5 Questions with Tiyan Baker
Tiyan Baker is a Malaysian Bidayuh/Anglo-Australian artist making video and installation art. Baker's practice engages with sites where contemporary crises around neoliberalism, neo-colonialism, environmental degradation and psycho-spiritual alienation are staged. She uses field research and documentary techniques to explore our emotional experience within wider socio-political contexts.
Originally from Darwin, Baker currently lives and works on the Gadigal and Wangal lands known as Sydney.
Still from Tarun (Tiyan Baker, 2020)
No.1
What was the impetus behind the making of Tarun?
I was interested in documenting and reflecting on my personal discomfort surrounding my return to my mother’s birthplace: my discomfort with communicating in Bidayuh [her native language], with living in the village and trying to make my own relationships as an adult.
Being a Bidayuh woman born in Australia, returning to the village is not an easy position to be placed in. I was also interested in looking at the intergenerational effects of migration and the idea of ghosts, haunting and death that surround migration stories. Ghosts are a subject of daily discussion in Bidayuh culture, and being in the jungle brings me a sense of being very close to the death cycle. In many ways, I just wanted to document a place that is very evocative for me personally.
No.2
In Tarun, you let viewers into your journey as you return to your mother’s village, where you learn bits of her migration history while picking up her native language, Bidayuh, along the way. How did you approach it, and what did you glean from this experience?
I approached the experience of making Tarun with really open eyes—I just observed and took notes of anything that interested me or felt important. It was a very intuitive process, much more so than the rest of my work, which is usually very research-based. Even now, I sort of find the work wordless; it exists in a space of total feeling.
While shooting and editing Tarun, I made a lot of decisions based on personal memories I had as a child in the village, or things I experienced as an adult during my residency that were impactful for me. I interwove all of these impressions with my mother’s own words to create the work.
It is wholly impossible for me at this point to say what I learnt from that experience. On the most basic level, I learnt many important things about Bidayuh history, identity and culture that are absolutely foundational for me going forward. This is information I didn’t have access to before my residency, as you cannot look up Bidayuh people online and learn much: you have to have access to people. So I spent a lot of time talking to people, sometimes in language, and taking what they said at face value. It was very important for me to understand what was happening for my mum’s people on their own terms, and that was a strong driver for me during my residency in Sarawak.
No.3
A sense of psychospiritual alienation comes through very strongly in Tarun. Can you speak more to this?
Firstly, the village and the surrounding jungle can be scary and confronting. I wanted to capture its natural beauty, but at the same time I wanted to bring out the horror it evoked to my outsider eye. Secondly, for me, my cultural heritage has always been a site of personal loss and shame. Bidayuh people are a very small ethnic minority who are managing the impacts of colonisation and capitalism on their language and culture. My mother was the only person in her family to migrate. I have never met any Bidayuh people in Australia outside my family, and until recently could not communicate with my family in Sarawak.
As such, there is a distinct sense of being culturally marooned, of being left behind while they move forward. I have been told by people in my life that I’m “basically white” and I have internalised that idea. I have come to realise that there are many complex reasons that I don’t look or act like a “real” Bidayuh woman, reasons that are much bigger than myself and speak to wider cultural displacement. I am still trying to find ways to move through that shame and find space for pride and celebration.
No.4
The short film is an evocative and poignant piece that explores diasporic ‘homecoming’ in a way that considers indigeneity in the Global South (in this case, Malaysia and Sarawak). This is often overlooked in mainstream conversations surrounding diasporic identity. What do you think can be done to illuminate these complexities further?
The fact is that there are a lot of ethnic minorities all over the world whose lives, cultures and existences are not acknowledged by the Anglosphere, and Bidayuh people are one of them. As an artist, my long-term goal is to create meaningful cultural conversations in the region. Through my practice, I really that hope in the future I can facilitate creative exchange and partnership between Australia and Indigenous peoples in Sarawak.
I’m also interested in exploring ideas that sit outside of western consciousness, specifically ideas that circulate about Southeast Asian cultures through online media and cultural discourse. I want to find places where these ideas meet the western gaze—highlighting places of tension or absurdity in ways that have the potential to show western thought to be hysterical, delusional or globally irrelevant. A lot of my work is preoccupied with this line of enquiry at the moment.
No.5
What will you be working on next?
I’ve got a very busy second half of 2020, with a lot of projects in the pipeline. Most relevant to Tarun though, is the work I’m making for the NSW Visual Arts (Emerging) Award. The work will examine the meme culture and associated hysteria surrounding the durian in western media, and positioning that alongside research I did while in Sarawak about the relevance of durian to Bidayuh culture and to my family in particular, who are durian farmers.
The durian that comes out of my mother’s region is some of the best in the world. It also economically sustains Bidayuh people in the area. Durian trees are passed down through the family, and Bidayuh language has many words specific to durian activities. I like thinking about this alongside Anthony Bourdain’s quote that after eating durian “your breath will smell as if you’ve been french kissing your dead grandmother”, or the myriad Youtube videos of white people trying durian and gagging. Through the work, I hope to tap into durian’s menacing power.
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