Cannupa Hanska Luger in “Friends & Strangers”

Descriptive audio version available here.

Donning futuristic regalia adorned with clanging bells and protective padding, artist Cannupa Hanska Luger prepares to shoot a video for his multimedia project Future Ancestral Technology (2018–ongoing). Luger uses his role as an artist to try to effect change and chart a path to a future where Indigenous people and their rights are respected, we live in greater harmony with our planet, and the myth of the individual is abolished. “Today we celebrate individuals, we celebrate genius, but it’s not sustainable,” says the artist. “We are dependent, not just on each other but our relationships to the environment and other species.” In Future Ancestral Technologies, Luger engages science fiction’s aesthetics and imaginative possibilities to project Indigenous culture and identity into the distant future. To do this, the artist repurposes the detritus of contemporary life to create regalia, sculptures, photographs, and performances. 

In 2016, during conflicts over the Dakota Access Pipeline, Luger began his Mirror Shield Project. The artist designed mirrored shields, posted a tutorial online calling for people to produce their own, and brought them to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota as an artwork, where they could be used to reflect the dehumanizing gear of the police back at them. Luger frequently works collaboratively toward socially concerned aims, as in his ongoing project Counting Coup. In the project, which aims to rehumanize abstract data points, Luger calls for volunteers and hosts workshops to shape clay beads that are fired and used in sculptures. Every One (2018), a work within Counting Coup, uses 4,000 beads to reflect the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women noted in a 2016 report by the Native Women’s Association of Canada. At Colgate University, the artist leads a workshop where community members work to shape 20,000 beads, one for each of the remaining plains bison. Beside the artist is his family: his wife and studio manager, Ginger Dunnill, and his two sons, ‘io and Tsesa. The family goes everywhere together, including exhibitions and residencies, and are integral to his life and his practice as an artist. Working alongside him in the studio, giving him direction during performances and video shoots, or loading works in and out of cars, the family demonstrates that no artist truly works alone. “The truth of our daily lives life is one of integration,” says Luger. “That’s how we survive the future.”

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