Unknown inheritance | Tiyan Baker: Primavera 2023 artist

‘I’m not considered Indigenous by Malaysian state law because I have a white father.’
Find out more about the Primavera 2023 touring exhibition: www.mca.com.au...
Tiyan Baker is a Malaysian Bidayǔh-Anglo Australian artist who works with installation, photography, video, and sculpture. Her practice draws on historical research, language, digital processes, and material play to trace unseen relationships between words, place, and stories. Centring and celebrating her Indigenous heritage and culture in her works, Baker is also interested in things she has unknowingly inherited. Living far from native lands and amid the (re)colonisation of Borneo, she explores all that can shift, be mistranslated or lost, and what can manifest in its place. She talks more about what inspired Personal computer : ramin ntaangan in this video.
Using an artistic logic that is part salvaging and part speculation, Baker’s work engages in embodied storytelling and world-building to reclaim her vision of her Indigenous heritage in the face of intergenerational shame and disadvantage, systematic destruction of culture, and geographical disconnect from family and kin.
Primavera: Young Australian Artists is the MCA’s annual exhibition platform emerging artists living and working in Australia.
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