Duane Linklater: Kakîke/Forever

The commission of Kâkikê / Forever (2018) by Omaskêko Ininiwak (Cree) artist Duane Linklater is installed on the façade of the Gallery’s T.C. Douglas building, transforming the skyline of Regina, Saskatchewan, the provincial capital. The project is a text-based, site-specific work that responds to various aspects of its location. Drawing from unattributed Indigenous words spoken during the making of treaties (between Indigenous nations and the British Crown): “As long as the sun shines, the river flows, and the grass grows,” Kâkikê / Forever poetically reflects Canada’s conflicted past, charged present, and future (post)-colonial imaginary.

The MacKenzie Art Gallery is situated within Treaty 4 territory, the traditional home of the Cree, Saulteaux, and Métis peoples, and a home to the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people. Treaty 4 was signed in 1874 between First Nations and the British Crown at Fort Qu’Appelle.

The commission was organized as part of a series of programs over the summer of 2017 on the occasion of Canada’s 150th anniversary of Confederation. The series included panel discussions, artist talks, film screenings, an in-gallery engagement space, and workshops focused on the themes of public art, reconciliation, inter-cultural relations, and national commemoration. This artwork became a welcome addition to the MacKenzie’s permanent collection which includes over 5,000 works of art, spanning 5,000 years.

Duane Linklater is an Omaskêko Ininiwak artist and was born in 1976. He is currently based in North Bay, Ontario. He attended the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College in upstate New York, USA, completing his Master of Fine Arts in Film and Video. Linklater’s practice is concerned in part with the exploration of the physical and theoretical structures of the museum in relation to the current and historical conditions of Indigenous people and their objects and forms. These explorations are articulated in a myriad of forms including sculpture, photography, film and video, installation and text works.

Linklater has exhibited his work nationally and internationally at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (2015), Vancouver Art Gallery (2015), 80 WSE Gallery in New York City (2017), Institute of Contemporary Arts Philadelphia (2015), the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City (2015), Documenta 13 (2012), the SeMa Biennale in Seoul Korea (2016), Taipei Biennial (2018), and the Liverpool Biennial (2018) to name a few. Recent projects include a survey of work at the Frye Museum in Seattle (2021) travelling to the MCA Chicago (March 2023), Whitney Biennial: Quiet As It’s Kept (2022), a commission at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for Soft Power (2019), and a project at the newly reopened Artists Space in New York City in 2020. Duane has also received several prizes including the 2013 Sobey Art Award, a national annual prize given to an artist under 40 and more recently the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award from the Canada Council for the Arts in 2016.

Photos: courtesy MacKenzie Art Gallery