Spring Reflections 2026

Written By cannupa luger

Cannupa Hanska Luger wins 2026 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

From the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award judges citation: “SURVIVA is a love song: to Earth, to community, to all who understand the only possible future is one that returns to Indigenous lifeways. What’s startling isn’t the dystopian charge—though that’s there—but the tenderness threaded through it, a choreography of care embedded in sharp surfaces. Multi-genre and multi-voiced, wholly devoted to the specificity of its observations, SURVIVA doesn’t imagine apocalypse as spectacle so much as it imagines endurance as relationship. Survival here is neither heroic nor solitary, but collective, improvised, and ethically burdened—an ongoing negotiation between Indigenous futurity, colonial debris, and the quiet insistence that something livable must still be made, even now.” 

Studio Process: The making of a new commission for Biennale of Sydney & Fondation Cartier

"Listening, witnessing, and respecting Indigenous knowledge systems and more than human kin relationships are central to the meaning this work seeks to uphold."

Seven hand-built ceramic dingo skulls become a sonic pipe organ, spanning a 60-foot corridor within the White Bay Power Station for REMEMORY: The 25th Edition of the Biennale of Sydney.

Luger composed a responsive sound and light score with these chambered whistle forms. Each was rigged with custom technical mechanisms and an engineered trigger system that force timed air through the ceramic vessels, creating a durational action every thirty minutes.

Luger has worked with the ceramic vessel as instrument for the past decade, building forms by hand with clay to take up space beyond the object. The transformation of clay into ceramic is a record of humanity. The clay whistle carries a global ancestral lineage. One of the earliest ceramic instruments, it appears across cultures, splitting breath into vibration and activating not only the object, but the space around it.

To create this new commission, Luger engaged with Indigenous protocol through a series of conversations with First Nations community members and elders from the Sydney region. These in-depth discussions revealed the importance of animals native to the region, including those that are near or now extinct, and those respected as guides, teachers, and relatives. In considering which figures might hold the most resonance for Indigenous communities in the area, this exchange proved pivotal in shaping the final direction of the work, the dingo.

“How can a handful of clay fill an entire landscape?”

From Luger’s year long process of connection to community, sonic design, engineering and hand-built clay work emerges the seven ceramic dingo skulls, conceived as a pack, each functioning as a two- or three-chamber whistle. Predators like the dingo are essential to a living ecosystem and are sacred relatives to First Nations people, revered and sustained through coexistence for thousands of years. A chorus of howls moves in call and response with one another, the architecture, and those who encounter the work. This installation demands that we listen.

VOLUME (III — White Bay Power Station, Australia). Ceramic, site-specific sound and light installation
Cannupa Hanska Luger, 2026. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain Photograph by Mark Pokorny

Recent Published Writing

Excerpt page from A Declaration of Interdependance (We Are The Archive) by Cannupa Hanska Luger for Archives of American Art Journal Spring 2026

In the News

Southwest Contemporary Feature - On a road trip across the former reangelands of the American bison, Cannupa Hanska Luger envisions a new monument.

  • Cannupa Hanska Luger Wins 2026 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Read Here →

PEN America Feature - Cannupa Hanska Luger Knows the Power of Make-Believe

  • The Brooklyn Rail - Cannupa Hanska Luger: Dripping Earth Read Here →

  • Art in America - American Art History from A to Z Read Here →

  • Art Guide Australia - Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Bones Speak Read Here →

  • Le Grand Tour Magazine - Prelude in a major key for mechanical lung Read Here →

  • ABC Radio National - Cannupa Hanska Luger at the Sydney Biennale Listen Here →

  • New Mexico Magazine - SURVIVA: Reclaiming the Survival Field Guide Read Here →

Experience The Artwork

Upcoming:

Ongoing:

Studio Book & Audio Recommendations

Wathéča Records Sourcebook

Era Editions / Wathéča Records

End Times For Beginners

edited and created by Amaryllis R. Flowers

Long Con Podcast with Sterlin Harjo & Cannupa Hanska Luger

produced by Broken Boxes

Garden

by Kalyn Fay

cannupa luger
Next

Winter Reflections 2025