mouthbreather
mouthbreather (2023) was commissioned by the Institute of Modern Art and Nowness Asia for ‘Now You’re Speakin’ My Language’, curated by Kate ten Buuren.
“Tiyan Baker probes the tension between orality and the written word in her journey to reclaim language in the experimental short filmed entirely form the inside of her mouth.
In Tiyan Baker's mouthbreather, we witness the world from behind the artist's teeth as she walks across her Ancestral lands and mouths, breathes, calls forth and gives form to a buried language. mouthbreather explores the possibilities of language revival and how language shapes and changes our relationship to land and ways of knowing the world.
The film was shot on Baker's mother’s Bidayǔh Country, on a trip to Malaysian-ruled Sarawak, Borneo. In an introduction to the experimental short, Kate ten Buuren, curator of Now You're Speakin' My Language shared, "Since 2019, Tiyan has been relearning her mothertongue Bukar Bidayǔh. By placing the camera in her mouth, Tiyan considers how we wrap our tongues around words to make sounds that we’ve never made, but are held somewhere deep within the memories of our bodies and the land.” - introduction to mouthbreather on Nowness Asia online platform
Watch the film here.
Artwork details:
digital video, 13:09 minutes
mouthbreather, 2023, installation view, Singapore Art Museum. Documentation by Singapore art Museum.
mouthbreather, 2023, still from video, courtesy of the artist.
mouthbreather, 2023, still from video, courtesy of the artist.
mouthbreather, 2023, still from video, courtesy of the artist.
mouthbreather, 2023, still from video, courtesy of the artist.
mouthbreather, 2023, still from video, courtesy of the artist.
mouthbreather, 2023, still from video, courtesy of the artist.
I live and work on the lands of the Awabakal and Worimi people.
This sovereign land was never ceded.
The land I live on always was and always will be Aboriginal land.