Multi-disciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger's innovative billboard exhibition, Future Ancestral Technologies: WE SURVIVE YOU, comes to a close on September 27. Luger's work, on display in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, asks a crucial question in a time of intense climate anxiety: what does our future look like? Can Indigenous ancestral knowledge be seen as a 'technology' of survival?
Future Ancestral Technologies: WE SURVIVE YOU relates to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of Climate Action, and Sustainable Cities and Communities. The Vancouver Art Gallery defines Luger's work as a form of Indigenous science fiction, expressing both the importance of Indigenous knowledge, and the socio-political upheaval that colonial systems have created.
The WE SURVIVE YOU is one piece in Luger's larger Future Ancestral Technologies series which includes sculpture, film, performance and installation works. The billboard is a photographic work featuring warrior-like subjects wearing patterned and colourful regalia.
Luger is used to creating standout work like the East Hastings billboard. Growing up on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota and member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara). He self-describes on his website as an award-winning artist and cultural innovator, following ideas that reflect Indigenous innovation.
This work was commissioned for Landback.art, in collaboration with NDN Collective, INDÍGENA and For Freedoms. It was originally displayed in 2021, in Mandan, Dakota.