some of the key questions Lukin Linklater poses in this work are how these belongings are in relation to and activated within the present moment through touch, sound, song, dance, and other embodied forms. She sees these belongings from her homelands contained and suspended in time within the collections storage. Yet, their inclusion in the Alaska Commercial Collection at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology also allows for a feeling that through their collection the artist can access material that her ancestors have left for her as information to discern and decipher. Other Indigenous peoples will also visit these belongings and learn from them. Their interpretations of these materials will be different from Lukin Linklater’s own. She notes, “In this way I am interacting with ancestral ideas in the present moment in my efforts towards repair and restoration. As a Sugpiaq person, this yearning for repair is the result of the ongoing storms of colonialisms described by the late Elder, Barbara Shangin, in my homelands.”
About the artist
Tanya Lukin Linklater’s performances, works for camera, installations, and writings cite Indigenous dance and visual art lineages, our structures of sustenance, and weather. She undertakes embodied inquiry and rehearsal in relation to scores, ancestral belongings, and art works. Her work reckons with histories that affect Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences, (home)lands, and ideas. Her recent exhibitions include Aichi Triennale, Japan; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; National Gallery of Canada; New Museum Triennial, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Toronto Biennial of Art. Inner blades of grass (soft), inner blades of grass (cured), inner blades of grass (bruised by weather), including works from the last ten years and commissions, and curated by Kelly Kivland, was presented by the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2024. Her Sugpiaq homelands are the Kodiak archipelago of southwestern Alaska. She lives and works in Nbisiing Anishnaabeg aki.
