Neither Nor
Tanya Lukin Linklater – 2016
“Tanya Lukin Linklater began investigations of childhood through text and video in response to the attempted assassination of girls’ education activist, Malala Yousafzai in the region of Swat Valley, Pakistan in late 2012.”
For her video, the the, 2013, she investigated portrayals of childhood in film, often in tragic circumstances, including Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962), and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). Her methodology included an excavation of the films for images of bodies in relation to one another and the composition of shots for re-creation in performative videos. She repeated this process for Untitled, 2016, investigating Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Hana Makhmalbaf’s Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame (2007), and Samira Makhmalbaf’s Blackboards (2000). Lukin Linklater uses repetition, recreation, and transmission in video and text. In the recreation of scenes, the meanings become altered.
With dancers, Daina Ashbee, Ceinwen Gobert and Emily Law and support from the Ontario Arts Council.
About the Artist
Tanya Lukin Linklater—
Tanya Lukin Linklater’s performance collaborations, videos, photographs and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is compelled by the interstices of visual art and poetry, pedagogy (learning), Indigenous languages, portrayals of women and children in film, and the body.
Her work has been exhibited and performed at EFA Project Space + Performa, NYC, Museum of Contemporary Art Santiago, Chilé, SBC Gallery, Montreal, Western Front, Vancouver, Images Festival + Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, and elsewhere. Her poetry and essays have been published in C Magazine, BlackFlash Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, Taos International Journal of Poetry and Art, Drunken Boat, Ice Floe, and in publications by Access Gallery, Western Front, and McLaren Art Centre. 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 is currently a graduate student in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. 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.