Do curved windows hold more light?　

ADAM 2023: three nodes, three prompts

Indranjan Banerjee (2023 ADAM observer)

The ADAM (Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance) Gathering 2023 starts off with an impressive architectural tour of the Taipei Performing Arts Center (TPAC) building, the mothership hosting this season of Taipei Arts Festival and ADAM; the first physical edition post-covid. The TPAC brings with it an architectural prowess that is unique - built with a metaphorical hotpot bowl embedded as the central feature of the building, the architecture brings in the ethos of the city and the island of Taiwan into the rubric of the building. It is an occupation with a national and global agenda, in pursuit of new directions, ready to incubate new ways of looking. 

It is in the context of the walkthrough, followed by a press conference that I meet most of the participants of ADAM; it appears different than what I imagined it to be when invited by River Lin, curator of Taipei Arts Festival and ADAM. Instead of a close roundtable of participants, it is a large cohort of artists, researchers, practitioners, curatorial delegates from across the globe representing various performing arts festivals, stakeholders, listeners, viewers and friends of the program, curators and programming team, and the two Observers of the program. I happen to be one of the Observers. 

The shared curatorial theme of both the Taipei Arts Festival and ADAM 2023 ‘Think Like an Ecosystem’ forwards ecological thinking in contemporary performance practice. Within this framework the human condition emerges in the foreground - through the lens of queerness, indigeneity, and the category of the non-human. The framework is also carefully placed within the discourse of the geo-political-cultural domain of The Global South. There is no doubt that the scope is broad, and it has to be if the urgency is to capture the contemporary human condition on a sincerely global scale - a lofty challenge that the ADAM program has embarked on. 

The programme structure of ADAM is dense with three main nodes - The ADAM Artist Lab, The ADAM Kitchen and the ADAM Assembly.

Node 1: Artist Lab

The proposition for the ADAM’s Artist Lab, the month-long collective residency program guest curated by artists Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) and Chen Chen is ‘Watering Intimacy’: perspectives on Queer Ecology. The affective standpoint is an act of plunging into fluid territories; the assertion is inherently boundary defiant. Twelve artists from Brazil, Paris, Switzerland, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Japan, Australia and New Zealand are brought together forming a dynamic cohort. 

Intimacy is awfully hard; watering it, tending to it, and providing sustained care to it for 5 weeks is even harder. Watering Intimacy as an instinct for the artists’ lab, demands solid grounds for holding. 

On Day 1 of the 4-day ADAM Gathering public program, a day-long sharing from afternoon to evening marked the culmination of the ADAM program. The sharing includes a marathon of performance acts devised by the artists-in-residence that reflected their collaborative and independent research. 

Each act was an affective proposition - they focused on the queer, the indigenous and the ecological condition and justice while simultaneously engaging with more nuanced ideas around divination, beauty, poetry, violence, acts of annotation. 

At the ADAM's Artist Lab, indigeneity, queerness and nature are proposed as methods. Queer ecology here is not limited to nature or identities and lived experiences of queerness and indigeneity. In addition, the lab transpires as a collective exercise in re-establishing a network of bodies and kinships as ecology. The performance acts as propositions, foreground acts of care - some nuanced, some more radical - the spirit of which we can hope to borrow to orient ourselves to and cope with the ecological condition. 

Node 2: Kitchen

The ADAM’s Kitchen program invites artists to perform their research through work-in-progress presentations where their ongoing research finds new grounds through new collaborations. Research sharing mediated through artistic production becomes a generative site. The three research based projects are based on the same curatorial thread of ‘Think Like an Ecosystem/ Queer ecologies’ running through the different components of ADAM - 

1) the first project Museum II: Ridden explores the potential relationship between disaster and dance which the artistic collaborators Leu Wijee (Indonesia), Mio Ishida (Japan) and Hung Wei-Ling (Taiwan) centers exploring body and readiness 

2) A Field Guide to Getting Lost in the Southern Universe, a performance lecture, reframes colonial travelog to connect historical archives and fictional writing in the context of the global south. The collaborators are two prominent Taiwanese visual artists Rikey Tenn, founder of the Nusantara Archive Project and multimedia artist Wu Chi-Yu

3) M(Other)hood: A Collective Lecture that queers Motherhood as Intrahood, a perpetual becoming than a singular identity - a collaboration by Scarlet Yu Mei Wah (Hong Kong/Berlin), Tung I-Fen (Taiwan) and Fan Xiang-Jun (Taiwan) that took the shape of a performance lecture in a playroom. 

