Capture Billboard: Cannupa Hanska Luger | Future Ancestral Technologies: WE SURVIVE YOU

This exhibition is located on a billboard at 1607 East Hastings Street, near Woodland Drive and adjacent to the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre Society. Directions »

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. Luger’s ongoing series 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, 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 xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations, and it is being presented adjacent to the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre Society. 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.

Future Ancestral Technologies: WE SURVIVE YOU is being presented as 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.