Cannupa Hanska Luger, Future Ancestral Technologies: WE SURVIVE YOU, 2026. Courtesy of the Artist. Site photo: Dennis Ha. Installation mock-up: Robert Marks.
Cannupa Hanska Luger, Future Ancestral Technologies: WE SURVIVE YOU, 2026. Courtesy of the Artist.
Billboard design by Cannupa Hanska Luger, originally commissioned for Landback.art, in Collaboration with NDN Collective, INDÍGENA and For Freedoms, 2021. This new presentation is commissioned by Vancouver Art Gallery in collaboration with Capture Photography Festival, 2026.
Cannupa Hanska Luger, Future Ancestral Technologies: WE SURVIVE YOU, 2026. Courtesy of the Artist. Site photo: Dennis Ha. Installation mock-up: Robert Marks.
Cannupa Hanska Luger, Future Ancestral Technologies: WE SURVIVE YOU, 2026. Courtesy of the Artist.
Billboard design by Cannupa Hanska Luger, originally commissioned for Landback.art, in Collaboration with NDN Collective, INDÍGENA and For Freedoms, 2021. This new presentation is commissioned by Vancouver Art Gallery in collaboration with Capture Photography Festival, 2026.
Future Ancestral Technologies: WE SURVIVE YOU
Sited on one billboard on East Hastings St near Woodland Dr, adjacent to the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre Society
As new ecological realities reshape the planet, what role does art play? Artists are not scientists, nor are they journalists. But they invite us to think differently and imagine new futures. Cannupa Hanska Luger’s work offers one such mediation on the possibilities.
Hanska Luger’s billboard, Future Ancestral Technologies: WE SURVIVE YOU (2026), is part of a larger body of work that includes sculpture, film, performance, and installation. Future Ancestral Technologies is a form of Indigenous science fiction that imagines how our culture confronts and shifts into the future. Featuring warrior- or sentry-like figures sporting brightly coloured and patterned regalia, WE SURVIVE YOU is both joyful and imposing. Who is implied in We and You? This work underscores that Indigenous knowledge is critical to human survival. In this century shaped by climate change and socio-political upheaval, Hanska Luger insists the act of imagining is necessary.
This public artwork’s location has meaning that resonates both locally and globally. WE SURVIVE YOU is presented on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh nations, and is located adjacent to the Aboriginal Friendship Centre. East Hastings is one of Vancouver’s busiest streets, a commercial thoroughfare with intersecting histories of industry, immigration, poverty, and social upheaval. Together, these confluences give rise and context to the phrase: We survive you.
WE SURVIVE YOU is part of the exhibition Future Geographies: Art in the Century of Climate Change, on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery from May 14, 2026, to January 10, 2027.
Billboard design by Cannupa Hanska Luger, originally commissioned for Landback.art, in collaboration with NDN Collective, INDÍGENA, and For Freedoms, 2021. This new presentation is commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery in collaboration with Capture Photography Festival, 2026.
