In a dialog with Duane Linklater revealed within the brochure for his present exhibition, 12 + 2, at Dia Chelsea, filmmaker and scholar Tasha Hubbard (Peepeekisis First Nation) distills the intertwined erasures effected beneath colonialism in North America. Over the course of the nineteenth century, parallel to the systematic literal and cultural genocide of Native individuals, settlers killed hundreds of thousands of buffalo, until there remained just a few hundred; even now, when different giant recreation populations are rebounding as a part of free-ranging herds, buffalo are for essentially the most half solely allowed on personal land, nationwide parks, or reservations. “Indigenous people and buffalo are conflated in the settler mind and have been from the beginning; we are buffalo, and they are us,” she stated. “And so, just like settler colonialism needs Indigenous people to be constrained and contained, it’s the same for buffalo.”
Linklater not solely lets buffalo run free in 12 + 2, conceptually not less than, however within the set up, efficiency, and work on view he additionally reimagines the world of their phrases. Given the mutual identification, coexistence, and interdependence between Native individuals and the species throughout millennia, the transfer is an act of imagining the Earth in and thru a lens of Indigeneity. Seven of the beasts, which the artist original out of wire and papier-mâché earlier than scaling them as much as two or 3 times their pure measurement, make themselves at house in two huge galleries (collectively they’re titled “wallowposition”). Their faceted planes and visual seams the place parts join give them a barely robot-like look. They’re eyeless, featureless actually, lined in dun-colored plaster that mimics mud. However they’re additionally vivid, animate, and expressive — cute, even. One kneels on its entrance legs, maybe consuming water. One other has plopped itself on its aspect, legs flailing within the air. Yet one more, an adolescent with lengthy legs and a head smaller than the remaining, appears to be caught mid-trot, whereas a child sploots on the ground.
Set up view Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 at Dia Chelsea (© Duane Linklater, picture Invoice Jacobson Studio, New York; courtesy Dia Artwork Basis)
They’re wallowing: rolling within the filth, eliminating critters on their coats, cooling off, smelling smells, choosing up grass seeds that may fall off their our bodies later, guaranteeing the unfold of prairie grasses and brush. It’s an instinctual, pleasurable conduct wherein, in response to curator Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, the animals don’t indulge beneath circumstances of captivity or duress.
What does it take for buffalo to be at house, to be in an setting the place they cannot merely survive — which they’ve finished regardless of the very best efforts of American colonizers — however thrive? And by extension, what does it take for these sculpted buffalo, made by an artist who’s Omasekêko Ininiwak from Moose Cree First Nation, to be at house on this artwork establishment?
Linklater undertakes a technique of worldbuilding at Dia, a basis that has traditionally supported artists (Smithson, Holt, De Maria, Heizer) who as usually as not didn’t register that the land they co-opted as website and materials was and is homeland to Native individuals. The muse, furthermore, occupies an industrial area constructed upon layers and layers of historical past and topography, together with Lenape tobacco fields. Linklater remaps the Chelsea area not solely by turning it right into a digital prairie, marked out by the presence of buffalo, but in addition by extracting 12 cylindrical cores from the ground and substrate and changing them with soil and granite discs from close to his house in Northern Ontario. Two different boreholes stay empty, lined with glass so guests can see what’s under. The 12 items of granite, organized in a circle that transverses the 2 rooms, along with the 2 boreholes (the “12 + 2” of the piece’s title and that of the exhibition as an entire), mark out the pole placement of a teepee, an association with cosmological significance — yet one more type of mapping; one in all Linklater’s cochineal-stained, charcoal-marked teepee covers, “parliament,” hangs from the rafters within the second gallery. The dug-up slag and concrete are introduced in a metal trough close by. The intervention remembers Robert Smithson’s “non-sites,” for which he introduced supplies like coal and rocks gathered from industrial wastelands in New Jersey and elsewhere into the gallery, connecting the white field to the surface world and to each the current and a deep geological previous. However as an alternative of merely bringing the surface in, Linklater additionally drills down, forcing us to cope with a really human-scaled chronology of displacement.
Efficiency of “bison bison (dance_hum for dirtbath),” written and choreographed by Tanya Lukin Linklater as a part of Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 at Dia Chelsea. On the wall within the background is Duane Linklater’s “wallowwallow”
Regardless of his buffaloes’ monumentality, Linklater preserves the galleries’ huge openness to accommodate the work’s essential efficiency element. On Saturdays afternoons, “bison bison (dance_hum for dirtbath)” takes place, written and choreographed by the artist Tanya Lukin Linklater, Duane Linklater’s spouse and frequent collaborator. Over the course of 44 minutes, dancers tempo across the room, experiencing this digital panorama the way in which buffalo may. At occasions they undertake actions meant to honor or map it, as when a performer makes charcoal rubbings of the granite plugs within the ground. Their actions drive the music, “buffalounit,” composed by eagleswitheyesclosed (a collaboration between Linklater and his son Tobias) and performed by a drummer, cellist, and bass guitarist. Over seven weeks, the variety of dancers and musicians will winnow away, ending with a single percussionist and a single determine in movement.
Rendered in oil stick, paint, and graphite on three panels, “kitaskînaw_kitaskînawâw (every indian I know hates that song)” — the track within the title is, I believe, the basic anthem of westward growth, “Home on the Range” — remembers the historical past of summary portray by way of its gestural strokes in pink, white, and blue (plus touches of browns and beige) and measurement (it measures round 11 by 6.5 ft). However the marks additionally coalesce right into a duck-rabbit picture of a buffalo laying on its aspect and a tough map of the North American continent. Within the different gallery is “wallowwallow,” a round kind fabricated from soil, hay, clay, and brown, grey, and blue pigment on metal and surrounded by a halo utilized on to the brick wall. It’s meant to recommend the hollows the buffalo make as they roll round on the soil, reshaping the panorama as they go, however it additionally reads because the Earth seen from area. Linklater ties the well-being of his buffalo to that of the Indigenous individuals with whom they’ve lengthy lived symbiotically — and even to that of the world itself — not in nostalgic phrases however in futurist ones through robotic buffalos and titles that recommend laptop file names. As an entire, 12 + 2 appears to level us to an vital fact: We stay in a world that buffalo create.
A buffalo sculpture from the set up “wallowposition” in Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 at Dia Chelsea
Efficiency of “bison bison (dance_hum for dirtbath),” written and choreographed by Tanya Lukin Linklater as a part of Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 at Dia Chelsea
A buffalo sculpture from the set up “wallowposition” in Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 at Dia Chelsea
Set up view Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 at Dia Chelsea (© Duane Linklater, picture Invoice Jacobson Studio, New York; courtesy Dia Artwork Basis)
A buffalo sculpture from the set up “wallowposition” in Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 at Dia Chelsea
Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 continues at Dia Chelsea (537 West twenty second Avenue, Chelsea, Manhattan) by way of January 24, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi.
