Post-Doctoral Fellow in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices: Dr. Tanya Lukin Linklater
From December 2023 to December 2024, Tanya Lukin Linklater was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices in the Visual Arts Department at University of Victoria.
During her time as a Post-Doctoral Fellow, Dr. Lukin Linklater:
Launched the catalogue, Tanya Lukin Linklater: My mind is with the weather, co-organized by Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver and Contemporary Art Gallery on April 6, 2024.
Presented her solo exhibition, Inner blades of grass (soft) (cured) (bruised by weather), including works from the last ten years and new commissions, at Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio in summer 2024. She choreographed a new performance with four dance artists near sculptures at the opening and closing of the exhibition. She organized a Gathering with performances, workshops, and conversations with artists, choreographers, singers, writers, and community leadership to close the exhibition.
Commissioned by the Toronto Performance Art Collective, she made Stone stick star in response to the 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival’s archive that includes description of Rebecca Belmore’s 1997 performance, For Dudley.
Presented We are with. With sky, sunlight, clouds, wind. With ground, grass, trees, songbirds. (We are held)., with three dance artists in High Park for Precarious Joys, Toronto Biennial of Art in September 2024.
Created a multi-part learning tool for the Toronto Biennial of Art composed of an infographic poster, a booklet of prompts, and a note on process, released in September 2024.
Completed a commissioned audio work titled Scores for deep, tender rest in the exhibition, Labour, curated by Ingrid Johnson at Art Museum, University of Toronto. The exhibition was held from September 2024 to March 2025. Lukin Linklater participated in a public conversation (panel) in October 2024 at University of Toronto for the exhibition.
Exhibited artwork in the exhibition, Ilagit/Relatives, co-curated by Heather Igloliorte and Taqralik Partridge at the FOFA gallery in Montréal
Curated, Suarluni/Emergence: Circumpolar Performance, an event at Centre Phi November 8, 2024 for Qinnirajaattuq / Ripples: Making Waves in Inuit Art symposium which featured performace art by Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Sylvia Cloutier, Jessie Kleeman, Taqralik Partridge, and Allison Akootchook Warden
Organized and moderated a panel discussion, Suarluni / Emergence: Circumpolar Performance, with Sylvia Cloutier, Jessie Kleeman, Taqralik Partridge, and Allison Akootchook Warden for the Ripples symposium on November 7, 2024.
Published an interview in BOMB Magazine “Kendra Sullivan and Tanya Lukin Linklater: On creative practice, poetry, and motivating institutional change” November 15, 2024
Spoke on a panel, “Material Matters,” with Sandra Brewster, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, and Wanda Nanibush at aabaakwad (it clears after the storm) gathering in Toronto organized by Wanda Nanibush December 4-December 9, 2024.
Tanya Lukin Linklater’s Sugpiaq homelands are in the Kodiak archipelago of southwestern Alaska. She is a tribally enrolled member of the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions. She makes dances in museums, videos, sculptures, and works on paper. She thinks with weather, embodiment, and beingness in her practice. Sensation, scores, orality, poetics, embodied inquiry, and being in relation to ancestral belongings and other material structure her work.
Her performances and artworks have shown in recent years at Aichi Triennale, Japan; Camden Art Centre, London; Dia Art Foundation, New York; Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; New Museum Triennial, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Toronto Biennial of Art; Vancouver Art Gallery and elsewhere. Crested, presented by Portikus in Frankfurt, Germany in 2026, is her first solo exhibition in Europe. Comprised of textiles, bentwood sculptures, watercolours, and performance, the exhibition will travel to Rudolfinum in Prague, Czechia. Her recent publications include poetry and art writing on Ruth Cuthand, Tsema Igharas, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, and Taqralik Partridge.
Completing her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University in 2023, her doctoral writing emphasized weather, embodiment, and materiality while theorizing Indigenous performance. She was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices in the Visual Arts Department at University of Victoria with support from Dr. Heather Igloliorte’s Canada Excellence Research Chair. She also taught as a faculty mentor in the Institute of American Indian Arts’ (Santa Fe) low-residency MFA in Studio Arts 2021-2026.