Tiyan Baker
mouthbreather
2023
A statement by the artist
Shot on Bidayǔh lands in Malaysian Borneo, mouthbreather is a meditation on Baker’s fraught but fulfilling journey re-learning her 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.mouthbreather is a reflection on the power of speaking language on the lands it arose from, and the relationship between naming, knowing and seeing.
Tiyan Baker
Tiyan Baker is an 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. Living far from native lands, culture and family, in the midst of the (re)colonisation of Borneo, she explores all that can be mistranslated or lost, and what can manifest in its place.
She currently lives and works on the Awabakal and Worimi lands known as Newcastle, Australia.
