Skawennati

Skawennati makes art from her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. Her artistic practice questions our relationships with technology and highlights Indigenous people in the future. An early adopter of cyberspace as both a location and a medium, she has produced groundbreaking projects such as CyberPowWow (1997-2004), an online gallery, chatspace, and mixed-reality event, and TimeTraveller™ (2007-2013), a multimedia project with a machinima series as its basis. She believes the medium is the message and creates short movies, still images, sculpture, fashion, and performative experiences.Her works have been presented in Europe, Oceania, China, and across North America. Recent highlights include the permanent exhibition On This Ground: Being and Belonging in America at the Peabody Essex Museum, which acquired her large public sculpture, Celestial Tree and Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, which was named the 2021 Exhibition of the Year by the Association of Art Museum Curators. The show will be touring the United States until 2023. Her works are in the collections of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Thoma Foundation, among others. She is honoured to have received a 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions Grant; a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship; a Visiting Artist Fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library; and an Honorary Doctorate from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.