In a conversation with Duane Linklater published in the brochure for his current exhibition, 12 + 2, at Dia Chelsea, filmmaker and scholar Tasha Hubbard (Peepeekisis First Nation) distills the intertwined erasures effected under colonialism in North America. Over the course of the 19th century, parallel to the systematic literal and cultural genocide of Native people, settlers killed millions of buffalo, till there remained only a few hundred; even now, when other large game populations are rebounding as part of free-ranging herds, buffalo are for the most part only allowed on private land, national parks, or reservations. “Indigenous people and buffalo are conflated in the settler mind and have been from the beginning; we are buffalo, and they are us,” she said. “And so, just like settler colonialism needs Indigenous people to be constrained and contained, it’s the same for buffalo.” Linklater not only lets buffalo run free in 12 + 2, conceptually at least, but in the installation, performance, and paintings on view he also reimagines the world in their terms. Given the mutual identification, coexistence, and interdependence between Native people and the species across millennia, the move is an act of imagining the Earth in and through a lens of Indigeneity. Seven of the beasts, which the artist fashioned out of wire and papier-mâché before scaling them up to two or three times their natural size, make themselves at home in two vast galleries (together they’re titled “wallowposition”). Their faceted planes and visible seams where components connect give them a slightly robot-like appearance. They are eyeless, featureless really, covered in dun-colored plaster that mimics mud. But they are also vivid, animate, and expressive — adorable, even. One kneels on its front legs, perhaps drinking water. Another has plopped itself on its side, legs flailing in the air. Yet another, an adolescent with long legs and a head smaller than the rest, seems to be caught mid-trot, while a baby sploots on the floor. Installation view Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 at Dia Chelsea (© Duane Linklater, photo Bill Jacobson Studio, New York; courtesy Dia Art Foundation)They are wallowing: rolling in the dirt, getting rid of critters on their coats, cooling off, smelling smells, picking up grass seeds that will fall off their bodies later, ensuring the spread of prairie grasses and brush. It is an instinctual, pleasurable behavior in which, according to curator Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, the animals do not indulge under conditions of captivity or duress. What does it take for buffalo to be at home, to be in an environment where they can not merely survive — which they’ve done despite the best efforts of American colonizers — but thrive? And by extension, what does it take for these sculpted buffalo, made by an artist who is Omasekêko Ininiwak from Moose Cree First Nation, to be at home in this art institution? Linklater undertakes a process of worldbuilding at Dia, a foundation that has historically supported artists (Smithson, Holt, De Maria, Heizer) who as often as not failed to register that the land they co-opted as site and material was and is homeland to Native people. The foundation, moreover, occupies an industrial space built upon layers and layers of history and topography, including Lenape tobacco fields. Linklater remaps the Chelsea space not only by turning it into a virtual prairie, marked out by the presence of buffalo, but also by extracting 12 cylindrical cores from the floor and substrate and replacing them with soil and granite discs from near his home in Northern Ontario. Two other boreholes remain empty, covered with glass so visitors can see what’s below. The 12 pieces of granite, arranged in a circle that transverses the two rooms, together with the two boreholes (the “12 + 2” of the piece’s title and that of the exhibition as a whole), mark out the pole placement of a teepee, an arrangement with cosmological significance — yet another form of mapping; one of Linklater’s cochineal-stained, charcoal-marked teepee covers, “parliament,” hangs from the rafters in the second gallery. The dug-up slag and concrete are presented in a steel trough nearby. The intervention recalls Robert Smithson’s “non-sites,” for which he brought materials like coal and rocks gathered from industrial wastelands in New Jersey and elsewhere into the gallery, connecting the white box to the outside world and to both the present and a deep geological past. But instead of merely bringing the outside in, Linklater also drills down, forcing us to deal with a very human-scaled chronology of displacement. Performance of “bison bison (dance_hum for dirtbath),” written and choreographed by Tanya Lukin Linklater as part of Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 at Dia Chelsea. On the wall in the background is Duane Linklater’s “wallowwallow” Despite his buffaloes’ monumentality, Linklater preserves the galleries’ vast openness to accommodate the work’s crucial performance component. On Saturdays afternoons, “bison bison (dance_hum for dirtbath)” takes place, written and choreographed by the artist Tanya Lukin Linklater, Duane Linklater’s wife and frequent collaborator. Over the course of 44 minutes, dancers pace around the room, experiencing this virtual landscape the way buffalo might. At times they undertake activities meant to honor or map it, as when a performer makes charcoal rubbings of the granite plugs in the floor. Their activities drive the music, “buffalounit,” composed by eagleswitheyesclosed (a collaboration between Linklater and his son Tobias) and played by a drummer, cellist, and bass guitarist. Over seven weeks, the number of dancers and musicians will winnow away, ending with a single percussionist and a single figure in motion.Rendered in oil stick, paint, and graphite on three panels, “kitaskînaw_kitaskînawâw (every indian I know hates that song)” — the song in the title is, I suspect, the classic anthem of westward expansion, “Home on the Range” — recalls the history of abstract painting through its gestural strokes in red, white, and blue (plus touches of browns and beige) and size (it measures around 11 by 6.5 feet). But the marks also coalesce into a duck-rabbit image of a buffalo laying on its side and a rough map of the North American continent. In the other gallery is “wallowwallow,” a circular form made of soil, hay, clay, and brown, gray, and blue pigment on steel and surrounded by a halo applied directly to the brick wall. It is meant to suggest the hollows the buffalo make as they roll around on the soil, reshaping the landscape as they go, but it also reads as the Earth seen from space. Linklater ties the well-being of his buffalo to that of the Indigenous people with whom they have long lived symbiotically — and even to that of the world itself — not in nostalgic terms but in futurist ones via robotic buffalos and titles that suggest computer file names. As a whole, 12 + 2 seems to point us to an important truth: We live in a world that buffalo create. A buffalo sculpture from the installation “wallowposition” in Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 at Dia Chelsea Performance of “bison bison (dance_hum for dirtbath),” written and choreographed by Tanya Lukin Linklater as part of Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 at Dia Chelsea A buffalo sculpture from the installation “wallowposition” in Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 at Dia ChelseaInstallation view Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 at Dia Chelsea (© Duane Linklater, photo Bill Jacobson Studio, New York; courtesy Dia Art Foundation)A buffalo sculpture from the installation “wallowposition” in Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 at Dia ChelseaDuane Linklater: 12 + 2 continues at Dia Chelsea (537 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through January 24, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi.