Tendon Thread | Artist Talk with Tanya Lukin Linklater @ Berkeley Center for New Media
An Art, Technology, & Culture Colloquium lecture, presented as part of BCNM's Indigenous Technologies program, curated by Indigenous Technologies Coordinator Talia Dixon, co-sponsored by the Art Practice Department, the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, and the Graduate Students of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
with Tanya Lukin Linklater
Artist-Choreographer and Assistant Professor, Native Studies, University of Alberta
Compelled by lineages of Sugpiaq cultural work and their continuance despite imperial and colonial disruptions of their lifeways, Tanya Lukin Linklater will discuss her ongoing practice of visiting ancestral belongings — Sugpiaq technologies — in museum collections, including UC Berkeley's Hearst Museum of Anthropology. The talk will then bring into focus her speculative responses to photographic documentation of Sugpiaq belongings in the Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg, Russia. Coupled with her meditations on estuaries, grasses, and customary practices of the Kodiak archipelago, these threads organize Crested, her solo exhibition at Portikus, Frankfurt, and Tendon thread, a performance commission for the Center for Human Rights and the Arts and Fisher Center at Bard College, premiering in winter 2026.
Tanya Lukin Linklater makes dances in museums, videos, sculptures, and works on paper. She thinks with weather, embodiment, beingness, and ancestral belongings in her practice. She is compelled by scores, orality, poetics, embodied inquiry, Indigenous knowledge transmission, and ephemerality.
Her recent and forthcoming exhibitions and performances include Camden Art Centre, London, UK; Dia Art Foundation, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Portikus, Frankfurt; Rudolfinum, Prague; SITE SANTA FE; and Fisher Center at Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Her artworks have entered the collections of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Art Gallery of Ontario, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Remai Modern, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate Americas Foundation, Vancouver Art Gallery, Walker Art Center, and elsewhere.
Her book, Slow Scrape (2nd edition, Talonbooks, Vancouver 2022), draws on documentary poetics, concrete-based installations, event scores, and can be read alongside her choreographic practice. Her recent publications include contributions to The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada, Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me, Mark: Sonya Kelliher-Combs, and Native Visual Sovereignty: A Reader on Art and Performance.
In 2024 she was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices with Dr. Heather Igloliorte, Canada Excellence Research Chair, at University of Victoria. A dedicated educator, Tanya was a faculty mentor in the Institute of American Indian Arts’ MFA in Studio Arts 2021-2026.