An Indigenous Future: Cannupa Hanska Luger

Cannupa Hanska Luger, Future Ancestral Technologies: Muscle, Bone & Sinew Regalia, 2020. Photo courtesy of the artist.

An Indigenous Future

ARTIST AND MULTIMEDIA CREATOR CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER COMES

TO THE MUSEUM IN JULY as the Hammersley Foundation Visiting Artist. His current project, Future Ancestral Technologies, is a multimedia installation project that approaches Indigenous futurism, blending media, place, storytelling, and documentation of a living practice. It will be installed in the Museum lobby in July and will be on display for one year.

Future Ancestral Technologies’ overall narrative stems from the themes of science fiction, genetic memory, and reclaiming indigeneity. This new installation of an ongoing narrative offers multiple points of entry into an undetermined moment in the future, engaging the viewer in an innovative life-based art installation that dreams of survival and solutions. The Museum’s installation will play on the nature of home and how we imagine it in the future.

Luger, a multi-disciplinary artist of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and European descent, was raised on the Standing Rock Reservation. He now lives in Glorieta, where his studio includes a kiln, clay, ceramics and woodworking tools, a sewing machine, fabric, and found afghans he is using to construct futuristic regalia pieces. These serve to anchor a theme in the installation and are both traditional and futuristic in their design and construction.

The project also consists of art objects, videos, and performance, imagining a post-apocalyptic time through an indigenous lens. Some of the work is land-based and site-specific, using traditional crafts and ritual, and yet re-envisions art practice to create indigenous culture and stories that thrive in the future. Using social collaboration, Luger produces multi-pronged projects that provoke diverse publics to engage with Indigenous peoples and values apart from the lens of colonial social structuring. Luger lectures and participates in residencies and projects around the globe and his work is collected internationally. He is a 2020 Creative Capital Award recipient, a 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant recipient and the recipient of the 2018 Museum of Arts and Design’s inaugural Burke Prize.

ON VIEW

CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER

July 2021-June 2022