Tanya Lukin Linklater

(Alutiiq/Sugpiaq)
Kodiak AK, Homeland and territory of the Alutiiq/Sugpiaq people 1976
Currently based in North Bay ON, Nbisiing Anishnaabeg Territory

We wear one another
2019
Digital video installation
30 min. (total duration)
Collection of the Artist

Excerpts of text composed by the artist, Tanya Lukin Linklater, in relation to a Mackenzie Delta Inuvialuit gut-skin parka, held in the Hudson’s Bay Company Collection at the Manitoba Museum.

The gut-skin parka and text were installed on specially fabricated plinths at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre for Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts, curated by Candice Hopkins and Dylan Robinson. The gut-skin parka became a score for a performance that the artist developed with dancers, Ceinwen Gobert and Danah Rosales, and composer/musician, Laura Ortman, through an open-rehearsal process.

This new performance, We wear one another, was presented at the Ka’tarohkwi Festival of Indigenous Arts at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts on 24 March 2019.

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Tanya Lukin Linklater is an Alutiiq multidisciplinary artist and performer whose work, performances, videos and installations have been exhibited in Canada and abroad. Her work centres Indigenous knowledge production in and through orality, conversation and embodied practices, including dance. While reckoning with histories that affect Indigenous peoples’ lives, lands and ideas, she investigates insistence. She considers That which sustains us a conceptual and affective line within her work, alongside histories and structural violences that Indigenous peoples continue to respond to. In 2017, 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. In 2018, Lukin Linklater presented a commissioned performance for Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Lukin Linklater was the inaugural recipient of the Wanda Koop Research Fund administered by Canadian Art. She will present currrent and new works, including a performance, for the BMW Tate Live Exhibition 2020 in London. She originates from the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in Alaska and is based in Northern Ontario.

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Resources for Further Research

Additional information and writings about Tanya Lukin Linklater, compiled by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery team.

• Read an article by Godfre Leung on Linklater’s We Wear One Another

• Read an article on Linklater’s first solo exhibition at ma ma projects in Toronto.

• Read a feature of Linklater’s performance He was a poet and he taught us how to react and to become this poetry, Parts 1 and 2 (2016) at the 2015 Biennale de Montreal.

• Watch a public lecture by Linklater as part of The Audain Visual Artist in Residence program for the School of Contemporary Arts at SFU

• Watch Linklater in conversation Catherine Wood, Senior Curator, International Art (Performance) at the Tate Modern, during a virtual studio visit

• Read an essay by Candice Hopkins titled “Repatriation Otherwise: How Protocols of Belonging are Shifting the Museological Frame” which discusses Linklater’s project “We wear one another”

• RSVP to an event on December 4: a discussion with Linklater and Okwui Okpawasili for Choreographies of the Archipelago: Artists in Conversation hosted by the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University

Suggested Further Reading

Foster, Susan Leigh. “Watching Woman and Water.” Theatre Survey 51, no. 1 (2010): 121-125

Shea Murphy, Jacqueline. “Gathering from Within: Indigenous Nationhood and Tanya Lukin Linklater’s Woman and Water.” Theatre Research International 35, no. 2 (2010): 165–71. doi:10.1017/S0307883310000076.

Tanya Lukin Linklater, We wear one another, 2019, performance documentation. Courtesy of the artist and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.

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