Choreographies of the Archipelago: Tanya Lukin Linklater and Okwui Okpokwasili

Choreographies of the Archipelago: Artists in Conversation is a series of online exchanges between artists who work across a variety of geopolitical and disciplinary contexts. This event is presented by the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University with generous support from the Ford Foundation.

Immediately following these public presentations, discussions continued through an invite-only forum. Afterwords: Tanya Lukin Linklater & Okwui Okpokwasili (pdf) is an edited transcript of a private conversation that took place over Zoom on December 4, 2020, between the named artists, ICPP students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

Tanya Lukin Linklater’s work centres knowledge production in and through orality, conversation, and embodied practices. While reckoning with histories that affect Indigenous peoples' lives, lands and ideas, she investigates insistence in both concept and application, producing performances with dancers, composers, musicians and poets, in relation to the architecture of museums, objects in exhibition, scores, and cultural belongings. Exhibitions include SF MoMA (2020), Remai Modern (2020, 2017, 2016), Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2018), Art Gallery of Ontario (2017), Winnipeg Art Gallery (2017), La Biennale de Montréal (2016), Art Gallery of Alberta (2016) and elsewhere. New works were to be included at Tate Modern in the BMW Tate Live Exhibition 2020 in London (cancelled due to COVID-19). She is a doctoral candidate at Queen's University and a graduate of University of Alberta and Stanford University.

Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn-based performing artist working at the intersection of theater, dance, and installation, considering the dynamics of interiority and psychic space in shaping relationships, sociality and memory in the body and perspective of the Afro-femme. In collaboration with Peter Born, Okpokwasili creates multidisciplinary projects including: “Bessie” Award winning Pent-Up: A Revenge Dance, “Bessie” Award winning Bronx Gothic, Bronx Gothic: The Oval, Poor People's TV Room, Poor People's TV Room Solo, When I Return Who Will Receive Me, and Adaku's Revolt. Recently, she has been working on Sitting On A Man's Head a collaborative, improvisational sonic praxis with multiple artists inspired by precolonial embodied protest practices of Southeastern Nigerian women called Sitting On A Man. The last iteration of this practice was in Danspace Platform: Utterances from the Chorus, co-curated with Judy Hussy-Taylor at Danspace Project, NYC.