Starting with this inquiry based on the epistemology of image, Negative Horizon, the 5th Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition (2016 TIVA), explores how the historical trajectory of image movements comes about and intertwines with the contemporary experience of displacement. The venue of 2016 TIVA is located in Beitou District, which is a starting point and will serve as a referencing point representing the compressed hundred-year history of movement and migration taking place in Taiwan.  Setting off from Beitou, 2016 TIVA tries to connect this specific locale to the whole world, summoning the emotive agencies of the audience.

The title of the exhibition—Negative Horizon— was derived from the title of Paul Virilio’s book published in 1984. In L’Horizon négatif, as a philosopher, Virilio discusses the violence caused by the newly-formed trinity of speed, image and modernity. By replacing the philosophical articulation of negatives with the material history of photographic film, 2016 TIVA attempts to question what the smooth visual experience symbolizes, wondering if it represents certain kind of efficiency without obstacle or the abyss of unsatisfied desire. The term “negative” is a word with multiple meanings, referring to passiveness, negation, femininity as well as an essential vehicle to mobilize image— the celluloid film which has played a vital role in the materialized process of appearance. The term “horizon” embodies the dynamics within the liminal space between the heaven and the earth, which is conditioned by the correlation between the perspective of the spectator and her/his circumstance of the surroundings; this term also bringing a sense of mobility embodied by the economic and political exiles, which result from contemporary geopolitics in conjunction with the disruption of citizenship caused by human trafficking beyond political borders. Negative Horizon thus stands for those invisible scenes that dwell opposite to, behind, or underneath the normative visibility, especially when these transnational/transregional voyages gradually become a part in the lives/life of the modern time, expanding our vision, understanding and feelings and at the same time transformed into underlying and legitimized exploitation.

2016 TIVA intends to follow the theme of the exhibition— “mobility”—from different dimensions closely. Twenty-seven foreign and domestic artists/artist groups, including the invited ones and the finalists from the international open call, participate in this exhibition. What follow are the brief introduction of some artists and their works:

KAO Chung-Li, the pioneer of Taiwanese image art, converses with La Jetée, Chris Marker’s classical omnibus film produced in 1962, via his work, which criticizes the collusion between image, the empire and the capital. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and YANG Jun separately but coincidently choose two Asian directors—Edward YANG and Kar-Wai WONG—to deal with the alienation and diaspora in the young metropolises (YANG’s Taipei and Wong’s Hong Kong). Similarly, dealing with the aesthetic of films, CHENG Ran, the video artists, composes a 467-min moving image to pay his attribute to films. John CATES hijacks the image narration in the western films, interrupting the screen politics with glitch art in order to show the violence in the collective unconscious of American nationalism. Futoshi MIYAGI, Trinh-Thi NGUYEN, and Lucy DAVIS also support their theses with moving images files. With the narration loosening the formation of image, they reconstruct the relationship between image and memory politics.

  
Coping with the topic of historical amnesia, Asio Chi-Hsiung LIU, a documentary director, forces us to reconsider the forgotten and muted Penghu Vietnamese Refugee camp under the Cold War structure. Hong-Kai WANG connects people via workshops to reconnect the oppressed physical experience in the matrix of the “Sugarcane Song”, which was composed by Sugarcane Farmers' Association during Japanese Occupation. Tita SALINA and Irwan AHMETT, Indonesian artists, have concerned the Indonesian illegal migrant workers’ working experience worldwide, emphasizing the mobility of the oppressed under the structural violence. CHANG Chien-Chi compares his migration reality with the real condition before and after his children were born. Following his navigation and trajectory, he has collected lullabies wherever he has been. His photos interweave his collection of lullabies, giving birth to the stop-motion moving images with his personal feelings. Nadav ASSOR mobilizes images on the border between Israel and Palestine by surveying and mapping landscape. Akira TAKAYAMA presents Beitou Heterotopia,an intersubjective tour performance perceived by our auditory sense with the local specificity of Beitou. Both TAKAYAMA and ASSOR’s works harbour the anticipation that audience can accomplish the art pieces with their memories and physical experience.