Dia se complace en presentar Duane Linklater: 12 + 2, una exposición que reúne nuevas obras de escultura, música y danza en torno al búfalo norteamericano: sus comportamientos característicos y futura reaparición, así como el desgaste de su cuerpo al desplazarse a través del paisaje.

Linklater inscribe con sutileza la estructura circular de 12 + 2 —de especial significado cosmológico para la cultura Omaskêko Cree, a la que pertenece el artista, así como el número de postes necesario para levantar un tipi— sobre el piso de Dia Chelsea, abarcando ambas galerías en un mismo conjunto de relaciones. En el centro de la instalación se encuentran siete grandes esculturas de búfalos revolcándose en distintas posiciones. Aludiendo a los movimientos suaves y vigorosos del animal —que a lo largo de los siglos han moldeado y transformado los ecosistemas de Norteamérica—, las esculturas invitan a un entendimiento encarnado del búfalo.

Durante siete sábados, iniciando el 13 de septiembre y hasta el 25 de octubre, presentaciones de música y danza inspiradas en los movimientos y las nociones de transmisión y destilación, profundizan en los aspectos menos materiales de la exposición. En palabras de Linklater, “El revolcar de los búfalos ha moldeado, marcado y, a su vez regenerado el territorio desde tiempos inmemoriales. 12 + 2 es la cosmologoía dentro de la cual operan”.

El resultado de cinco años de colaboración con Dia, Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 marca la primera comisión de Linklater a gran escala en Estados Unidos. La muestra se acompaña de una publicación ampliada con contribuciones del artista, la curadora Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, la cineasta Tasha Hubbard, la coreógrafa Tanya Lukin Linklater y la poeta Layli Long Soldier. El programa público incluye una conferencia de Long Soldier impartida el 8 de noviembre, así como la proyección de la obra en video y cinematográfica más reciente de Linklater, en diálogo con obras de otros artistas durante el otoño.

Buffalo wallowing comprises a range of specific behaviors with far-reaching consequences. A pleasurable activity, wallowing makes the animals vulnerable as they let their guard down and expose the most tender areas of their bodies. This is why buffalo do not wallow in captivity, under duress, or in threatening conditions. Through conversations between Duane Linklater and poet Layli Long Soldier, the question crystallized: “What is the context in which buffalo feel comfortable and where they allow themselves to wallow?”¹ 

In Linklater’s Omaskêko Cree culture, 12 + 2 is a cosmological structure and the literal application of materials for building a home. To make a teepee, twelve poles are arranged in a circle, and an additional two are placed outside of it to support the smoke flap. Each unit or position in the structure has meaning, with the external poles carrying the most spiritual connotations. Linklater overlays the two galleries of Dia Chelsea with the circular structure, marking the 12 + 2 positions on the floor with inlaid earth discs and hollows. Encompassing both buildings in a set of relations, the subtle gesture dislodges the binary logic of the settler space and offers an Indigenous counterweight, allowing for the expression of the components of the exhibition. The galleries become a prairie where buffalo freely roam and wallow. To enter the exhibition is to confront the animal close-up; in wallowposition (2025), seven large buffalo are engaged in vigorous and gentle actions that have, over centuries, shaped and transformed North American grasslands, aspen parklands, and boreal forests. wallwallow (2025) is the displaced material articulation of the concavity that results from the friction of their body with land, while kitaskînaw_kitaskînawâw (every indian I know hates that song) (2025) prefigures buffalo population rebounding across its native territory, which was once coextensive with North America and is now extremely confined.² Music and dance performances scored jointly by eagleswitheyesclosed and choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater draw on buffalo movements and ideas of transmission and distillation to further express the significance of the animals and of the cosmology that houses them—a home for the buffalo signified by the deconstruction and redistribution of the teepee in 12 + 2, the exhibition’s titular work, and parliament (both 2025), the latter a weathered teepee cover.

While the teepee remains in contemporary use for rites and shelter, it has offered, in mainstream Western culture, a stereotype to contain and distance Indigeneity in time and space. Linklater has previously deconstructed and deployed the teepee’s primary elements—poles and cover—as support and surface to articulate propositions on abstraction and architecture that unsettle those colonial implications. can the circle be unbroken 1–5 (2019), for example, is an installation consisting of five teepee covers dyed, painted, and digitally printed with flower motifs rendered both in the geometric manner common among Cree people before contact and in the illusionistic Dutch style that British settlers imparted on them. Linklater variously swathed, stretched, reclined, and folded the heavy fabric to conceal or reveal its patterns, both resisting and mourning forced assimilation. In primaryuse (2020), instead, the artist filmed his wife and young children methodically walking through the poles of a teepee that he had set up for cultural use in a sliver of woods abutting a municipal road near their home in North Bay, Robinson Huron Treaty territory. The occasional school bus crossing the camera frame, the distinctive trajectory of each walker, and the relation of the poles to surrounding trees open up the image of the teepee in space and time, embedding its architecture in a locality that is at once proximate, ancient, and resurgent.

