Artspace: mgluw tuq iy na Temahahoi / 找尋迭馬哈霍伊的路徑 / Finding Pathways to Temahahoi: Ciwas Tahos 林安琪 Anchi Lin
This exhibition was comprised of four very large projected moving image works and several small hand-made pottery forms. The combination of them together in the space created a feeling of a dynamic narrative, built through the artist's performances, voice narration, objects, and digitally crafted landscapes featuring in each work... many things working alongside one another to build a story... The themes and methodology reminded me a lot of Sriwhana Spong's castle-crystal...
From the exhibition description: Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) is a performance and new media artist of Taiwanese Indigenous Atayal and Hō-ló heritage based in Taipei, Taiwan. Through her artistic practice, Lin seeks out new forms of understanding beyond the hegemonic worldview using video, performance, cyberspace, and installation.
mgluw tuqiy na Temahahoi/找尋迭馬哈霍伊的路徑/Finding Pathways to Temahahoi takes us on a journey into Temahahoi; a place that Atayal legend says, where only women live. Temahahoi represents a decentralised queer space situated outside of colonial interpretations of queer discourse. Lin recalls personal memories, dreams, and stories with elders of Temahahoi in her multimedia installation of performance, moving image, and cyberspace to interrogate sovereignty, and ways to imagine a space for connection in the wake of loss, displacement and disconnection.
Atayal stories tell of how the women of Temahahoi possess magical powers with the natural world of animal, mineral and vegetable: they sustain their lifeforce from smoke and steam, and can become impregnated by the wind from sitting on a rock. Of specific significance for Lin is the Temahahoi women’s ability to commune with bees. Lin’s empowerment of Temahahoi is subversively political and implicitly radical - she uses her body as a medium and site through which vulnerability is a provocative, powerful force to explore concurrently, propositions for a vital indigenous and queer futurity.
Tautai: image and video exhibition, Still Here
Accompanying the four short films, displayed in the small theatre section of the gallery, were a number of group portraits featuring each family who took part in them. The screening space was set out with bean bags and mats, making it feel welcoming and homely...
Two Rooms: Noel Ivanoff Stem to Stern and Leigh Martin Wasabi Sunrise
Decided not to take too many photos as it's hard to capture the works via a camera. In person they have more changeable energies, and the optical illusion quality they seem to have through the layering of colour in each is much more apparent...
This may be wildly left field, but the paintings in Stem to Stern made me think of the modelling beeswax we used to use at Steiner school. I think it's the combination of the rectangular form, the vibrancy and depth of colour (which has almost a subsurface glow in some pieces), and the tactility that I associate with the material brought that to mind... the paintings evoke a lot of those similar qualities for me.)
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