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14/11/2025 12:00
14/11/2025 18:00
America/New_York
Duane Linklater: Film Work
Event details Wednesday–Saturday, November 14, 2025–February 21, 202612–6 pm
Program 1: The Place I Seek to GoNovember 14–December 6, 2025
Program 2: Primary UseDecember 12, 2025–January 10, 2026
Program 3: Modest LivelihoodJanuary 14–February 21, 2026
Dia Chelsea 537 West 22nd Street New York, New York
Free; no registration required.
In conjunction with Duane Linklater: 12 + 2, Dia presents a three-part survey exhibition of Linklater’s moving-image work in Dia Chelsea’s program space. Three consecutive programs highlight formal strategies and recurring themes in Linklater’s practice and place his work in dialogue with that of other artists.
The first installment, titled The Place I Seek to Go (after a 2014 film of the same name), groups four works by Linklater spanning a decade that reveal how the artist has employed close-up, replay, and stationary camera to explore notions of erasure, dissemblance, and political stalemate. Primary Use, the second installment of the survey, features Linklater’s primaryuse (2020) alongside works by artists James Luna and Alanis Obomsawin. These poetic works, each in their different way, resist, enact, or reflect on the enduring effects of colonialism on contemporary Indigenous life. The final installment showcases the work Modest Livelihood (2012), which Linklater realized in collaboration with artist Brian Jungen. The feature-length film follows the two artists on a hunting trip across Northern British Columbia, Treaty 8 territory. Here, Linklater redeploys the documentary genre as a site of self-representation, where even waiting in the tall grass is a reparative act of relation to land.
Exhibition brochure and full schedule
Duane Linklater (Omaskêko Ininiwak from Moose Cree First Nation) was born in 1976. He received a BA in Native Studies and Fine Arts from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, and an MFA in Film and Video from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Through sculpture, photography, moving image, installation, and text, he explores the physical and theoretical structures of the museum in relation to current and historical conditions of Indigenous peoples, their objects, and their approaches to materials. Linklater’s collaborative endeavors have included the Wood Land School (2011– ), a shape-shifting project critically engaging with the realms of representation, land, and politics. A mid-career survey of his work, mymothersside, was presented at the Frye Museum, Seattle (2021–22), and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2023) and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2023–24). Recent solo exhibitions were held at Mercer Union, Toronto (2016); Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario (2023); and Camden Art Centre, London (2025). His work was featured in international group exhibitions, including Documenta, Kassel, Germany (2012); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); and Bienal de São Paulo (2023); in addition to Artists Space, New York, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (both 2019–20). Dia’s engagement with Linklater began in 2019 with an invitation to take part in the institution’s Artists on Artists Lecture Series, which resulted in the debut performance of his musical project, eagleswitheyesclosed. Linklater lives in North Bay, Robinson Huron Treaty territory.
Brian Jungen was born in Fort St. John, British Columbia, in 1970 to a Dane-Zaa mother and Swiss Canadian father. Jungen’s artistic practice consists of challenging and merging the boundaries between Indigenous and popular cultures, often by incorporating mass-produced objects such as furniture and sports equipment to evoke Indigenous masks and animals. In doing so, Jungen foregrounds the complex dynamics of appropriation, adaptation, and cultural identity. Most recently, his work has been included in the Shanghai Biennale: Does the flower hear the bee?, Power Station of Art (2025–26), and presented in venues such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Jungen lives in the traditional territory of the Dane-Zaa Nation within Treaty 8 in Northern British Columbia.
James Luna was born on the La Jolla Reservation, California, in 1950 to a Luiseño mother and a Mexican father. Working across installations of altered found objects and performances both live and recorded, Luna addressed the stereotypes that construct and define Indigenous people in mainstream culture. With dramatic precision and lightness of touch, his work has uniquely explored Western notions of the American Indian and the enduring effects of colonialism on contemporary Indigenous life. Luna received a BFA from the University of California Irvine and a MA in counseling from San Diego State University. He worked as an academic counselor at Palomar College in San Marcos, California, and taught studio art at the University of California Davis, Irvine, and San Diego. Luna died in New Orleans in 2018.
Alanis Obomsawin was born near Lebanon, New Hampshire, in 1932. An artist, activist, filmmaker, and musician, she has received international acclaim for her documentary-style films. These include Incident at Restigouche (1984), which chronicles the 1981 raid on the Restigouche Reserve by the Quebec provincial police restricting the fishing of salmon, a traditional source of food and income for the Mi’kmaq people, and Kanehsatake: 270 years of Resistance (1993), which charts the Mohawk resistance against the expansion of a golf course onto sacred burial lands. A retrospective of Obomsawin’s work, The Children Have to Hear Another Story, has toured from the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2022), to the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2023), Vancouver Art Gallery (2023), and MoMA PS1, New York (2025). Obomsawin lives in Montreal.
Dia Chelsea
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Duane Linklater: Film Work
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