Share + 

Contemporary Indigenous Arts Showcase with Tanya Lukin Linklater and Friends

Mon Oct 14, 2019 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Presented by the UC Berkeley America Indian Graduate Program and Native American Studies

Tanya Lukin Linklater, Artist; Alutiiq; Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions. Sarah Biscarra Dilley, Artist, Independent Curator, Writer. Alan Palaez Lopez, Poet, Visual Performance Artist; Comparative Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley. Patrick V. Naranjo, Santa Clara Pueblo; Executive Director of UC Berkeley American Indian Graduate Program. Beth Piatote, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley.

Visual artists, dancers, and writers celebrate the creative pulse of indigenous languages that sustain their works in a night of performances that honor 2019 as UNESCO's International Year of Indigenous Languages. Headlining the show is Aluqtiiq artist-choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater, joined by Northern Chumash artist Sarah Biscarra Dilley; Afro-Indigenous poet Alan Pelaez-Lopez; Nez Perce writer and scholar Beth Piatote; and Santa Clara Pueblo member Patrick Naranjo, executive director of UC Berkeley’s American Indian Graduate Program. In many Indigenous communities, tʔɨnɨsmu, or language, provides a crucial resource in grounding knowledge and meaning within our own cultural context(s), holding immeasurable information, ranging from land management systems to poetics, material practices that are deeply tied to cultural continuance to place and placemaking. Centering tʔɨnɨsmu tiłhinktitʸu, the language of the people of tiłhini (commonly known as San Luis Obispo, CA), Sarah Biscarra Dilley will discuss the ways yakʔitʔɨnɨsmu grounds her own visual and written practice and remains central to her tribal community’s work, asserting creative, intellectual, and embodied sovereignty. Alan Peláez López will perform excerpts of their latest project, Libélulas/ Chambalés, a choreopoem written in Spanglish that tells a story of settler-colonialism through the voice of an unnamed toddler, a medicine woman/grandma, and five dragonflies. Beth Piatote will read from her forthcoming collection The Beadworkers: Stories and reflect on the relationship of beadwork, storytelling, and indigenous language in contemporary Native life. Tanya Lukin Linklater will read from her book Slow Scrape, accompanied by video works and performance documentation. Biographies: Sarah Biscarra Dilley is an artist, independent curator, and writer currently residing nitspu chochenyo ktitʸu (in the land/world of the Chochenyo-speaking people). A member of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash tribe, her interdisciplinary process is grounded in collaboration across experiences, communities, and place. Relating unceded land throughout tspu tiłhin ktitʸu (the land/world of the people of tiłhini), the State of California, as well as earth and archipelagos joined by shared water, her written and visual texts connect extractive industries, absent treaties, and attempted enclosure to emphasize movement, sovereignty, relation and the living qualities of each. While much of her foundations are shaped by body, land and the worlds in and around us, she is currently a PhD candidate in Native American Studies at University of California, Davis. She is full of birds. Tanya Lukin Linklater's performances in museums, videos, and installations have been shown in Canada and abroad. She often makes performance collaborations with dancers and sometimes composers/musicians and poets, in relation to the architecture of museums, objects in exhibition, scores, and cultural belongings reaching towards atmospheres that shift the space or potentially, the viewer. Her work centres knowledge production in and through orality, conversation, and embodied practices, including dance. While reckoning with histories that affect Indigenous peoples' lives, lands and ideas, she investigates insistence. Her ethical considerations include that which sustains us conceptually and affectively. In 2019 she will participate in …other such stories, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and Soft Power at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Tanya studied at University of Alberta (M.Ed.) and Stanford University (A.B. Honours) and is a doctoral candidate at Queen’s University. In 2018 she was the inaugural recipient of the Wanda Koop Research Fund administered by Canadian Art. She originates from the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in Alaska and has been based in northern Ontario, Canada for a decade. Alan Peláez López is an Afro-Indigenous (Zapotec) poet, collage and adornment artist from the southern Pacific coast of Oaxaca, México. Their writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and “Best of the Net,” and appears/is forthcoming in Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press), POETRY Magazine, Puerto del Sol, Everyday Feminism & elsewhere. Their debut collection, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien, is forthcoming from The Operating System Press (2020), and their chapbook, to love and mourn in the age of displacement, is forthcoming from Nomadic Press (September 2019). Patrick is a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo. He has a B.A. from Haskell Indian National University and an M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in American Indian Studies with an emphasis on contemporary tribal cultural property protections. Patrick has published several articles and continues to transform higher education experiences for Native and Indigenous people through the intersection of Native heritage, academia, and cultural concepts. Beth Piatote (Nez Perce) is associate professor of Native American Studies at UC Berkeley, where she specializes in Native American literature and law; Nez Perce language and literature; indigenous language revitalization; and creative writing. She is the author of two books and numerous articles and short stories.

For more information, visit artsdesign.berkeley.edu. Arts + Design Mondays @ BAMPFA is organized and sponsored by UC Berkeley's Arts + Design Initiative. In-kind support is provided by BAMPFA. The series is co-curated by the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice; American Indian Graduate Program; Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium; Berkeley Center for New Media; and Graduate School of Journalism, and by the City of Richmond.