Cruising
THE SEA WITHIN

Launched in the 2023’s edition of the Taipei Arts Festival, Cruising is a new program hosting international curators with their artists to do research residency with/in the festival to rethink how curating could be a method of performing the art ecosystem between festival-making and international collaboration. By ‘cruising’ and applying ‘cruising’ as a curatorial strategy, this program acknowledges Taiwan as a part of the Pacific ecosystem and engages the making and network of the Taipei Arts Festival with broader curatorial discourses and practices in the Asia Pacific region and beyond by foregrounding the notions of the south and archipelago. To inaugurate Cruising, we present Jogjakarta-based dance curator and dramaturg Helly Minarti with her proposed concept The Sea Within.

This artistic project explores the idea of the sea within us, as a way of anchoring the unanchored realms surrounding the notion of island and archipelago. It intends to tread on the possibilities of landing and oceaning as a method; as a way to imagine the ever-floating seaways with its ebbs and flows of the tides and waves that transcend the usual geopolitical framework of seeing and experiencing the ‘world’.

Inspired by the Icelandic word innsæi [read: in-saa-ee], which is translated into ‘the sea within’, the word also connotes the borderless nature of our inner world, a constantly moving space of vision, feelings and imagination that go beyond the literals. Within its linguistic origin, both meanings evoke the complex realms surrounding the ideas (and realities) of the island and archipelago that are at the center of inquiry for this project. Helly invites the four artists whose works, interests and politics seem to be aligned with the spirit of innsæi. Together, we turn our gaze to Oceania in search of a connection between past and present to our respective contexts that goes beyond the familiar border of nation-states. Thus, we deliberately inch away from the complex rendition of “Asia”, which has been echoing in the field of performing arts for some time, in the hope of discovering a subversive way of exploring a certain trope that is close to us and yet, so foreign.

Date/Time: 27 August 2023 (Sun.) 15:00-17:00

Location: 11F Studio 1, Taipei Performing Arts Center

*This sharing is conducted in English.

*Online registration

Curator: Helly Minarti (Indonesia)

Helly Minarti (Jakarta/Yogyakarta, Indonesia) works as an independent curator whose last curatorial project, Jejak-旅 Tabi Exchange: Wandering Contemporary Asian Performance (jejak-tabi.org), focuses on finding the contexts and connections among certain cities in Asia in terms of identifying and understanding each diverse artistic practice. This particular experience and encounter inform her to expand the exploration, from cities-bounded onto the realm of island/archipelago. Her critical reading on the subject just started a while ago, so The Sea Within is intended to be a space where she takes the plunge into the matter at hand, with the company of the four artists selected.

Artist: Ginoe (the Philippines)

Ginoe (Leyte/Makati, Manila- the Philippines) also known as Hubineer in online spaces (b. 1995) is a poet, artist, graphic designer, printmaker and community organizer, born in Leyte island of Visayas archipelago, and currently based in Makati in Manila, the Philippines. They work with found objects, scanography, textile, painting, drawing and printmaking to come up with their visual and conceptual assemblages. Ginoe’s works are hinged on the material culture of their locality (books, printed ephemera, personal archives, residue of consumption, folk religious objects) and transmutes them to form works that are tinged with cheeky defiance.

Artist: Watan Tusi (Taiwan)

Watan Tusi, is a Truku descendant from Swasal village. Tai originates from the Truku language meaning “to see or to observe” hinting to Watan’s gaze and contemplation towards traditional indigenous culture. The question Watan Tusi asks himself: “What could indigenous music and dance be more apart from traditional ceremonies and touristic performances?” After spending two years in field research of the movement of foot scripts on the land in daily life, Watan Tusi documented over 60 “Foot Scripts”. New physical and dance forms are evolved from the deconstruction and reconstruction process in every creation. The works of TAI Body Theatre are inspired by indigenous literature, body and music, as well as the status of indigenous people, environmental conflicts, and related issues.

Artist: Sayaka Uehara (Japan)

Sayaka Uehara (Tomigusuku City, Okinawa/Tokyo - Japan) Born in Okinawa in 1993. She exhibited White Seasons in 2016. The project attempted to capture the landscapes of Okinawa as an extension of someone’s life, rather than a symbolic interpretation of the existing image of “Okinawa” created by the market of consumption. In 2019, she held the exhibition The Others, a series that inherits the works from the White Seasons at two venues in Tokyo and Okinawa. In 2020, she received the 36th Higashikawa New Photographer Award from the Higashikawa Award which is renowned as the Town of Photography in Japan, for the work The Others. In 2022, the continuing series was published as a photo book Sleeping Tree from AKAAKA.

*Artists are listed in alphabetical order of the last name.