ART BASEL HONG KONG 2026
Ciwas Tahos: Kindom

Curator/ Alfonse Chiu
In the Atayal folk tale of Temahahoi, a reclusive group of women once lived deep within the mountains of Taiwan. Communicating with bees, feasting on smoke and fog, and getting pregnant by gusts of winds that blew through the woods, these women were queer pioneers invested in multi-species co-existence from far before the notion of queerness even made it onto the island. Anchoring artist Ciwas Tahos' interest in finding alternates to and countering the heteronormative world, the story of the Temahahoi has served as a keystone of emblematic of Tahos' recent investigation into queerness and indigeneity through using her body as a vessel to trace linguistic and cultural experiences of displacement, so as to open pathways toward new ways of understanding, remembering, and relating. Through performances and mark-making, Tahos' attempts at locating a path to a old new Temahahoi is also a potent metaphor for the search for refuge undertaken by queer and indigenous people on familiar land overran with unfamiliar and unfriendly people.

For communities that understand nature as fundamentally queer, Tahos' current body of work 'Finding Pathways to Temahahoi' (2020–ongoing) serves as a touchstone in not just sense-making but also way-finding for possibilities of remediating historical injustices committed against human and non-humans alike: in 'Perhaps, She Comes From/To ____ Alang' (2020), a two-channel video proposes a connection between the death of bees that serve as keystone species and the infertility experienced by indigenous communities after exposure to colonial and imperial matters, drawing the intimate relations between bodies and lands into closer view, and exposing the desire for belonging in the wake of displacement. Meanwhile, in the later mixed media installation 'Pswagi Temahahoi' (2022), traditional environmental knowledge in the form of pswagi or Atayal light-reading emerges as a technique central to an effort to find Temahahoi by mapping the paths taken by native bees—the traditional guardians of the hidden land.

Previously staged in institutional contexts including the current Sharjah Biennial, Hawai’i Triennial, Stellenbosch Triennale, and Documenta 15, this new iteration of Tahos’ work superimposes the concept of kinship, a principle of relationality that is crucial to seeking justice for multi-species co-existence against the concept of kingdom as both a term in biological taxonomy and a polity marked by sovereignty over itself. Marking the first extrusion of Tahos' investigation into the space of a contemporary art fair, 'KINDOM’ is an invitation for audience members to consider how we may locate ourselves in an increasingly inhospitable world as well as who and what we may encounter and accompany in our collective search for a sanctuary, big enough for both the world we know and the world we love.