Portikus

31/05/2026

Thank you to everyone who joined us for the opening of Crested and for celebrating Tanya Lukin Linklater’s first solo exhibition in Europe.

We are pleased to present Lukin Linklater’s Open Rehearsals, Tendon Thread, as part of the exhibition. The rehearsals will take place again today from 2–4 pm.

In her artistic practice, Lukin Linklater engages questions of belonging, memory, and Indigenous knowledge within the ongoing afterlives of colonial violence.

For Tendon Thread, she develops choreographic situations that explore listening, sensation, and embodied inquiry together with performers Mya Dixon, Talia Dixon, Mekko Harjo, and Mina Linklater. Rather than presenting finished enactments, these open rehearsals are intended to to share relational, ever-changing processes.

We look forward to welcoming you.



The exhibition is funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation), supported by the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media), the Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung, Kunst und Kultur, and Städelschule Portikus e.V., with additional support from Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm.

Photos: Nils Heck

26/05/2026

We are delighted to invite you to the opening of Crested, Tanya Lukin Linklater’s first solo exhibition in Europe, on Friday, 29 May 2026 at 6 pm, followed by a series of open rehearsals over the weekend - 30 & 31 May, 2–4 pm.

Crested unfolds as an open constellation — attuned to shifting temporalities, layered memory, and forms of attention grounded in relation rather than appropriation.

Lukin Linklater’s site-specific work will be activated through open rehearsals on Saturday and Sunday with performers Talia Dixon, Mya Dixon (both Payómkawichum), Mekko Harjo (Mvskoke, Shawnee, Seminole, Quapaw Nation), and Mina Linklater (Omaskeko Ininiwuk/Sugpiaq). Rather than presenting finished performances, these choreographic situations unfold as relational, ever-evolving processes, where knowledge emerges as bodily memory, activated and transmitted through movement, repetition, and interruption.

Lukin Linklater approaches choreography as an epistemological practice for articulating embodied knowledge. Silence and opacity are held as a methodology of obscurity: the body is present, yet resists full disclosure. This gesture refuses extractive reading, linear narrative, and Western archival logics, in order to hold Indigenous knowledge systems in protection.



Crested is funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) and the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media). Further support is provided by Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung, Kunst und Kultur and Städelschule Portikus e.V. Academic research for this exhibition was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canada, with additional support from Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm.

Image: Tanya Lukin Linklater, bison bison (dance_hum for dirtbath), 2025, performance with Sam Aros-Mitchell, Talia Dixon, Jonathan González, Mekko Harjo, Gladstone Butler, Fjóla Evans, Miguel Gallego, Rahul Nair, Dia Chelsea, New York, USA, 2025. Photo: Don Stahl. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation.

22/05/2026

12/05/2026

Tanya Lukin Linklater’s practice encompasses dance, performance, video, photography, installation, and writing.  She engages the histories that shape Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences, lands, and ways of knowing. Drawing on lineages of Indigenous dance and visual art, her work attends to structures of sustenance and to the forces of weather, understood as vital, interwoven systems. 

Her exhibition Crested, opens on Friday, May 29, 6pm, and will be on view until August 30, 2026.

Lukin Linklater’s recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada (2026); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, USA (2024); Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Canada (2023); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2022), among others.  

Lukin Linklater received the Wexner Center for the Arts Artist Residency Award in Visual Arts (2023-2024) and The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Visual Arts (2021).   

She studied at Stanford University and University of Alberta and completed her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University in 2023. She is a faculty member at the Institute of American Indian Arts (Santa Fe) low-residency MFA in Studio Arts (2021-present). 

Tanya Lukin Linklater lives and works in North Bay, Ontario, Canada. 



Photo: Pasha Rafiy

04/05/2026

We are pleased to announce Crested, Tanya Lukin Linklater’s exhibition at Portikus, on view 30 May — 30 August 2026, her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe.
Please join us for the opening on Friday, 29 May 2026, 6 pm.

For Crested, Lukin Linklater presents a new, site-specific body of work, including bentwood sculptures, beadwork, suspended textile forms, and watercolours.

Her practice engages the histories that shape Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences, lands, and ways of knowing. Drawing on lineages of Indigenous dance and visual art, her work attends to structures of sustenance and to the forces of weather, understood as vital, interwoven systems.

As part of the exhibition, Lukin Linklater will undertake a series of open rehearsals with performers Mya Dixon, Talia Dixon, and Mekko Harjo, presented on 30 & 31 May, 2–4 pm.

Tanya Lukin Linklater (Sugpiaq, b. 1976, Kodiak Island, USA) lives and works in North Bay, Ontario. Her practice encompasses dance, performance, video, photography, installation, and writing.

Director: Barbara Clausen
Curator: Juliane Bischoff
Supported by: Carina Bukuts



The exhibition is made possible by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes. Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, with support from Städelschule Portikus e.V., the Goethe Institut, and Mousonturm.

Poster design: Espace Ness / Émilie Ferrat

01/05/2026

Saodat Ismailova’s exhibition When the Water Turns to Wind is on view until May 10.

