'We can imagine alternatives to the present': Cannupa Hanska Luger on his show exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum

"How do you map time in three dimensions? Cannupa Hanska-Luger's new exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska asks that question in a choir of material tones, locating both harmony and discordance in Indigenous futurity. Dripping Earth (until 8 March 2026) is an ambitious undertaking, ushering viewers under water, over land and through the magma-hot center of historical turmoil."

"From 1832 to 1834, Bodmer followed Prince Maximilian of Wied, an avowed German naturalist, on an expedition through North America, serving as the royal's official documentarian. Bodmer's sketches and paintings were transformed into lithographs once the pair returned to Europe, a valuable but fraught record of the Indigenous American tribal regalia and ceremonial traditions he witnessed during his travels."

"Luger's interest in colonisation's violent legacy and its manifestation in pseudo-documentary materials is tangible throughout Dripping Earth, whether in the narrative reclamation of Bodmer's legacy through the series of speculative lithographs Future Ancestral Technologies, or in large-scale formal experiments that turn rote symbolism on its head-like a giant abacus in the shape of a buffalo or repurposed, hand-woven bison regalia that toes a Marvel-ian line."

Dripping Earth maps time spatially through immersive installations that move viewers under water, over land and into a magma-hot center of historical turmoil. Luger draws on Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota lineage while revisiting the landscape watercolours of Karl Bodmer and the Joslyn Art Museum's large Bodmer collection. Bodmer's sketches were converted into lithographs that involved redaction and reimagining, producing a fraught pseudo-documentary record. Luger reclaims and reframes that legacy via speculative lithographs titled Future Ancestral Technologies and through monumental, tactile works that interrogate colonisation's violent legacy and symbolic conventions.

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