LIVING AS FORM – The Local Version

Following the first installment Living As Form -The Nomadic Version, TheCube Project Space proudly presents its second installment: The Local Version. The Local Version consists of two projects rooted in localized contexts in Taiwan:Seventeen Years of Cultural Intervention: An Exhibition on the Black Hand Nakasi Workers’ Band and Will the Vole and the Egret Speak? created by the Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang and the Huiwei-based Natural Life Studio in Yunlin County.

Living As Form is a research-based audio-visual documentation exhibition, curated by chief curator of Creative Time of New York, Nato Thompson. It surveys more than 100 projects in the past 20 years that blur the line between art and everyday life, and that emphasize participation, dialogue, and community engagement. The Local Version from Taiwan is an addition to this research initiated by Living As Form archive, offering two distinctive socially-engaged approaches to cultural production.

Seventeen Years of Cultural Intervention: An Exhibition on the Black Hand Nakasi Workers’ Band

The seventeen-year-old Black Hand Nakasi Workers’ Band has been creating music collaboratively with workers and laborers and is one of the few activist groups who have grown together with their collaborators. Since it was founded in 1996, the band has participated in more than 300 rallies and demonstrations on numerous causes ranging from workers’ right, gender/sexuality equality, occupational hazards, environmentalism, migrant workers, anti-war, development-induced displacement and settlement to the houseless. Using music and singing as a political form of expression, Black Hand Nakasi empowers the socially disfranchised groups whom they work with. Over years, they are dedicated to exploring various possibilities of collaboration, and organizing workshops and events accordingly. This exhibition will feature the audiovisual and text documentations of their long-standing creative endeavors .

Will the Vole and the Egret Speak?

After working with the Huwei-based sugar factory retired workers in her 2011 project Music While We Work, Hong-Kai Wang turned her research onto the other facet of the same region’s sugar production─sugarcane farming. In collaboration with the Huwei-based research group Natural Life Studio, they invite the local sugarcane producers to join the project Will the Vole and the Egret Speak? It seeks to explore how the sugarcane producers’ socioeconomic relations inscribe in the use of the sugarcane farms and the corresponding production and vice versa, investigating the relationship between the making of local history and identities and that of local economy. As the research furthers, the project aims to create an archive consisting of various forms of human oral expression as a means of storing and transmitting knowledge. At this exhibition, they will share the work-in-progress documentations.

*An artist talk and a music performance by Black Hand Nakasi will be held on the 14th and 21st of September at theCube Project Space.