In her eponymous film installation, created specifically for Portikus, Ismailova continues her engagement with Central Asia’s layered histories, political transformations, and ecological conditions. The work reflects on loss, memory, and environmental collapse through the story of the disappearing Aral Sea — once one of the largest inland lakes in the world and now the site of one of the most devastating man-made environmental disasters of the 20th century.

Drawing from local perspectives while situating them within broader political and ecological contexts, the installation examines extractivist water systems linked to the cotton industry and imperial development projects. Through historical traces and transnational connections, Ismailova develops a filmic language that challenges imposed borders and highlights a region shaped by interconnected histories and environmental realities.

We are open
Tuesday—Friday, 12am-7pm
Saturday—Sunday, 11am-7pm
We are looking forward to welcoming you.

27/04/2026

Thursday, April 30, 2026, 7 pm – Film screening: Undercurrents – On Landscapes and Legacies

To conclude the film program in the context of Saodat Ismailova’s exhibition ‚When the Water Turns to Wind,‘ we will present ,Zone‘ by Simon Shim-Sutcliffe, shown in Germany for the first time. The work reflects on how liquid infrastructures shape spaces of abandoned memory and the layered ruins of successive empires. In contrast to the constructed landscape of the Panama Canal, the film stages an artificial well in an empty parking lot, echoing Gatun Lake as part of the canal’s engineered water system.

Drawing on his family history as Chinese labourers who worked on the Canal, Shim-Sutcliffe traces the making of forgotten images and examines how fluid landscapes have contributed to collective narratives of progress. ,Zone‘ brings together archival material, aerial tracking shots, 16mm and digital film, phone footage, stage design, and collage to explore the intersecting political and cultural forces that have shaped this site.

The screening will be followed by a conversation between and Portikus curator .

Admission is free.
We look forward to welcoming you.

Image: Simon Shim-Sutcliffe, Zone, 2025, film still, Courtesy of the artist.

20/04/2026

Thursday, April 23, 2026, 7 pm – Film screening: Echoes, Memory and the Unseen

Our next screening is comprised of a selection of short films by students from Saodat Ismailova’s class at Städelschule during the Winter Semester 2025/26. It brings together works by Lala Aliyeva, Andro Eradze, Oleksiy Radynski, Yuyan Wang, among others, and explores how memory takes form through images, infrastructures, and lived experience.

Across different geographies, the films trace how environments are transformed by industrial processes, political borders, and technological mediation. The natural world emerges not as a fixed origin, but as something already altered—entangled with systems of control and representation. At the same time, the artificial—archives, cinematic framings, and digital textures—becomes a site where traces of the invisible persist: memory, affect, and histories that resist disappearance.

Admission to the screening is free. We very much look forward to welcoming you.

.radynski

Images: 1-2 Yuyan Wang, Green Grey Black Brown, film still, 2025; 3-4 Andro Eradze, Raised in the Dust, film still, 2022. Video, 4K, 8:12 min. Commissioned by La Biennale di Venezia. Courtesy of the artist and SpazioA; 5-6 Oleksiy Radynski, Where Russia Ends, film stills, 2024; 7 Lala Aliyeva, They Whisper but Sometimes Scream, film stills, 2020; Courtesy of the artists.

07/04/2026

Thursday, April 9, 2026, 7 pm – Film screening: „Whose Voice is This?“

We warmly invite you to join us for the next screening in our series of films related to Saodat Ismailova’s exhibition When the Water Turns to Wind. „Whose Voice it This?“ is a selection of films brought together by curator Dilda Ramazan, who is part of DAVRA – a research group founded by Saodat Ismailova in 2021 that focuses on studying and reimagining Central Asia today.

The screening on April 9, 7pm, brings together video works by Zumrad Mirzalieva, Dana Iskakova, Azadbek Bekchanov, Ermina Takenova, Dariya Temirkhan, and Zhanar Bereketova. They range from documentary-style recordings to pieces built from found footage and animation, yet each of them reflects on the past and present of Central Asia, where questions of memory, agency, and a sometimes complex relationship to one’s land – as mediated through the landscape – remain central.

Admission to all screenings is free. We look forward to welcoming you!

.ninja .mir

Images: 1 Zumrad Mirzalieva, Tashkent 58-88, 2024, film still; 2 Zhanar Bereketova, Raw, 2025, film still; 3 Dana Iskakova, Whose voice is this?, 2024, film still; 4 Dariya Temirkhan, The fog cleared, but how can I clear the lungs from the ashes?, 2023, film still; Courtesy the artists

03/04/2026

We are open over Easter as follows and look forward to welcoming you to Saodat Ismailova’s exhibition When the Water Turns to Wind:
Friday, April 3: 12:00–19:00
Saturday, April 4: 11:00–19:00
Sunday, April 5: 11:00–19:00
Monday, April 6: Closed

Saodat Ismailova’s films and installations interweave ritual, myth, and dream with the textures of everyday life along the fault lines of Central Asia.
Her exhibition When the Water Turns to Wind unfolds a narrative of the slowly vanishing Aral Sea, continuing her long-term exploration of the region’s complex histories and cultures – once shaped by the coexistence of diverse languages, religions, and traditions.
Rather than a documentary survey, the site-specific film installation renders transformation and disappearance as a sensory experience, expressing profound ecological and cultural change.

Photo: Jens Ge**er