Suna Galay-Tamang

Suna Galay-Tamang is an artist, cultural worker and new mother of mixed Indigenous and Settler ancestries living on Coast Salish homelands of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaʔ, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Nations, where she was born.  She is Dene Métis from Turtle Island (Dënesųłinë́, Scottish and French), Tamang clan from Nepal, Ukrainian and German.

Her art centres around threshold-traversing practices; she works through clown, hide tanning, birthwork and astrology to move with fear, death and transformation.

These relational artforms function as ceremony: practices which encourage deep engagement with the body as land.  They reclaim pathways of relatedness through rigour, curiosity, and fine-tuning the senses.

Her artistic hypothesis is that dismantling harmful patterns of relating and imagining can be playful, and that the process towards it must embody the sense of liberation we seek to build in our bodies and the world.

Suna’s land-based practice centres around investigating the capacity of art to function as ceremony and the body as pedagogy, within the context of displacement from one’s traditional homelands. She works through the lenses of clown, hide tanning, birthwork, and astrology as tools towards reclamation of ancestral skills, physiological wisdom and communal health.

MST Territories, Turtle Island (Vancouver, Canada)