Toronto Biennial of Art 2022: What Water Knows, The Land Remembers

Tanya Lukin Linklater, Breastbone to sunrise, 2021. Kohkom scarf sculptures, performance platform. Dimensions variable. Photo by Charles Benton. Courtesy of the Artist and Catriona Jeffries.

Artwork Description

“Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art (March 26 – June 5, 2022), two of Tanya Lukin Linklater’s works will be displayed at our 72 Perth Ave site. Held in the air I never fell (spring lightning sweetgrass song) is a round performance platform clad in wood with its sides painted in copper, a nod to the role of copper in Indigenous communities as a signifier of both inherited and communal wealth. Above the platform, a suspended sculpture created from the fabric used to make what are called kohkom scarves, worn by Indigenous women and increasingly as a sign of Indigenous solidarity. Kohkom is Cree for grandmother, and for Tanya, the scarves are a way to evoke “women’s intergenerational, embodied, experiential (and sometimes land-based) knowledge”.

Sensation is a circuit of experience, a circuit of the felt traveling in and adjacent to the body, is an accompanying four channel video work, with monitors on the wall that play short-form choreographies by each of Tanya’s collaborators (dancers Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines,

Ceinwen Gobert and Emily Law), some of which take place on land, others in relation to water.

In collaboration with the Biennial’s Public Programming and Learning team, Tanya Lukin Linklater will build upon her interdisciplinary practice and exhibition work with a series of springtime site-specific performance investigations taking place at High Park over the course of five days, The sky held me (rainfall on hands hair lips).”

Artist Bio: 

Tanya Lukin Linklater (Alutiiq, born in 1976, Kodiak Island, USA; lives in North Bay, Canada) considers the histories of Indigenous peoples’ lives, lands and structures of sustenance through performances, works for camera, installations and writing. Her performances in relation to objects, scores and ancestral belongings generate what she has come to call “felt structures.” Her work has been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Chicago Architecture Biennial; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Remai Modern, Saskatoon; and elsewhere. In 2021, she participated in the New Museum Triennial and received the Herb Alpert Award in Visual Art.