Luke Naessens

Luke Naessens is the Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for the Arts of the Americas. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 2024. His first book, Presence and Priorness: Postminimalism and the Politics of Indigeneity, will examine U.S. Postminimalism in relation to the Indigenous politics of the 1970s, placing Postminimalist artists referencing Indigenous subjects and forms in dialogue with Indigenous artists working in Postminimalist modes. The project argues that Postminimalim and Indigenous activism involved analogous, yet rarely intersecting, projects of temporal politics: both sought to restructure the dominant orders of time in a moment when political, economic, and environmental crises undermined faith in the myth of linear progress. The book will theorize the settler-colonial conditions that prevented most Postminimalist artists from perceiving contemporary Indigenous political movements, while situating their artworks as part of a more expansive discursive terrain in which the significance of the concept of Indigeneity itself was contested.

In 2025 Luke is also curating Assembly, Ireland’s pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.