Artist talk by Ciwas Tahos (Anchi Lin 林安琪) Friday 12 June, 6pm
We’re absolutely delighted to welcome Ciwas Tahos (also known as Anchi Lin 林安琪) to MHAS to share with us her artistic practice and ongoing research. Ciwas is currently a visual arts fellow at the DAAD in Berlin, and we’re excited for this wonderful opportunity to get to know her and her work better.
Ciwas (Anchi) is a visual artist of Atayal descent from Taiwan. Working across performance, moving image, cyberspace, ceramics, and kinetic installation, her body-centred practice interweaves Atayal worldviews to claim self-determined space and presence.
Ciwas holds an MFA in New Media Art from Taipei National University of the Arts (Taiwan) and a BFA in Visual Art from Simon Fraser University (Canada). Her work explores cultural and gender identity, using the body as a vessel to trace linguistic and cultural experiences of displacement—opening pathways toward new ways of understanding, remembering, and relating.
Her most notable project, Finding Pathways to Temahahoi, is a multifaceted, ongoing series that reimagines and seeks the potential spaces of Temahahoi—an oral Atayal story about a group of queer women who once lived deep within the mountains, who could communicate with bees, sustain themselves by eating smoke, and become pregnant by gusts of wind. Through this work, Ciwas activates the cultural and geographic dimensions of queer belonging, using the oral story as a lens to imagine life beyond the heteronormative world. Ultimately, she intends to activate a sense of belonging for diasporic Temahahoi descendants across time and place.