Catriona Jeffries

The practice of Tanya Lukin Linklater is at once an exploration and articulation of insistence. Across works encompassing performance, video, installation, and writing, Lukin Linklater traces the expansive ways Indigenous knowledges, histories and structures have been embodied and sustained amidst colonialisms’ systemic dispossessions. Centering her focus in and through the body, her works map continuance as an iterative practice, often most powerfully enacted through relational gestures such as conversation, movement, listening and touch.

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Lukin Linklater presents An amplification through many minds (2019), a work that extends from her close engagement with a collection of Alutiiq/Sugpiaq and Unagan belongings originating from her homelands in southern Alaska and the Aleutian Chain, now held by the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley. This video follows Lukin Linklater and a trio of dancers through the process of developing a choreographic score for these displaced belongings that is subsequently performed in the museum’s storage vaults. A gesture towards both restoration and repatriation, this piece is accompanied by a series of new works on paper that index the artist’s presence through land and movement alike.

Documentation by Rachel Topham Photography.