Cannupa Hanska Luger

G.H.O.S.T. Ride / (Generative Habitation Operating System Technology)

Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota
b. Standing Rock Reservation, Fort Yates, North Dakota, 1979
Based in Glorieta, New Mexico

G.H.O.S.T. Ride / (Generative Habitation Operating System Technology)
33.651027, -116.196352
Temalpakh Farm
1 Roberta Way, Coachella, CA 92236
Viewing hours are 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Monday to Saturday.

Cannupa Hanska Luger’s multidisciplinary practice blends bold visual storytelling with an Indigenous worldview, reframing our understanding of collective humanity. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota and an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold, the New Mexico–based artist connects materials including clay, textiles, steel and digital media to ancestral knowledge and contemporary material culture.

G.H.O.S.T. Ride expands Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies (FAT) series, which uses speculative fiction to envision sustainable, land-based futures. The series imagines Indigenous communities utilizing innovative technologies to live in attunement with land and water, challenging colonial paradigms of extraction and exploitation.

For Desert X, Luger reimagines his iconic artwork, Repurposed Archaic Technology vehicle (aka RAT Rod), into a nomadic installation traversing through the Coachella Valley over nine weeks, stopping at various sites. Camouflaged in reflective vinyl, the vehicle merges with the environment, acting as both a mirror and an extension of the landscape. It incorporates industrial detritus, ceramics, and a tipi and is equipped with speculative water and light gathering systems inspired by Luger’s vision of an adaptive future. Visitors may encounter the vehicle’s time-traveling occupants — a family from an undefined future — offering insights into possible modes of survival.

Grounded in the ethos of Future Ancestral Technologies, Luger’s approach positions technology as a vessel for transmitting ideas across time and space. G.H.O.S.T. Ride invites viewers to radically reimagine coexistence among human and nonhuman realms, encouraging reflection on the enduring significance of land over the fleeting nature of human infrastructure. According to the artist, “This project reverses how the desert survives with unimaginable deep time evolutions and asks us to consider what we may learn from the desert, if we focus on its knowledge.”

Generous support is provided by Garth Greenan Gallery. Powered by the sun via SOLARPUNKS.

G.H.O.S.T Ride
(Generative Habitation Operating System Technology)

We have always traveled in dream
Dream is matter not yet created
You build in dream a world we inhabit

33.852444, -116.506083
N. Gene Autry Trail, Between Via Escuela and the I-10

Cannupa Hanska Luger’s billboards are part of G.H.O.S.T. Ride, a nomadic project incorporating video and a time-jumping caravan that traverses through the Coachella Valley, expanding the desert’s space-time continuum. These sequential billboards feature poetry written by the artist and depict the vehicle’s occupants—a family from an undefined future—offering insights into possible modes of adaptation and survival.