Tanya Lukin Linklater | Hair Prints

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Tanya Lukin Linklater, "Hair Prints (rehearsal documentation), 2022

With Ivanie Aubin-Malo. Courtesy of the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography.

Opening and Artists Discussion: Saturday, April 22, at 2pm

Hair Prints, Open Rehearsals: April 26, 27 & 28, 12-4pm

Hair Prints, an exhibition of mono-prints accompanied by Open Rehearsals registering movement and the significance of berries as ancestral knowledge and plant relatives.

For the exhibition, artist Tanya Lukin Linklater will make a new set of mono-prints onsite at Open Space by coating her hair in natural pigments of blueberry, raspberry, strawberry, and blackberry and transferring them to archival paper. The public will be invited to witness of Open Rehearsals, over three days, with dance artist Ivanie Aubin-Malo, expanding on the deep and layered embodied process they began in Vancouver in 2022 in response to Tanya’s initial set of hair prints. 

Hair Prints is presented as part of Wayfinders, the ones we breathe with, a series of exhibitions, residencies, and events taking place throughout 2023. This series considers intertwined histories, practices, migrations, and contemporary lives of adjacent island homelands. Wayfinders looks locally to communities on Vancouver Island; across to the Gulf Islands, which are municipally part of the Capital Regional District and more specifically the Penelakut and Lamalcha First Nations on Galiano Island with artist Camille Georgeson-Usher’s upcoming public artwork Until it Swells; north to the Alutiiq/Sugpiaq communities of Kodiak Island with artist Tanya Lukin Linklater; over to our closest neighbour to the southwest, Hawai'i, with curator and cultural practitioner Josh Tengan who joined us in Victoria for a residency in January; as well as farther afield to coastal neighbours and nations across the Pacific Ocean.

“Wayfinders offers a multi-facetted program that centres relationship-building and is linked through conceptual threads, transoceanic exchange, and both shared and disparate practices and positionalities as island peoples and dwellers,” said Open Space and Wayfinders Curator Toby Lawrence.

Tanya Lukin Linklater's performances, works for camera, installations, and writings cite Indigenous dance and visual art lineages, structures of sustenance, and weather as an organizing force. She undertakes embodied inquiry and rehearsal in relation to scores and ancestral belongings in museums and elsewhere alongside dance artists, composers, and poets. Through collaboration, her work reckons with histories that affect Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences, (home) lands, and ideas. She continues to write in relation to what she has come to call felt structures. Tanya’s forthcoming and recent exhibitions include the 14th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Aichi Triennale, Japan; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Oakville Galleries, Ontario; New Museum Triennial, New York; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Toronto Biennial of Art; among others. Slow Scrape, her first collection of poetry, was published by The Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism, Montréal (2020) with a second edition published by Talonbooks (2022). Tanya is represented by Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver. Her Sugpiaq homelands, Afognak and Port Lions, are in southwestern Alaska, and she lives and works in Nbisiing Anishinaabeg aki in Ontario.

Tanya will be joined by Ivanie Aubin-Malo, a Wolastoq and Quebecois dancer, choreographer, and curator, Ivanie invests herself in projects that reflect on ecology and human ethics regarding our environment. She has also danced Fancy Shawl, a powwow style since 2015, connecting with the spirit of transformation and celebrating women’s audacity. Her artistic research as a creator aims to shed light on the beauty of the Wolastoqey language and its relation to the land and the body. Ivanie additionally contributes to connecting Indigenous movement-based artists in order to break isolation, cultivate inspiration, facilitate knowledge sharing, and encourage certain experimental collaborations. As a dancer, she regularly collaborates with Tanya Lukin Linklater and worked with k.g Guttman, Andreane Leclerc, Corpuscule Danse, Lara Kramer, and Alexandre Morin, amongst others. Alongside Natasha Kanapé-Fontaine, she is currently co-creating a performance on wolastoqiyik and Innuat giants and oral stories. Recently based in L’Islet (QC), she plans to open a Wolastoqey Cultural Center where culture can be celebrated and revitalized in the area while connecting with others.