Jogjakarta-based dance curator and dramaturg Helly Minarti with her proposed concept The Sea Within, as part of Cruising, will return to the 2024 Taipei Arts Festival to present a work in progress with artists Watan Tusi, Ginoe, Sayaka Uehara and Densiel Lebang (in collaboration with Richard Kalipung and Daniel Pambudi). 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. Together, we turn our gaze to Oceania in search of a connection between past and present to our respective contexts 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, discovering a subversive way of exploring a certain trope that is close to us and yet, so foreign.
*Listed in alphabetical order of last name.
Helly Minarti, Indonesia
Guest Curator
Helly Minarti (Jakarta/Yogyakarta - Indonesia) works as an independent curator whose last curatorial project (2018-2021), Jejak-旅Tabi Exchange: Wandering Contemporary Asian Performance (jejak-tabi.org), focuses on unfolding the complexities of contexts and connections among certain cities in Asia in terms of identifying and understanding each diverse-, singular artistic practice at work. This particular experience/encounter informed her to expand the exploration, from cities-bounded onto the realm of island/archipelago by creating a space for inquiry - as articulated in the curatorial project of The Sea Within - which initial one-month residency-based research was presented as the inaugural Cruising edition of Taipei Arts Festival. After almost a year working remotely as a group, the one year project proves to be barely scratching the surface, so Helly hopes for the possibilities to pursue it further through different spaces and articulations.
Ginoe, the Philippines
Artist
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.
Watan Tusi, Taiwan
Artist
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.
Sayaka Uehara, Japan
Artist
Sayaka Uehara (Tomigusuku City, Okinawa) 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.
