booklet (PDF)

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 ccomprising bentwood sculptures, textile installations, beadwork and watercolors, 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 will be 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.

 

Tanya Lukin Linklater (Sugpiaq, b. 1976, Kodiak Island, USA) lives and works in North Bay, Ontario, Canada. Her practice encompasses dance, performance, video, photography, installation and writing.

Her recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada (2026); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, USA (2024); Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Canada (2023); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2022), among others.

Lukin Linklater’s works and performances have been presented at numerous international institutions, including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada (2026); the Dia Art Foundation, New York, USA (2025); Camden Art Centre, London, UK (2025); the Toronto

Biennial of Art, Canada (2022/23/24); the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, USA (2023); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, USA (2023); the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, USA (2023); the 14th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2023); the New Museum, New York, USA (2021); the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2020); and the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Chicago, USA (2019).

Her poetry collection Slow Scrape was published in 2020 (2nd edition, Talonbooks, Vancouver 2022).

Lukin Linklater received the Wexner Center for the Arts Artist Residency Award in Visual Arts (2023-2024) and The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Visual Arts (2021)

   

The exhibition is funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation). Funded by the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media). The exhibition is also supported by Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung, Kunst und Kultur as well as Städelschule Portikus e.V. with additional support from Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm. A research trip to North Bay, Ontario, was funded by Goethe Institut.

The research for this exhibition stems from the project In Perpetual Now: Art and the Politics of Cultural Memory in Post-Pandemic Times (2024–2026) and is supported by the Insight Development Grant of the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC/CRSH).

Poster design: Espace Ness / Émilie Ferrat

Installation Views: Robert Schittko