In Conversation: Cannupa Hanska Luger & Miranda Lash

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: , and .

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.

About the Artist

Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota) is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and cultural innovator whose expansive practice introduces new methodologies, ideas, and speculative technologies rooted in Indigenous innovation. Through installation, performance, and community engagement, he uplifts cultural continuity, ecological repair, and collective care. His work is exhibited and collected internationally.

Learn more about his work:

www.cannupahanska.com

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