mouthbreather, 2023, Single channel video, 4K, 13'26".
mouthbreather, 2023, Single channel video, 4K, 13'26".
mouthbreather, 2023, Single channel video, 4K, 13'26".
mouthbreather, 2023, Single channel video, 4K, 13'26".
Shot on Bidayǔh lands in Malaysian Borneo, mouthbreather is a meditation on my fraught but fulfilling journey re-learning my mother’s native tongue. Bukar Bidayǔh is an endangered Indigenous language spoken by approximately 50,000 people who live in villages at the base of the Bung Sadung mountain range in south-western Sarawak.
Through a process of re-learning to think and speak in language, opportunities to communicate through time emerge. Relationships with non-human entities are re-discovered, and ventriloquism becomes an Indigenous method of interspecies connection.
mouthbreather is a reflection on the power of speaking language on the lands it arose from, and the relationship between naming, knowing and seeing.
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Tiyan Baker is a Bidayǔh-Anglo artist who works with installation, photography, video and sculpture. Centring her Bidayǔh culture in her works, her practice draws on historical research, language, digital processes and material play to trace unseen relationships between words, place and stories. She was born and raised on the Larrakia lands known as Darwin and currently lives and works on the Awabakal and Worimi lands known as Newcastle, Australia.