Join us at the Holiday Theater for an intimate conversation with multidisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger and MCA Denver’s Ellen Bruss Chief Curator, Miranda Lash. Together, they’ll discuss Luger’s debut book, SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide, and how his Mandan/Hidatsa/Lakota heritage—what he describes as being descended from “Water People”—informs his call to treat nature with reverence rather than as a resource. The conversation reflects themes present in our current exhibitions: Roni Horn: Water, Water on the Wall, You’re the Fairest of Them All, and Deborah Jack: the haunting of estuaries…the (after)math of confluence.
SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide will be available for purchase, and Cannupa will be on hand to sign copies after the discussion.
About the Book
Through a proliferation of forms, including sculpture, regalia, film, photography, poetry, painting, and installation, acclaimed multimedia artist Cannupa Hanska Luger has been weaving together strands of a new myth. Collectively referred to as Future Ancestral Technologies, this sprawling series of interrelated works seeks to reimagine Indigenous life and culture in a postcolonial world where space exploration has reduced and reconfigured the earth’s population.
Part graphic novel, part art book, SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide offers readers a view beneath, beyond, and between the lines of Luger’s ever-expanding artistic universe. In this ecstatically hybrid work, Luger transforms a 1970s military survival guide through poetic redaction, speculative fiction, and iterative line drawing, deftly surfacing and disrupting the colonial subconscious that haunts this vexed source text. An epic and timely meditation on planetary life in the midst of transformation, SURVIVA boldly presents an earth-based, demilitarized future dream that foregrounds Indigenous knowledge as critical to humanity’s survival.
