CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER

Through monumental installations, Luger interweaves performance and political action to communicate stories about 21st century Indigeneity. Inspired by images of women holding mirrors up to riot police in the Ukraine, Luger created a brief instructional video for ‘The Mirror Shield Project (2016)’, inviting the public to create and send mirrored shields to the Water Protectors along the Dakota Access Pipeline—trading hundreds of supporters’ ephemeral “likes” and “shares” on social media for tangible and transformative contributions. The artist used a similar instructional video in ‘The MMIWQT Bead Project (2018)’, prompting diverse communities across the U.S. and Canada to shape and send over 4,000 individual handmade clay beads, which he then assembled into the 15 by 15-foot sculptural installation Every One. With the cooperation of thousands, the project re-humanized the abstract data gathered by the Native Women’s Association of Canada, each bead standing in for one of the missing or murdered Indigenous women, girls, queer and trans community members.

The videos ‘River (The Water Serpent)’ and the ‘The Mirror Shield Project’ on view in the exhibition, were initiated in 2016 in support of the Water Protectors standing up against the Dakota Access Pipeline near Standing Rock, ND. Through a tutorial video that went viral on social media, Cannupa Hanska Luger invited people to create mirrored shields that would be used in onsite frontline actions. In only a few short weeks, over a thousand shields were received from across the nation and became central to the Protector’s visual language and the events that ensued. ‘The Mirror Shield Project’ has since been formatted and used in various resistance movements across the world. ‘The Mirror Shield Project’ was conceived for the protection of his homelands and the water and inspired by images of women holding mirrors up to riot police in the Ukraine, so that the police could see themselves. The intention is to create a reflective mirror not only for a shield of protection, so that an oppressor may cause less harm, but to also utilize the oppressors image to reflect their own oppressive violent force back to them, to remind them that we are all human, regardless of the side of the line we are on, to force the oppressor to see themselves and the harm they are causing. This project speaks about when a line has been drawn and a frontline is created; that it can be difficult to see the humanity that exists behind the uniform holding that line. But those police are human beings, the mirror shield is a point of human engagement and a remembering that we are all in this life experience on this planet together.

The mirror shields for the installation are created locally by members of the community in each city where the installation is exhibited, and all shields are donated to community and social action projects following the exhibition.