At Dia Chelsea with 12+ 2, Linklater adopts the teepee’s essential structure to center Indigenous presences, material and immaterial, while contending with the topographical and institutional site into which he was invited. The work consists of twelve discs cut from core samples the artist sourced from Northern Ontario and, conversely, two holes that were drilled in situ. Organized linearly in a pipe, the extracted aggregate literalizes the longer history of the Chelsea area and meshes estuary marshland, Lenape tobacco fields, and the brittle landfill on which the neighborhood currently sits. The action of drilling points to Tram Stop (1976), an installation by the late German artist Joseph Beuys, whose project 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, 1982– ) lines the streets outside Dia Chelsea. Realized for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Tram Stop featured a set of sculptural elements cast in iron—a tram track crudely set into the gallery floor, four squat cylindrical drums, and an upright totem pole with the body of a cannon and the primitively styled head of a man—alongside a borehole and the rubble excavated from it. Linklater materially confronts Beuys’s work and by extension his appropriation of Native symbolism and shamanistic practices, all while articulating a way of being in relation to land and animal.

The friction of boundaries between inside and outside, absence and presence, and Indigenous and settler knowledge enunciated by 12 + 2 is primarily enacted by sculptures of buffalo wallowing in wallowposition. Linklater renders seven different positions of wallow that he observed and modeled from YouTube videos, as proximity to buffalo is a rare event. The animals trample about, press themselves into the land, roll from left to right, rub their chins, drink water from the wallow, or simply sit in it. The practical effects are numerous; for instance, scratching their back, ridding themselves of critters, or trapping seeds in their coats and spreading them across land. The impact on ecosystems is also profound. Year after year herds would return to the wallows, their cumulative presence forming depressions in the land where water gathers, favorably affecting the wildlife and environment around it. The large, angular sculptures retain the material memory of the artist’s hand, who first handwrought them in wire and papier-mâché before having them scaled up. Realized collaboratively by Linklater and his son, Tobias, wallwallow is the vertical displacement of a wallow in the form of a circular earthwork that implies the geometric concavity.

“Is the wallow a buffalo home?” Linklater asks.³ To devise a counter-structure and Indigenous home as the precondition to being close to an absent relative is a method that recurs in Linklater’s work. For example, while preparing an exhibition at Mercer Union, Toronto, in 2015, he became aware that the work of Ethel (Trapper) Linklater, his paternal grandmother, was held in the collection of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Ontario. The desire to be close to his familial belongings, beaded moose-hide garments that she had expertly hand sewn, led the artist to formally request them on loan and design structures to uphold them. The resulting Speculative apparatus for the work of nohkompan and nikosisi (2016) is a ten-part sculptural proposition that counters the normative structures that condition our experience of objects in art galleries. To make these “speculative apparatuses,” concrete plinths and metal armatures, Linklater imagined the size and other features of his grandmother’s pieces in their absence while reimagining museological materials and modalities in order to be close and show closeness to the objects. At Dia, the artist magnifies this method and proposes, in the words of scholar Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “locality as rapport rather than property.”⁴

In the east gallery, the vertical painting kitaskînaw_kitaskînawâw (every indian I know hates that song) reorients habitual ways of looking at North America. Brushstrokes resembling both flesh and vectors map familial trajectories and buffalo territory in motion across grasslands, from the Yukon, through the Canadian and American West, and down into the southwest, Texas, and Mexico. As such, kitaskînaw_kitaskînawâw envisions geography as aesthetic sovereignty of buffalo descending into Dia Chelsea.⁵ Long Soldier writes that the grandeur of the animal stops her soul and provokes sentiments of reverence and closeness, but that to encounter the animal is a rare occurrence, precluded by governmental measures that have decimated and confined buffalo. “We wanted to get as close as we could, to see and feel his presence,” she continues.⁶ Here, the large sculptural forms and the significant space between them activate the galleries, involving ideas of absence, form, mass, space, and presence with the rebounding of buffalo. Linklater articulates wallowing in sculptural terms to consider and process what the action of buffalo means for each person individually—a proposition taken on by the performances.

