This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required and attendance is capped. After the live presentation, the recording will be available online.
Registration: Please e-mail: textiles.materiality@concordia.ca
Cannupa Hanska Luger speaks of his practice combining social collaboration and craft in an evolving tradition of making things work. Moving between the realms of contemporary art and Indigenous culture, amidst academia and the front lines, he uses materials such as clay, textiles, steel and digital media. Clay signifies our connection to place, literally the ground on which we stand. We create textiles from plants, reflecting our truly embodied relationship between fiber and flesh. Steel has allowed humans to develop, build and dominate; it provides the physical structures for control and capital. And technology now provides an opportunity to question our civility and our connectedness through durational and situational media. He mobilizes social media to create short call-to-action videos requesting objects to be created on massive scale. One such video resulted in communities building hundreds of mirrored shields as a tactic for front lines demonstration. Another involved disparate groups in the making of thousands of clay beads to commemorate lost lives. These engagement techniques combine technology and handwork to mobilize and even heal the communities who are facing immeasurable trauma from colonization.
Cannupa Hanska Luger is a New Mexico-based multidisciplinary artist who uses social collaboration in response to timely and site-specific issues. Raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota and European descent. A winner of many awards and with numerous national and international exhibitions to his credit, most recently Luger has been named a 2020 Creative Capital Fellow, a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, the recipient the 2020 A Blade Of Grass Artist Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art and the recipient of the Center For Crafts inaugural Craft
Research Fund Artist Fellowship for 2020.
www.cannupahanska.com<http://www.cannupahanska.com>
This event is hosted by the Textiles and Materiality Research Cluster and the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology. Concordia University is located in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal, on unceded Indigenous lands. The Kanien’kehá:ka Nation is recognized as the custodians of these lands and waters, which many diverse peoples use today.