Tanya Lukin Linklater and Karen Pheasant-Neganigwane

Conversation
– Moderated by Clare Butcher
Online event
Friday October 22nd 2021 at 6pm

During this conversation, Karen Pheasant-Neganigwane and Tanya Lukin Linklater share insights into their practices as artists, educators, and writers working within Indigenous performance methodologies. Reflecting on their ongoing relationships with one another, place, language, and those who have shaped their work over time, Pheasant-Neganigwane and Lukin Linklater carefully consider their personal processes of situating embodied practices in community and in the arts. They will speak to the Indigenous performance histories that ground their contemporary approaches, as well as the role of intergenerational exchange as a mode of learning. The conversation, with moderator Clare Butcher, takes place ahead of Lukin Linklater’s contribution to the 2022 edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art and the Culture Days Creatives in Residence Program.

Artists’ bio
Karen Pheasant-Neganigwane is an Anishinaabe advocator of social change through expressions of dance, text and teaching. Karen’s path to activism and scholarly work started as a youth during the height of the civil rights era of the 1970s. The social project of Rochdale college (Toronto) led with “idealism, artistic spirit and free speech”  provided the embryonic opening for her inquisitive spirit. Through ceremony and mentorship, she has spent the past forty years mentored by iconic Indigenous scholars from the Great Lakes of her people to Treaty Three, Treaty Six and currently in Treaty Seven.
Tanya Lukin Linklater originates from the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in southwestern Alaska. Her performances, works for camera, installations, and writings centre histories of Indigenous peoples’ lives, lands, and structures of sustenance. Her performances in relation to objects, scores, and ancestral belongings generate what she has come to call felt structures.
Clare Butcher is a curator and educator from Zimbabwe who cooks and collaborates as part of her practice. She is working as Curator for Public Programming & Learning with the Toronto Biennial of Art’s amazing team – wondering what the future of gathering and learning together might be, as well as how artist-led education can transform the curriculum.