Inspired by what lies outside of the page, a series of performances—titled buffalounit for bison bison (dance_hum for dirtbath) (2025)—combines music, dance, and text to express the most immaterial connotations of the exhibition. Lukin Linklater offered parameters for eagleswitheyesclosed to compose music, which in turn structures the dance. buffalounit consists of seven modules to be selectively played over 44 minutes in response to the choreography, bison bison (dance_hum for dirtbath), unfolding live. Thinking with buffalo and through movement, the dancers express the resonance of the seasons and various ecosystems on the body. The starting point for the music is a durational bass-and-drums improvisation layered with field recordings and other found sound, which eagleswitheyesclosed had transcribed into sheet music to be played by a trio comprising a guitar, cello, and percussion. Over seven weeks, the number of performers distills from seven to two, starting with the trio and a four-dancer ensemble and ending with the percussionist and a solo dancer. eagleswitheyesclosed was formed by Linklater and his son Tobias in 2019 to play back to images, typically a film, their improvisations generating moments of friction and poetic overlap. In line with the concept that informs eagleswitheyesclosed and the structure of the composition, the musicians do not play to accompany the choreography but rather respond to it. Each performance is a variation on the collaboration between the artists toward a multidimensional understanding of buffalo—its typical behaviors and future rebounding, as well as the weathering of its body as it traverses landscapes.

Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 has a certain mobility, and it is passing through Dia Chelsea. The personalities of the agile and weighty animals emerge through a variety of scales and points of contact between floor and sculptures, their profile many times refracted to multiply dimensions and escape capture. As such, the buffalo sculptures and the exhibition as a whole hover between monumental volume and lines of flight, “lines without beginning or end as a way to imagine Indigenous futurity.”⁷

—Matilde Guidelli-Guidi

Notes

1. Duane Linklater, in conversation with the author, Zoom, November 22, 2024.
2. On the near-decimation of buffalo in the 1800s and current Indigenous-led actions to restore their population, see “Duane Linklater and Tasha Hubbard in Conversation,” in this brochure, pp. 8–13.
3. Linklater, in conversation with the author, phone call, March 25, 2025.
4. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Salmon Stills in Motion: The Local as Colonial Critique in the Films of Alanis Obomsawin,” in Alanis Obomsawin: Lifework, ed. Richard William Hill, Hila Peleg, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Prestel, 2022), p. 121.
5. Jolene Rickard, “Sovereignty: A Line in the Sand,” Aperture, Summer 1995, p. 51.
6. Layli Long Soldier, “I Want to See My Relatives Close-Up,” in this brochure, p. 17.
7. Linklater et al., “Wood Land School: Kahatenhstánion tsi na’tetiatere ne Iotohrkó:wa tánon Iotohrha / Drawing Lines from January to December,” exhibition statement, SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montreal, 2017, https://www.sbcgallery.ca/wood-land-school-fr?lang=en.

All works 2025 and courtesy the artist; and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver; and kurimanzutto

1. kitaskînaw_kitaskînawâw (every indian I know hates that song)
   Oil paint, oil stick, and graphite on linen mounted on wood

2. wallowposition
   Plaster on foam, 7 parts

3. 12 + 2
   Northern Ontario and on-site core samples, steel, and resin, 2 parts

4. wallwallow
   Soil, hay, clay, and pigment on steel

5. parliament
   Charcoal, cochineal, and rabbit-skin glue on canvas

6. God Bless the Indians of New York City
   Gouache on paper on linen canvas in enamel-on-wood frame

accompanied by

buffalounit, 2025
Music composed by eagleswitheyesclosed; arranged by Rahul Nair; performed by Gladstone Butler, Fjóla Evans, and Miguel Gallego

bison bison (dance_hum for dirtbath), 2025
Performance written and choreographed by Tanya Lukin Linklater; performed by Sam Aros-Mitchell, Talia Dixon, Jonathan González, and Mekko Harjo

Duane Linklater (Omaskêko Ininiwak from Moose Cree First Nation) is an artist living in North Bay, Robinson Huron Treaty territory. His work explores the physical and theoretical structures of the museum in relation to current and historical conditions of Indigenous peoples, their objects, and their approaches to materials. He articulates his explorations through sculpture, photography, moving image, installation, and text.

with 

eagleswitheyesclosed is a musical project consisting of Tobias Linklater (Native Village of Port Lions/Moose Cree First Nation) and Duane Linklater.

Gladstone Butler is a percussionist, producer, and composer living in New York.

Fjóla Evans is a cellist and composer living in New York.

Miguel Gallego is an artist and musician living in New York.

Rahul Nair is a composer living in Brooklyn.

Tanya Lukin Linklater (Sugpiaq) is an artist and choreographer living in North Bay, Robinson Huron Treaty territory.

Sam Aros-Mitchell (Texas Band of Yaqui Indians) is a choreographer, cultural producer, scholar, and performer living in Minneapolis.

Talia Dixon (Payómkawichum, Pauma Band of Luiseño) is a dancer, artist, and PhD candidate in performance studies at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Jonathan González is an artist, writer, and educator living in New York and Philadelphia.

Mekko Harjo (Mvskoke, Shawnee, Seminole, and enrolled Quapaw Nation) is an artist living in Brooklyn.

Tasha Hubbard (Peepeekisis First Nation) is a filmmaker and scholar living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Sioux Tribe) is an artist, activist, poet, and writer living in Santa Fe.

Duane Linklater | September 2, 2025