
Ceramics & Mixed Media Installation
An exhibition by Cannupa Hanska Luger with mixed-media sculpture, regalia, and video, all based in myth, science fiction, and Indigenous futurism.
Future Ancestral Technologies is an approach to making art objects, video, and land based performance with the intent to influence global consciousness. This Indigenous-centered science fiction uses creative storytelling to radically reimagine the future. Moving sci-fi theory into practice, this methodology conjures innovative life-based solutions that promote a thriving Indigeneity.
This Indigenous science fiction is characterized by regalia, tools, shelter, transportation, and technology which invite the viewer to experience multiple points of entry into Luger’s sci-fi narrative and myth telling through multiple symbiotic landscapes. The ongoing narrative developed by installation and land based work articulates future spaces in which Indigenous people harness technology to live nomadically, reclaiming hyper-attunement to land and water. Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is a story, a methodology, a practice, a way of futurism, that suggests alternative approaches to recognizing the future with reverence.
Using art practice to adopt science fiction, Future Ancestral Technologies is a context for dismantling time to imagine the distant future and dream of sustainable approaches to the lived experiences of the generations to come. Using traditional craft and the act of making creates futuristic potential, the process imagines, enacts and prototypes experiences and technologies that promote Indigenous cultures to thrive into the future.
Future Ancestral Technologies challenges and empowers humans—from individuals to industries—to visualize an Indigenous future and to practice empathy and resourcefulness in epochs to come.
“Future Ancestral Technologies looks to customs in order to move us forward, advancing new materials and new modes of thinking by utilizing science fiction theory, creative storytelling, Indigenous technology and contemporary materials and the detritus of capitalism to present time bending landscapes of myth. ”
–Cannupa Hanska Luger
Ceramics & Mixed Media Installation
This Is Not A Snake / The One Who Checks and The One Who Balances, Cannupa Hanska Luger, 2017-2020.
Future Ancestral Technologies: We Survive You, Cannupa Hanska Luger, 2019-2020, installed at SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2020.
Performance still from Future Ancestral Technologies: The One Who Checks and The One Who Balances, Cannupa Hanska Luger. Photo by Chip Thomas.
Future Ancestral Technologies, Cannupa Hanska Luger, production still, Troy, NY, 2021. Photo by Michael Valiquette / EMPAC.
Muscle, Bone & Sinew regalia, Future Ancestral Technologies, Cannupa Hanska Luger, 2020-2021.
Empathy Interface (VR headset), Future Ancestral Technologies: We Survive You, Cannupa Hanska Luger, 2019-2020, installed at SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2020.
Future Ancestral Technologies, Cannupa Hanska Luger, video still, 2019.
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