Ciwas Tahos (she/they), also known as Anchi Lin 林安琪, works with a quiet insistence. Ciwas makes body-centred work, queering performances, moving image, cyberspace, ceramics, kinetic sculptures, and field-based research.
Ciwas weaves together Atayal oral narratives and fieldwork with Elders, alongside archival and embodied methods, in their research-led practice guided by their queer non-binary lens. Since 2020, Ciwas has been engaged in her ongoing project, Finding Pathways to Temahahoi, a place where women and gender diverse people live deep in the mountains, sustained by steam, conceiving through wind, and protected by bees. This story ignited Ciwas, who conceptualised multi-mouthpiece ceramic sound sculptures as a way to collectively share breath and call forth Temahahoi through collective performance. These live performances with single or multiple ocarinas are also digitised in experimental film, photography, cyberspace, and sound scripts, taking over metres of canvas or temporally drawn on glass panes. Ciwas does not imagine a queer space into being so much as trace a passage towards one that has always existed, with a commitment to non-binary practice that extends beyond gender.
Her body appears as a site under pressure: negotiating Indigenous cosmologies alongside settler histories, holding friction between inherited knowledge and the systems that have repeatedly tried to overwrite it. In Raw ⇆ Ripened ⇆ Happiness, that pressure becomes literal. Ciwas uses the action of stamping her body, and her body as stamp, to interrogate the displacement of lineage and belonging wrought by colonisation. Kinetic machines forcefully stamp her with red ink, and laser-cut microaggressions become paper-based imprints when Ciwas smears her body red with ink to become the stamp. The connection to body, to belly, is a consistent form displayed within installations that hold space for performance and video works. Embodied transmission feeds directly into Ciwas’ work, where sweeping, gargling, tracing, attending, and sometimes covering recur as she repeatedly returns to rework and redevelop.