Join AGO Artist in Residence Tanya Lukin Linklater in conversation with Wanda Nanibush, Assistant Curator, Canadian and Indigenous Art, to discuss the work of Rita Letendre and Lukin Linklater’s performance-based response to the exhibition Rita Letendre: Fire and Light.

Tanya Lukin Linklater is an Alutiiq artist and choreographer who combines dance, music and text into moving explorations of space, bodies and relationships. From August 9 - 18, 2017, Lukin Linklater will be the AGO’s Artist in Residence.

While in residence, Lukin Linklater will work with dancers inside the exhibition Rita Letendre: Fire and Lightto stage a performance, titled Sun Force, in response to Letendre’s powerful work. Visitors to the AGO are welcome to view Tanya and her collaborators in process through a series of open rehearsals that will take place inside the exhibition during gallery hours. The final performance will begin at 7 pm on Friday, August 18.

Click here for more information about Sun Force.

ABOUT TANYA LUKIN LINKLATER

Tanya Lukin Linklater's performance collaborations, videos, and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is compelled by relationships between bodies, histories, poetry, pedagogy, Indigenous conceptual spaces and Indigenous languages, and institutions. Her work has been exhibited and performed at EFA Project Space + Performa, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Santiago, Chilé; Western Front, Vancouver, and elsewhere. In 2016 she presented He was a poet and he taught us how to react and become this poetry (Parts 1 and 2) at La Biennale de Montréal - Le Grand Balcon curated by Philippe Pirotte.

In 2017, as a member of Wood Land School alongside Duane Linklater and cheyanne turions with Walter Scott, Tanya will participate in the slow exhibition, Kahatènhston tsi na’tetiátere ne Iotohrkó: wa tánon Iotohrha, Drawing a Line From January to December. For the duration of 2017, SBC Gallery will be renamed and operate as Wood Land School. Wood Land School also participated in Under the Mango Tree - Ulterior Sites of Learning, a gathering for documenta14 in Kassel.

Tanya's poetry and essays have been published in C Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, and in publications by Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, among others. Tanya studied at University of Alberta (M.Ed.) and Stanford University (A.B. Honours) where she received the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and the Louis Sudler Prize for Creative and Performing Arts. She was awarded the Chalmers Professional Development Grant in 2010 and the K.M. Hunter Artist Award in Literature in 2013.

She originates from the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in southern Alaska and is based in northern Ontario, Canada.

ABOUT WANDA NANIBUSH

Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe curator, image and word warrior, and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation, located in Southern Ontario. Nanibush has a Master’s degree in visual studies from the University of Toronto. Over the past two decades, Nanibush has served in a wide range of capacities from programmer and festival coordinator to Aboriginal arts officer and executive director. During that time, she worked with organizations such as ImagineNATIVE, LIFT, Optic Nerve Film Festival, Reframe Film Festival, the Ontario Arts Council, Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, and the Association for Native Development in the Performing & Visual Arts (ANDPVA).

Her curatorial credits include the exhibitions Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971-1989 (AGO), Sovereign Acts II (Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery), and the award winning KWE: The work of Rebecca Belmore (Justina M. Barnicke Gallery). Nanibush has published widely on the subject of Indigenous art as well as women’s issues, and is currently at work on her first book, titled Violence No More: The Rise of Indigenous Women. She is also working on an AGO exhibition of works by Gershon Iskowitz Prize-winning artist Rebecca Belmore, scheduled to open in 2018.