Queering me, babe!

Date/Time: 26 August 2023 (Sat.) 15:15-16:15
Venue: 11F Studio 1, Taipei Performing Arts Center
Speaker: Indranjan Banerjee, Betty Apple, Chen Chen, Choy Ka-Fai, Sorour Darabi, Kilian Engels, Huang Ding-Yun, Jeff Khan, Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos), Prumsodun Ok, Sasapin Siriwanij, Faith Tan, Aaron Wright (*Ordered alphabetically by last name.)
Language: In English.
Sign up: Online registration , admission by ticket.

What queer art and performance would mean and feel like today is arguably queer. Let's take the queer as a lens to see what's on and what's going to become in various art ecosystems here, there, and somewhere. This roundtable discussion invites queer minds and bodies to unpack their universes to host and facilitate conversations.

This session is a roundtable discussion format. Each table will be hosted by curators or artists.

Speaker
Indranjan Banerjee (India)
Indranjan Banerjee (he/they) is a curator, writer and cultural producer; and is presently a Curator at Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi. He often plays the role of an interlocutor with artists and creative practitioners and thinks with creative practices that are at the intersection of visual, material and performance cultures. His engagements with dance, movement, somatic practices, and thus the body feeds his interest in the interstices of art, technology and ecology. He investigates the relationship between image and text, body and embodiment, and speculates on the entanglements between art and design. His curatorial research primarily draws from the above intersections. Experimental writing, writing in transmission, acts of annotation and the bodies of writing are his writerly fixations. His writing has featured in such publications as Experimenter Books, STIR, Art India and Art Dose among other independent publications. His ongoing writing project ‘Measuring with Mercury’ has been selected for Literaturfestival BuchBasel 2022.

Betty Apple (Taiwan)
Betty Apple, based in Taipei, graduated from the Drama Department and the New Media Art program at Taipei National University of the Arts. She is known for her artistic practices in sound art, performance art, electronic music, DJ, and RAVE planning, among others, which she uses for her body politics.
In recent years, Betty has performed at various international events such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney LiveWorks Experimental Art Festival, Melbourne Fringe Festival, MONA FOMA Arts Festival in Australia, Santarcangelo Arts Festival in Italy, Taipei Arts Festival, Other Futures Science Fiction Art Festival in the Netherlands, Apexart in New York, CTM Festival in Berlin, Jogja Biennale in Indonesia, WSK Sound Art Festival in Manila, and Taipei White Night.

Chen Chen (Taiwan)
Chen Chen is an artist working with intersections of nature, art, and spirituality with a background of theatre training from U-Theatre (Taiwan) and the methods of Jerzy Grotowski (Poland). Learning from nature and its wisdom, the notion and history of shamanism, as a medium of humans and life forms, has shaped her approaches to performance.
Her recent and ongoing practice is enacting rituals in forests and streets, exploring the originality and possibilities of human beings and becoming.

Choy Ka-Fai (Singapore)
Choy Ka-Fai is a Berlin-based Singaporean artist. His multidisciplinary art practice situates itself at the intersection of dance, media art and performance. At the heart of his research is a continuous exploration of the metaphysics of the human body. Through research expeditions, pseudo-scientific experiments and documentary performances, Ka-Fai appropriates technologies and narratives to imagine new futures of the human body. Ka-Fai’s projects have been presented in major institutions and festivals worldwide, including Sadler’s Wells (London, UK), ImPulsTanz Festival (Vienna, Austria) and Tanz Im August (Berlin, Germany). He was the residentartist at tanzhaus nrw in Düsseldorf (2017–2019) and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (2014–2015). Ka Fai graduated with a M.A. in Design Interaction from the Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom.

Sorour Darabi (Iran / Germany & France)
Sorour Darabi is an Iranian trans artist based in France since 2013, living and working between Paris & Berlin.
Working actively in Iran, he was a part of the underground organisation ICCD, whose festival Untimely (Tehran) hosted his work before his departure for France. During studies at the ICI - CCN de Montpellier he created the solo Subject to Change, then in 2016 Farci.e, in 2018 Savušun and in 2021 Mowgli and Natural Drama. He is recently working on his first group piece Mille et Une Nuits which will be premiered in Montpellier Danse Festival 2024. Mille et Une Nuits is a project that begins during his residency and Palais de Tokyo in November 2022.

