Anchi Lin. Juried Artist
Vacant Assembly
Artist Statement
‘Perhaps, She Comes From/To ____ Alang’ weaves together three different narratives to re-examine queerness, gender, oral history, and displacement from land lost. The inspiration draws from the oral narrative that connects the relationship between bees and the land in the telling of the place of Temahahoi and another story concerning brass pots gifted to the tribal community members by the colonizers addresses issues related to the resulting infertility amongst many Indigenous people. This work engages with environmental issues, particularly the plight of bees, by intertwining the close relationship between the imbalanced ecology and quiet queer bodies. Continuing and combining these oral herstories, Ciwas desires to have a specific qalang landmark, by creating a virtual land in the space of the Internet. To pin forward towards an Internet address https://raxal-mu.glitch.me that uses the Internet space to expand knowledge and connections beyond the soil and into the cloud.
About the artists
Anchi Lin, her Atayal name is Ciwas Tahos. She is a Taipei, Taiwan, raised and based new media and performance artist of Atayal/ Itaṟal and Taiwanese Hō-ló descent. Ciwas’s body-centred practice weaves Indigenous Atayal worldview through performance, moving image, cyberspace, ceramics and kinetic installation to claim a self-determined queer space. Ciwas completed an MFA in New Media Art at Taipei National University of the Arts (Taiwan) and a BFA in Visual Art at Simon Fraser University (Canada). Ciwas’s work is an exploration of cultural and gender identity, using her body as a medium to trace linguistic and cultural experiences of displacement to seek out new queer forms of understanding.
Ciwas has exhibited, presented and performed across countries, including recent artist residencies in Vietnam for Ba-Bau AIR, the Portland Institute For Contemporary Art, USA and the Kyoto Art Centre in Japan. Most recently, Ciwas was awarded the Biannual Prize of Pulima Art Award and was selected as the inaugural Artist for the Australia-Taiwan Friendship Year Arts Exchange Partnership for 2023. In 2023, their work was exhibited at the 2023 Arts Electronica Festival in Austria, the Taiwan Austronesian Art Triennial in Taiwan, and Proto-zone13 at Shedhalle in Switzerland. Ciwas was the guest curator for the 2022 and the 2023 ADAM Artist Lab for the Taipei Performing Art Centre.
Recent notable exhibitions in 2022 featured Pswagi Temahahoi, which was concurrently exhibited at Documenta 15 in Germany and Indonesia, Solid Art Gallery in Taiwan and Lin’s solo show Finding Pathways to Temahahoi at Artspace Aotearoa Gallery in Aotearoa New Zealand. Pswagi Temahahoi is the most recent work from the ongoing project mgluw tuqiy na Temahahoi exploring the place of Temahahoi. Ciwas’s writing on her practice related to this body of work was recently published in the Pacific Arts Journal.
Credits: Voice over: Apang Bway, Yukan Maray, Yukan Masa. Unity Technical Support: Wei-Hsuan Hung
URL: https://anchilin.ca/