Idas Losin, belonging to the Truku and Atayal Indigenous people of Taiwan, uses her background as the foundation of her work. Austronesian languages originated among Indigenous people in Taiwan, and through sea migrations over millennia their reach extended as far as Rapa Nui/Easter Island, Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Madagascar, where related languages are still spoken. This migration constitutes the most extensive expansion of a language family outside of Western colonialism. After several waves of colonialism and cultural oppression, Taiwan’s historical significance as the linguistic homeland of hundreds of millions of people—who today are spread across a third of the world’s surface—is largely ignored. This geographical context, with Taiwan at its core, is also in ideological and political competition with one that places the island within (and at the margins of) the Sinic world. The artist’s work is thus part of an effort to reconnect with her roots and to contribute to the shaping of contemporary Taiwanese (Indigenous) identity. Losin decided to travel to the various parts of the world where Austronesian languages are spoken and to paint her impressions, subverting the position of the European colonial explorer and privileged traveller as the customary observer and depicter of the world. Her site-specific mural welcoming the visitors to the exhibition combines several previously existing works to create a singular, fluid landscape. Here, visual references from worlds that seem disparate collide, connected by threads of language and culture which criss-cross oceans as if they were a current.

Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), co-produced by Idas Losin and HKW, 2024–25

Work in the exhibition: In my world (2024–25), acrylic, 1.53 × 19.54 m. Courtesy of the artist