An ambitious, world-envisioning work of Indigenous futurism.
Since 2015—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 futuredream that foregrounds Indigenous knowledge as critical to humanity’s survival.
SURVIVA is the first title from Aora Books, a publishing imprint dedicated to exploring transformational thought and culture that transcends borders, disciplines, and traditions. Rooted in an ethos of polyvocality and planetary consciousness, Aora publishes works that forge bold connections across time, place, ideas, and beings often seen as separate.
Arvustused
"Cannupa Hanska Luger has created a wondrous book of survivance, a story to carry in pocket and study at every opportunity. At once a dystopia (earth is near destroyed) and a postcolonial fantasy (the colonizers abandon the planet for good), SURVIVA is a work of artistic brilliance that draws our attention to the simultaneity of ruins and futures. Rich with dreampower and evocation, these pages illustrate the mysteries of space-time, the dissolution of boundaries, and the relational universe described by Indigenous quantum mechanics. Read carefully, SURVIVA has the power to bend time itself, lifting us from past and present into futures innumerable." Philip J. Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University and author of Playing Indian
"SURVIVA offers Indigenous wisdom for a shared future built on ancestral knowledge in radical relation. This is a survival guide like none other." Candice Hopkins, curator of the Forge Project "SURVIVA is not just another riff on a sci-fi depiction of some imagined future. Lugers poetic and visual interventions are clear directives for all of us to ready our minds, bodies, and spirits as we continue to move through the future together." Jeffrey Gibson, artist and editor of An Indigenous Present
"SURVIVA boldly reimagines our conceptions of time and history, challenging our collective narratives and pushing us to rethink the art of survival through a lens of transformation." Hank Willis Thomas, artist and cofounder of For Freedoms
"Cannupa Hanska Luger is a mad genius able to weave parables from tomorrow with lessons from yesterday into a stunningly prescient and wise field guide you should read right now. This is not a book. This is a time machine." Jordan Klepper, The Daily Show, Comedy Central
"SURVIVA feels everlasting and also like it will self-destruct after you read it." Sterlin Harjo, filmmaker, Reservation Dogs (Hulu/FX)
Muu info
Winner of 2018 Burke Prize Winner, Museum of Arts and Design 2018 and 2023 SOROS Arts Fellowship Award 2023 and 2020 A Blade Of Grass Fellow for Socially Engaged 2020 and 2021 Grist 50 Changemaker Fellow 2021 and 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship Award 2022 and 2021 United States Artist Fellowship Award 2021 and 2016 Native Arts & Cultures Foundation National Ar 2016 and 2023 VIA Art Fund Artistic Production Grantee 2023 and 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Award 2020 and 2020 Center For Craft, Craft Research Fellow 2020 and 2024 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts Monument Lab Fe 2024 (United States) and 2020 Creative Capital Award 2020 and 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors 2019 and 2021 CEC ArtsLink International Fellow 2021 and 2025 Wayfinder Award 2025 (United States).
Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multidisciplinary artist who creates monumental installations, sculpture, and performance to communicate urgent stories of twenty-first-century Indigeneity. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota. Lugers bold visual storytelling presents new ways of seeing our collective humanity while foregrounding an Indigenous worldview. His work is in numerous permanent museum collections and has been exhibited around the world, including at the Sharjah Biennial 16, United Arab Emirates; the 81st Whitney Biennial, New York; the 14th Shanghai Biennale; and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Gardiner Museum in Toronto; and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Georgia. Luger has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, United States Artists, Creative Capital, the Smithsonian Institution, the Open Society Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others. Luger currently lives and works in Glorieta, NM.
Eden Pearlstein is an author, artist, and cofounder of Ayin Press. He is the author of Nothing is for Everyone: Poems, and coauthor/editor of the chapbooks In/Flux: On Influence, Inspiration, Transmission, and Transformation; Taste and See: A Psychedelic Pesach Companion; and Indwelling: An Earth-Based Sukkot Companion. Eden holds two master's degrees from JTS in Experiential Education and Jewish Philosophy. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two children.
Cem Eskinazi is a Turkish graphic designer, type designer, and educator whose work spans publications, typefaces, exhibitions and systems. Since 2022, he has run his independent studio practice, following his role as a full-time in-house type designer at Occupant Fonts and Morisawa, where he worked with Cyrus Highsmith. His projects have been recognized by institutions such as the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Society of Typographic Arts and the Type Directors Club, where he has also served as a jury member. Cem teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and ELISAVA School of Design and Engineering in Barcelona, Spain. He holds a BS in Marketing Communications and Photography from Emerson College and an MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. He lives in Barcelona.
