Catriona Jeffries

In her artistic practice, Tanya Lukin Linklater engages questions of belonging, memory, and Indigenous knowledge in the context of the ongoing afterlives of colonial violence. For Crested, her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, Lukin Linklater developed a new cycle of work comprising bentwood sculptures, textile installations, beadwork, and watercolours that draw on visual traditions and methodologies of Sugpiaq communities.

For over fifteen years, Lukin Linklater has lived in North Bay, Northern Ontario, on the territory of the Nbisiing Anishnaabeg. Her Sugpiaq homelands are in southwestern Alaska—a region profoundly shaped by Russian colonialism, followed by American rule. Her trajectory has unfolded between places, languages, and forms of knowledge.

A key reference for the exhibition is a small woven bag, one of several Sugpiaq belongings housed in Saint Petersburg’s Kunstkamera, brought there from Alaska during Russia’s colonial rule in the 19th century. Lukin Linklater asks what forms restitution and repatriation might take, and is particularly interested in how knowledge, cultural practices, and relationships can be carried forward despite colonial control and institutional forgetting.

In her installations, Lukin Linklater references Sugpiaq cosmologies, symbols used to adorn belongings, and customary bentwood techniques, as well as weather phenomena, movements of water, and knowledge structures. At the same time, she addresses hybrid forms that emerged through colonial violence. European materials such as glass beads and textiles were integrated into existing Indigenous artistic traditions and transformed into self-determined forms of expression. Through subtle gestures, Lukin Linklater illuminates the often-overlooked spaces of knowledge cultivated by Indigenous women.

The exhibition title Crested carries multiple meanings. It refers to the crest of a wave—the point of highest elevation, like a river swelling during a storm. The term also suggests adornment: tufted, plumed, embellished. A crest may also serve as a visual marker of belonging to a group.

The exhibition is activated by a series of Open Rehearsals held on May 30 and 31, 2026. Together with performers Mya Dixon, Talia Dixon, Mekko Harjo, and Mina Linklater, the artist develops choreographic situations that explore listening, sensation, and embodied inquiry. These open rehearsals are not intended to convey finished enactments, but rather to share relational, ever-changing processes.

In Crested, Lukin Linklater addresses both the consequences of colonial dispossession and forms of cultural continuity and resistance, understanding relationality as a mode of practice: a way of thinking through relationships—to history, landscape, lived culture and embodiment. In doing so, she cultivates forms of attention grounded in relation rather than possession, opening a space shaped by movement and the entanglements of history with lived experience.

Documentation by Robert Schittko.