The Power Plant

Tanya Lukin Linklater is an Indigenous artist-choreographer of Alutiiq descent, born in 1976 in Kodiak Island, Alaska.

Tanya Lukin Linklater's performances, works for camera, installations, and writings centre Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences, (home)lands, and structures of sustenance. Her performances in relation to objects in exhibition, scores, and ancestral belongings generate what she has come to call felt structures. She investigates insistence in both concept and application.

In 2023 Tanya Lukin Linklater will participate in soft and weak like water, the 14th Gwangju Biennale. Her work has been shown recently at Aichi Triennale, Chicago Architecture Biennial, National Gallery of Canada, New Museum Triennial, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Toronto Biennial of Art. Since 2015 her work has been shown at Art Gallery of Alberta, Art Gallery of Ontario, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, EFA Project Space + Performa, La Biennale de Montréal, Remai Modern, Winnipeg Art Gallery, and elsewhere. Her presentation of current and new works for the BMW Tate Live Exhibition, Our Bodies, Our Archives, in London was cancelled due to the pandemic. As a member of Wood Land School, she participated in Under the Mango Tree - Sites of Learning, a gathering for documenta14 in Athens and Kassel. Tanya Lukin Linklater is represented by Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver.

In 2022 Tanya Lukin Linklater's iterative solo exhibition, My mind is with the weather, opened at Oakville Galleries and is currently on view at CAG (Vancouver). In 2023 the exhibition will include additional work by Tiffany Shaw at the SAAG (Alberta). A catalogue for My mind is with the weather with contributions by Eungie Joo, Frances Loeffler, Layli Long Soldier, Tanya Lukin Linklater, and Beth Piatote will be released. Tanya has worked alongside dancers Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Ceinwen Gobert, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, and Emily Law, among others. In recent years she has worked in relation to composer and amplified violinist, Laura Ortman, artist, Duane Linklater, and artist/curator/architect, Tiffany Shaw.

Her first collection of poetry, Slow Scrape, was published in the Documents series by The Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism, Montréal in 2020 with a second printing in 2021. Slow Scrape is, in the words of Layli Long Soldier, “an expansive and undulating meditation on time, relations, origin and colonization." Slow Scrape can be read alongside Lukin Linklater’s practice as a visual artist and choreographer. She has also published in periodicals and publications by galleries.

Tanya studied at University of Alberta (M.Ed.) and Stanford University (A.B. Honours). She is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen's University with supervision by Dylan Robinson. In 2018 Tanya was chosen as the inaugural recipient of the Wanda Koop Research Fund administered by Canadian Art. In 2019 she received the Art Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. In 2021 Tanya received the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Visual Art and was long listed for the Sobey Art Award. In 2022 The Wexner Center for the Arts announced that Tanya was selected for an artist residency award with a solo exhibition planned for 2024. Her Alutiiq/Sugpiaq homelands are in southwestern Alaska where much of her family continues to live. She is a member of the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in the Kodiak archipelago.