Node 3: Assembly

In both the ADAM Kitchen and Assembly programs, the three curatorial inquiry remain prominent, with each project responding to one of the three prompts as lines of inquiry into- 

the ecological condition, 

the queer condition, and

the geopolitical condition - in particular the Global South

The ADAM Assembly is the active discourse building third node of the ADAM programme. Invited curators and artists articulate and position their practices - a mix of local and global, personal and institutional frameworks that simultaneously respond and emerge out of ADAM’s three core curatorial inquiries:

1) The panel Curating (with) Ecosystems considers the ecological as a curatorial method

2) Queering me, babe! - a round the floor conversation and listening circle (which I have been a speaker for) around queerness as a method towards artistic and institutional practices in the arts ecosystem.

3) Rethinking (Global) South - a panel discussion that reorients the Global South as an urgent cultural and political kinship. It is important to mention that the framework of the Global South that came across is largely from the vantage point of Taiwan looking eastwards, extending cultural coalitions to South-East Asia and then to Australasia.

The cultural re-mapping that we witness in the ADAM program is of political significance in contemporary times as it becomes testament to the shifts in the cultural tides globally. New artistic histories as palimpsest to the older ones are being shaped through initiatives like the ADAM. 

A Hyphenated Festival as Worldmaking

It is also significant that ADAM is closely aligned and integrated with the Taipei Arts Festival, more so in the 2023 edition. They have emerged as hyphenated programs. Both share the same curatorial thematic. The 4 day ADAM Gathering events are open to the public in largely similar capacities— as ticketed events under the umbrella of Taipei Arts Festival, where the audience can attend artist talks, panels, research and performance sharing, and drafts of the artist lab performances.

In conjunction with the Festival, ADAM Gathering co-presents a keynote talk Faivā Haka; Art of Cultural Action by Latai Taumoepeau, and ecological works as key performances – The Rite of Lobster by Chen Yu-Dien and Feng Cheng-Tsung; Sun & Sea by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Line Lapelytė; Louver/Shutter/Blinds/Hundred Leaves by Lee Ming-Chen, Bat Banquet by Ku Kuang-Yi and Robert Charles Johnson and Ocean Island Mine by Latai Taumoepeau, and Mt Jade is in Metamorphoses by lololol, Shin Hanagata and Wang Yu-Jun.

The ADAM Gathering 2023 also inaugurates Cruising, the new curatorial residency program of Taipei Arts Festival in conjunction with ADAM, where Jogjakarta based dance curator and dramaturg Helly Minarti with collaborating artists Ginoe, Watan Tusi, and Sayaka Uehara present their research on oceanic and archipelagic thinking as a performance in the last day of ADAM breathing in new directions in the overarching discourse of ecological thinking. 

Most importantly, both the Taipei Arts Festival and ADAM Gathering 2023 are entirely hosted in the iconic Taipei Performing Arts Center building, a site that becomes a crucible for an active cultural self-fashioning that is building certain kinships to re-establish self within a chosen collective responding to conditions of common grounds. 

The Taipei Arts Festival, ADAM and the TPAC building emerge as a prominent triptych recontextualising the cultural mosaic of the island and its kinship with the world. Inside the curved windows of the TPAC building, where crafted optics makes the Taipei streets appear like flowing rivers, a prism-like portal refracts urgent and emergent artistic discourse as socio-cultural re-orientation. 

Photo by Grace Lin, 陳柏宇