PTT Space is delighted to present Tiyan Baker: Matriphagy, the artist's first solo exhibition in East Asia. Featuring new and recent moving image, photography, and installation works that draw on Baker's long-term investigations into the techno-politics of indigen(eit)y and traditional knowledge systems, this presentation marks the gallery debut of a rising star in the Asia Pacific whose works have been shown extensively in Australian and Southeast Asian institutions.

A form of matricidal cannibalism that is found in certain animal species, the phenomenon of matriphagy represents a gesture of ultimate sacrifice that sees the maternal body becoming a willing source of nutrients for the survival of her offspring—through her death, life emerges. As an extended metaphor for how indigenous cultural knowledges and cosmologies are passed down through matrilineal and matrisocial practices of resistance despite the looming forces of epistemic and political violence from colonial and imperial regimes, the concept of matriphagy is also a useful heuristics for understanding how Baker triangulates her own negotiation of her heritage as both an indigenous Bidayǔh woman of Borneo and a settler on the lands of Aboriginal Country, and the inevitable contestations between colliding schemas of identity and society, embedded within each forms of relation to land, life, and language.