(Tending) (to) (Ta): Ta Introduces Ta av April Lin 林森

4 – 9 October, 17.00-00.00, Färjeterminalen, Stadshamnen 26

Ta Introduces Ta is an excerpt from the feature-length (Tending) (to) (Ta),  a narrative-led speculative fiction film which follows an exchange of internal letters between two protagonists who imagine one another across parallel dimensions. The work grounds itself in ‘tā’, the monosyllabic sound which in Mandarin Chinese encompasses all third person pronouns: 他 (third person male), 她 (third person female), and 它 (more-than-human lifeforms and objects). As these multiple genders and modes of being are all pronounced ‘tā’, the word ‘ta’ has in recent years been reconfigured and adopted as a gender neutral pronoun in colloquial contexts in Mainland China, in queer spaces and beyond. In the film, Lin casts ‘ta’ as an infinite cosmic entity with a proper noun Ta, who exists across universes and is present in all beings and matter.

Direction, animation, sound design, voice by: April Lin 林森

Composer: Valeria Radchenko

Audio post-production: I. Nakhla

Title graphics: Sai Tripathi

Commissioned by Obsidian Coast.

April Lin 林森 (b. 1996, Stockholm — they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator investigating image-making and world-building as sites for the construction, sustenance, and dissemination of co-existent yet conflicting truths. Working across moving image, performance, creative computing and installation, they dream & explore & critique & fret & catastrophise & imagine & play – for a collective remembering of forgotten pasts, for a critical examination of normalised presents, and for a visualising of freer futures as, of course, imagined from the periphery.

Interweaving strands of auto-biography, documentary, queer ecology, and new media, April Lin 林森’s works are topped off with an inevitable garnish consisting of the other matters dialoguing with their brain and heart during the making process of each piece. Uniting their genre-fluid body of work is a commitment to centring oppressed knowledge, building an ethics of collaboration around reciprocal care, and exploring the linkages between history, memory, and interpersonal and structural trauma.

Their work has been shown at the Museum of the Moving Image New York, Sheffield DocFest, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, the V&A Museum, HOME, Malmö Konstmuseum, LA Filmforum, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Manchester Art Galley, MADATAC, Arebyte Gallery, Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, NOWNESS Asia, and 4:3 Boiler Room.