Island a: Stardust Memories of Moving Homes
Irwan Ahmett & Tita Salina
Esther Lu / Moderator
Tanah Tumpah Darah, or The Land of Spilled Blood（橫血之地）, marks the 10th anniversary of Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina's long-term project, The Ring of Fire. It is a lecture performance capturing their extensive travel from Sumatra to Papua. In this latest enactment, we follow their search for a shattered star, venturing into village after village and witnessing the deprived environments across Indonesia, including the deforestation of peatlands, the active volcano red zones, gold mining sites, and more. Within their narrative, “star” becomes a connecting and camouflaging metaphor, mirroring suffering souls and the multi-layers of social and political conflicts in an apocalyptic landscape. From the fragmented glimpses of this disastrous reality, we also come to trace our hidden, interwoven connections with those subjects we encounter through the camera.
The work highlights the systematic violence in human society and the complexity of geopolitical conditions. In their epic depiction, the artist duo critically suggest how we participate in these dynamics, while on the other hand, how we might share compassion with the planet. If an alien object is required for us to open our eyes and shift the existing power, perhaps this falling star can be both a blessing and a warning—it is an invitation to engage, reflect, and act for the place that we feel lost in and collectively call home. (Esther Lu)
Esther Lu / Moderator
Esther Lu is a curator and writer with a background in literature, art history, activism and curatorial studies. She is interested in formulating conceptual ways of seeing and discursive events that intertwine art and reality. Many of her projects focus on the interplay of sensibility, body, institution and memory. She is driven by the curiosity to explore human conditions, boundaries of knowing, and how art embodies and exceeds our imagination to address various concerns toward humanity, culture and the relevance of life. Esther was the director of Taipei Contemporary Art Center from 2015 to 2017, and the curator of This is Not a Taiwan Pavilion — a collateral event at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. She has curated a number of international exhibitions and workshops in Asia and Europe. Her recent curatorial practice involves creating co-learning and innovative mediation strategies for professional workshops and audience experience. She founded Moss Piglets, a non-profit initiative to investigate future body politics and ecological art in 2021.
Irwan Ahmett & Tita Salina
Irwan Ahmett & Tita Salina are a self-taught artist duo based in Jakarta. Their initial work is to place the imagination through performative intervention in the midst of chaotic public space of megapolitan Jakarta, which faces the dilemma of uncontrolled urbanization and pollution. The development of networks in art and activist circles has encouraged their artistic practice to progress toward the more profound and deeper circumstances. They are currently working on a long-term project related to geopolitical turmoil in the Ring of Fire – Pacific Rim, the most prone region to natural disasters as well as traumatic consequences which are caused by the persistent ideological violence. They see their high mobility as the main vehicle to participate in residency programs, research, field study and exhibitions especially in specific areas, which are paradoxical such as some heavenly yet deadly beautiful places on earth. Irwan and Tita wanted to find answers about planetary anxieties in regard to human existence by means of evolutionary perspective and to produce knowledge through arts related to injustice, humanity and ecology.
[Commoning 1]
A Sea of Islands: Networked Art Communities in Our Time
Launched in 2017, Nusantara Archive was originally conceived as a framework and methodology for regional decolonization. The word "Nusantara" is a combination of the Sanskrit words "nusa" (island) and "antara" (outer), referring to the vision of the Malay Archipelago (including Southern Thailand, the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, Borneo, the Indonesian Archipelago, and the Southern Philippines), where Malay is the lingua franca. Given the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the global art ecosystem in 2020, our initial plans for art residency exchanges between Taiwan and Southeast Asia have also undergone changes. We have begun to shift our attention towards local communities as well as to think through the agency of technological media in the practice of art community, further internalizing the metaphor of the "island" into the reterritorialization of regional networks.
During the post-pandemic community activities on-site, we will invoke Epeli Hau'ofa's theory of the Pacific islands by replacing the notion of "islands in a far sea" with "a sea of islands", and experiment with a mode of decentralized collaboration specific to art communities. With this conceptual shift, the exhibition reflects on its own post/re-colonial situation from the perspective of the sea. Simultaneously, it connects the genealogy of actual islands such as Malaysian islands, Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu, and Austronesia along with historical “Nanyang” (South Sea), with individual islands serving as metaphorical landmarks. This aims to expand the Nusantara Archive residency project both before and after the outbreak of the pandemic. The five consecutive weekends consist of a lecture performance, screenings, discussions, workshops and a music party carried out by five groups of artists and curators. It is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal dynamics and multi-scalar perspectives of the "Sea of Islands" that are not confined by the linear time of progress.
Through the spatial metaphor of the "ocean" as a technology of the sensible that connects the "non-homogeneous" islands, we invite you to reflect with us on the practice of networked commons that art communities have not been able to carry out due to language barriers, technological limitations, and other factors. Finally, by curating a special features on the online Modern Art+ and special screenings, we will create memory landmarks for each week's activities.
Reference：
l “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6 (1): 148-161, 1994.
l “The Ocean in Us,” The Contemporary Pacific 10 (2): 392-410, 1998
l ISSUE 52: Archipelago Futurism?「群島未來主義？」Jun 2022
Concept Development
Rikey Tenn／Curator
Rikey Tenn is the founder of the Nusantara Archive Project (since 2017), which is based on the shared history of Taiwan and Southeast Asia and its decolonization process. He initiated and co-organized the workshop Nusantara in Future Tense with Singaporean artist collective soft/WALL/studs in 2020. As a researcher, he was involved in The Secret South (curator: Nobuo Takamori) in 2020, as part of which he presented the Nusantara Archive (archive f) His most recent collaborative project, A Field Guide to Getting Lost in the Southern Universe, (the first year) is a CREATORS creative/Support Program initiated by C-LAB in 2022.
Spatial Design
Wu Chi-Yu／Co-curator
Based in Taipei, Wu Chi-Yu (b. 1986) is a multimedia artist whose works include film, video installation, and photography. He delves into the lost and unestablished links among species, environment, and the technology that constructs human civilization, exploring the complex historical geography of Asia and the interdependence of various beings through multiple narratives. His works have been exhibited and screened at Times Art Museum, Guangzhou (2021); MoCA, Taipei (2020); 2018 Shanghai Biennale; 2016 Taipei Biennial; Beijing International Short Film Festival (2017) and was a resident artist at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2014-2015).
Contact：02-25957656 ext.122