Hometown: Anchorage / Kaktovik, AK

Website: http://placeofthefutureancient.com/

Dates in Sitka: 2016-04

Allison Warden is an Iñupiaq interdisciplinary artist born in Fairbanks, Alaska with close ties to Kaktovik, Alaska.  She is also known by her rap persona, AKU-MATU.  Her most recent show, “Let Glow” debuted at the Bunnell Street Art Center as part of an artistic residency in March 2014. “Let Glow” is an interactive interdisciplinary piece that explores a man’s process towards love and the push to drill for oil on the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd. In 2015, she received a State of Alaska Governor’s Award in the Arts and Humanities. In 2013, she received a Connie Boochever fellowship in performance art from the Alaska State Council of the Arts and a Rasmuson Individual Artist Award for performance art in 2012.
Her one-woman show, “Calling All Polar Bears” debuted at Pangea Theatre with Intermedia Arts in 2011 as part of a National Performance Network (NPN) residency. “Calling All Polar Bears” brings the audience virtually to the village of Kaktovik, where they hear about the impacts of climate change in the Arctic and the push for resource extraction from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It has since toured to Berlin,Germany London, England, and the communities of Anchorage and Homer in Alaska. In 2009, she created an interactive interdisciplinary piece at MTS Gallery in Anchorage, Alaska titled, “virtual subsistence”. It incorporated video projection, the smell of polar bear cooking and a herd of caribou being hunted in the gallery to look at land issues and subsistence rights in Alaska.
Her current project, “Unipkaaġusiksuġuvik (the place of the future/ancient)” will debut as a solo show at the Anchorage Museum in October of 2016. The show is an interdisciplinary installation of an Iñupiaq ceremonial house that exists in the space between the hyper-future and the super-ancient. During the two month run of the exhibit, Warden will be physically in the gallery installation for a total of 390 hours. She is in the process of recreating artifacts from the Museum using futuristic materials, and artifacts from the Museum’s collection will also be incorporated in the space. She currently resides in Anchorage, Alaska.