Kilian Engels (Germany)
Kilian Engels is a curator based in Germany, currently working for International Arts Festival Wiesbaden Biennale, where he presented, co-produced and commissioned interdisciplinary work by artists, activists and collectives also featured at Venice Biennale, Documenta 13/14 and documenta fifteen, amongst others.
Before, he was co-founder and long-term artistic director of Munich-based festival Radikal jung, promoting a younger generation of international theatre makers. He grew up in Germany and the US, studied Philosophy and Literature and graduated from Oxford University with an M.St. in European Literature.
https://www.wiesbaden-biennale.eu/en/home

Huang Ding-Yun (Taiwan)
Huang Ding-Yun is one of the co-founders of Taipei-based multi-creator collective, Co-Coism. Co-coism aims at work-in-collective, site-responding, and interdisciplinary practices. They focus on creating a flexible relationship between the audience and the performers. Recently, Ding-Yun initiated series of projects on ‘Mind and Consciousness’ such as God in Residence, Performing Insanity.

Jeff Khan (Australia)
Jeff Khan is a writer, curator and arts leader based in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). Currently the Creative Director of Asia TOPA: Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts, Jeff works at the intersection of performance, dance, visual art and sound. Previously, Jeff was Artistic Director & CEO at Performance Space, Sydney (2011-2022) where he curated and oversaw the annual Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, as well as a year-round program of artist development, residencies, and international exchange. Jeff’s curatorial work is focused on the Asia Pacific engaged with exigent issues in the region, from queer and feminist conversations to artists’ responses to environmental, political, and intercultural conversations. Jeff has previously held positions and Guest Curatorships at the Next Wave Festival, Gertrude Contemporary, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. He has participated on juries and assessment panels for the Taishin Art Award (Taiwan); Create NSW; the Australia Council for the Arts; Arts Northern Rivers, and many more.

Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) [Taiwan]
Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) is a visual artist of Taiwanese Indigenous Atayal and Hō-ló descent. Through her practice and interest in language, identity, gender, and the environment, Lin seeks out new forms of understanding beyond the hetero-patriarchal status quo, using video, performance, cyberspace, and sound.
https://www.anchilin.ca/

Prumsodun Ok (USA / Cambodia)
Prumsodun Ok’s interdisciplinary performances contemplate the ‘avant-garde in antiquity,’ and are lauded as ‘Radical Beauty’ (The Bangkok Post). His original works have been supported by Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions, Creative Capital, National Dance Project, MAP Fund, Surdna Foundation, and Dance/USA among others. He is the founding artistic director of Prumsodun Ok & NATYARASA, Cambodia’s first gay dance company, which Channel NewsAsia describes as ‘one of the most revolutionary dance troupes in Cambodia…a dance troupe like no other.’ Ok’s celebrated TED Talk and keynote speech at the 2019 Dance/USA Annual Conference have roused audiences to their feet in ovation.

Sasapin Siriwanij (Thailand)
With Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English from the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Sasapin Siriwanij is a core member of B-Floor Theatre as a performer, director, and producer, a decade-long career which has rendered her well-versed in movement-based performance practices with interests in social critique and personal and social empowerment. Sasapin has taken the role of Artistic Director of Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting (BIPAM) since 2018, and has co-founded Producers of Thai Performing Arts Network (POTPAN), alongside being an independent theater artist and international touring producer.
http://www.bipam.org

Aaron Wright (England)
Aaron Wright was appointed as Head of Performance and Dance at the Southbank Centre in 2023. Aaron has extensive experience in commissioning and presenting contemporary performing arts having led Fierce as Artistic Director since May 2016, where he was responsible for festival programming, commissioning, artist development and building partnerships. He curated three editions of the biennial Fierce Festival in 2017-2022, working with a broad range of international artists and companies. Aaron was also a cultural programme consultant for the Birmingham 2022 Festival for which Fierce delivered a major public realm project Key to the City by artist Paul Ramírez Jonas. Aaron also helped instigate the new English performing arts showcase: Horizon.