Performance by the artist
📅 Saturday, February 28, 6:00 pm to 6:50 pm
📍Galerie d’Engramme
As part of the Biennale, artist Ciwas Tahos presents a performance at Engramme, a center renowned for its commitment to printmaking and current practices. The artist invests the space to propose a sensitive and embodied intervention, where gesture, material and presence become the vectors of a direct dialogue with the public.
This performance offers a privileged opportunity to discover Ciwas Tahos’ work in a living, ephemeral form, at the heart of a key venue on the Quebec City art scene.
Free admission – please arrive a few minutes in advance.
In her series Raw ⇆ Ripened ⇆ Happiness, Ciwas Tahos uses her own flesh as material to interrogate the way the stamp was traditionally used in Taiwan to identify indigenous peoples and assign them to administrative categories. By actively erasing identities through this act, governments have brandished the officiality of red ink as a bureaucratic weapon with profound repercussions on the body. Whether in Canada with regard to aboriginal communities, or in Taiwan, where the Atayal people – from whom Tahos is descended – have also been subjected to displacement and cultural erasure, stamps have acted as extensions of state authority.
Tahos’ installation relies on machines whose hammers repeatedly strike her body, creating a printing device that transforms her flesh. Water is present everywhere, in the watery ink that marks his skin and in his body itself, which absorbs and then reinvests the moisture in other performative actions aimed at entering into communion with Atayal culture. By marking his own flesh with text, then transferring this imprint to the gallery, Tahos leaves a trace that persists in the space long after he’s gone.