Cannupa Hanska Luger
Site: The Luminary + Augmented Reality
Curator: Risa Puleo
To engage with Cannupa Hanska Luger’s project from desktop:
Sign into Instagram from your smartphone
Open your phone camera + scan a QR code below
Click the link that pops up to explore Cannupa’s filter
Record a video with the filter to your Instagram story
Tag @counterpublic + @cannupahanska + #counterpublic2023 to be featured by us, and post!
To explore the filters from smartphone:
Click here to be led to Cannupa Hanksa Luger’s Instagram profile
Tap the star symbol above the posts
Pick a filter and record
Tag @counterpublic + @cannupahanska + #counterpublic2023 to be featured by us, and post to your story!
As they were in the past, buffalo are integral to an Indigenous future world. In Future Ancestral Technologies: Roaming, created by Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota) in collaboration with Fabricatorz Foundation, viewers are invited to watch buffalo roam through virtual space via their mobile phones. In the augmented reality platform (accessed through the QR code above for use on personal mobile phones or tablet devices checked out from The Luminary), viewers can interact with seven Midéegaadi (buffalo in the Hidatsa language) positioned along the St. Louis’s horizon line.
In a continuous looping performative action, the Midéegaadi invite the buffalo to return to St. Louis. Over the course of the exhibition, this invitation becomes increasingly accessible from locales beyond St. Louis as its movement through digital space amplifies its call. This initiates a series of additional returns including the prairies on which the buffalo feed and undammed Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to provide water for those plants and animals.
On the exterior of The Luminary, an image of the Midéegaadi is overlaid with text that reads “We Survive You.” Here, Luger uses the vagueness of the pronoun “we” to engage viewers in a conversation and ask: Who are “we” relative to survival?
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Cannupa Hanska Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation. Through monumental installations, Luger interweaves performance and political action to communicate stories about 21st-century Indigeneity. Luger has received numerous awards such as the United States Artists Fellowship, Creative Capital Fellowship, and the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship, and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at venues such as Princeton University Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Gardiner Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design.
In the 1800s, non-Native settlers and military forces undertook the intentional slaughter of bison herds, driving the species to near extinction. This deliberate act was aimed towards destroying economies, food sources, and lifeways of many Indigenous peoples of North America.
The figures of Midéegaadi draw attention to how the loss of a single species has lasting impacts on communities and the environment over 200 years later, while maintaining a pledge of accountability to the land and waters that have sustained the Buffalo Nation and in turn the human beings.
By celebrating the ancestral technology of calling bison back onto the landscape and using augmented reality, Counter Public artist Cannupa Hanska Luger invites us to visualize the bison's regeneration and repair.
Midéegaadi does more than celebrate an animal; it acknowledges atrocity and reveals complexity; it reckons with the accumulation of time and the potentialities of the future.
“For people Indigenous to North America, the buffalo are an emblem of survival and cultural adaptation; we respect the buffalo as a relative. This work mourns the loss of a mighty species and the violence that has built our country while celebrating the bison’s resilience and in turn our own. Midéegaadi empowers Indigenous people and practices as central to global futures and reflects a future space where we once again live in reverence and respect for our more than human kinships.” - Cannupa Hanska Luger
Midéegaadi are a part of the newest series from Cannupa Hanska Luger’s speculative fiction series, Future Ancestral Technologies, a project that looks to customary practices in order to move culture forward. It actively incorporates science fiction theory, storytelling, Indigenous technologies, contemporary materials and the detritus of capitalism to present time-bending landscapes and to prototype new myths.
ARTISTS LINKS
Instagram: @cannupahanska
Website: cannupahanska.com
