Tanya Lukin Linklater: “Tendon thread”

Compelled by lineages of Sugpiaq cultural work and their continuance despite imperial and colonial disruptions of lifeways, Tanya Lukin Linklater will discuss her ongoing practice of visiting the ancestral belongings of her people in museum collections. The talk will bring into focus her speculative responses to photographic documentation of Sugpiaq belongings in the Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg, Russia. Coupled with her meditations on estuaries, grasses, and the customary practices of the Kodiak archipelago, these threads organize her performance commission, A Vessel is an Atmosphere Distilled, for the Evidence festival by Fisher Center LAB, in association with the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College, premiering in Fall 2026. 

This talk is produced in collaboration with Fen Live Lab (F’LL/فل), an incubator for innovations in live art and performance practices, and co-presented with Forge Project, the Fisher Center, and the Bard Center for Indigenous Studies. 

Moderated by Joanna Settle.

About the Artist
Making dances in museums, videos, sculptures, and works on paper, Tanya Lukin Linklater thinks with beingness, embodiment, orality, scores, sensation, and weather. Her recent exhibitions and performances include Dia Chelsea, New York, Camden Art Centre, London, and Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio. She is Sugpiaq from the Kodiak archipelago of southwestern Alaska.