Equal Love

Research background: Employing a generative archival artistic methodology, this project created new records of the marriage equality debate in Taiwan. Jacques Derrida identified how archives serve as repositories of unstable meaning. Building upon this work, Hal Foster cites three modes that contemporary archival artists use to recontextualise meaning, one of which is the constructed or generated archive. Other artists working in this generative archival mode include Jeremy Deller, Mary Kelly, Hito Steyrl, and Mark Dion. This project shares with these artists an interest in documenting social histories as archival records of socio-political contexts. In this specific project, this included a critical articulation of queer voices.

Research contribution: This project sought to reveal some of the hidden histories around the ongoing marriage equality and queer rights debates in Taiwan. In 2017 the Constitutional Court in Taiwan ruled existing marriage laws unconstitutional and gave parliament two years to amend them. This project took place during this period where I produced: a video artwork featuring interviews with politicians, activists, and community organisers; a series of protest placards made in collaboration with students from Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA); and, a print of a personal email response received from the Justice Department. Australia achieved marriage equality at the end of 2017, offering a unique opportunity for discourse and exchange at this time. The video work remains one of the most thorough records of leading figures on this issue, providing an extra-archival historical relevance.

Research significance: This body of work was produced on a residency at TNUA and exhibited at Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (KdMoFA) in 2018. KdMoFA was the first university art museum in Taiwan. It has a strong international reputation and holds one of the three major art biennales in Taiwan (the Kuandu Biennale). Previous artists showing at KdMoFA include Song Dong, Fiona Tan, Tiffany Chung and Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran. This work was subsequently exhibited at Spare Room in Melbourne in 2019.