Residency Sharing: Ciwas Tahos in conversation with Khanyisile Mbongwa

Residency Sharing: Ciwas Tahos in conversation with Khanyisile Mbongwa

Artist talk by Ciwas Tahos

Wednesday, October 28, 2026
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM 
Location: SOLU, Panimokatu 1 (3rd floor), Helsinki

Join us to meet M-Cult residency artist Ciwas Tahos (Anchi Lin) on Wednesday, October 28th! For this Residency Sharing event, M-Cult partners with Bioart Society. Ciwas will introduce her work to the audience during an artist talk, in a conversation with Curator of Art in the Public Realm Khanyisile Mbongwa (Amos Rex). 

During their stay in Helsinki, Ciwas is gathering beeswax to extend her ongoing project Finding Pathways to Temahahoi. Temahahoi is a space from Atayal people’s story about a group of women and gender diverse people who live deep in the mountains of Taiwan, communicating with bees, sustaining themselves with steam, and conceiving through gusts of wind while sunbathing. Finding Pathways to Temahahoi is a multifaceted body of work that reimagines and seeks out the potential spaces. Through this work, Ciwas activates the cultural and geographic dimensions of queer belonging, extending beyond, around and through heteronormative confines to activate futures that reclaim, resist and bring together queer community. 

About

Ciwas Tahos

Ciwas Tahos, also known as Anchi Lin 林安琪 (she/they) is a Taiwanese visual artist of Atayal and Hō-ló descent. Ciwas uses her body-centred practice and Atayal worldview to weave together performance, moving image, cyberspace, ceramic sound and kinetic sculptures in ways that disrupt, queer, question, retell and reimagine desired futures. 

Recent notable exhibitions where Ciwas’ work could be seen include: Manif D’art 12: The Québec City Biennial (2026), Breaking Ground: Art and Activism in Indigenous Taiwan at the IAIA, Sante Fe (2026), the Sharjah Biennial 16: TO CARRY (2025), Hawai‘i Triennial (2025), ALOHA NŌ (2025), and the 1st Taiwan International Austronesian Art Triennial in Taiwan (2024). In 2025, Ciwas took part in Stellenbosch Triennial at Stellenbosch, South Africa, curated by Khanyisile Mbongwa. Ciwas holds an MFA in New Media Art from Taipei National University of the Arts (Taiwan) and a BFA in Visual Art from Simon Fraser University (Canada). Previous notable performances include Kyōto Experiment, Japan, BLEED festival at Arts House, Melbourne in 2024 and Liveworks festival for Performance Space at Carriageworks, Sydney and Taipei Arts Festival at Taipei Performing Arts Centre (TPAC), Taiwan in 2025. Ciwas also served as guest curator for the 2022 and 2023 ADAM Artist Lab at TPAC and has had her writing published in the Pacific Arts Journal, 2022. In 2023, Ciwas was awarded the Biannual Prize of the Pulima Art Award. 

From May 2026 till May 2027, Ciwas is based in Berlin as a DAAD Visual Arts Fellow with a studio at Küstlerhaus Bethanien. Ciwas’ visit to Helsinki between October 8–November 2 is field research for this fellowship. 

Khanyisile Mbongwa

Khanyisile Mbongwa is a South African born Finland based curatorial theorist and sociologist. Her work makes space for liberatory futures by positioning the creative as both method and medium for imagination and transformation. Her interdisciplinary curatorial practice draws from ecology, ancestral and indigenous knowledge systems, and contemporary art’s liberatory strategies. 

She collaborates with artists whose work engages land, water, cosmology, and the body as living archives—sites of territory, memory, and cartography. Mbongwa is particularly drawn to practices exploring the human condition, Black aesthetic time, trans-indigeneity, the Black radical tradition, BIPOC-queer imaginaries, and radical Black-Indigenous world-making. At the heart of her work is the philosophy of Care and Cure as ethical and relational tools for building possible narratives. From 2026, Khanyisile Mbongwa has been the Curator of Art in the Public Realm at Amos Rex.

Residency programme – In between: Wetland and Park Forest residency

Ciwas Tahos’ stay in Helsinki is part of In between: Wetland and Park Forest residency collaboration with Accton Arts Foundation and Art Site of Railway Warehouse and Zone Sound Creative (Taiwan). Programme invites one artist from Finland and one from Taiwan to immerse and work within local urban nature areas of the residencies. In September, Sophia Mitiku from Finland was working with Siangshan Wetland in Hsinchu.

Bioart Society

Bioart Society (BAS) is a Helsinki-based association working at the intersection of art, science and society. Established in 2008, the association has close to 200 members in Finland and other countries. Bioart Society is committed to developing, producing and facilitating activities around art and natural sciences with an emphasis on biology, ecology and life sciences.

Practicalities

Light refreshments will be served.

Please note that the Bioart Society is hosting Microbial Lovesongs Exhibition in the SOLU space on 19–30 Oct 2026. Ciwas Tahos’ talk will take place in the exhibition space. The exhibition can be visited at 12–17.

There will be a photographer in the event. Please let them know if you prefer not to appear in the photos.

Building Accessibility info

Entering: 9 consecutive stairs or a metal ramp leading to the building's front lobby. The front door has two 2 cm thresholds. From the far end of the lobby, you can take a spacious elevator directly to SOLU Space on the 3rd floor.Alternatively, the stairwell is on the right as you enter, and the space is up two flights of stairs.

Inside: The 3rd floor has one gender neutral toilet with a 2 cm threshold. A wheelchair accessible toilet is available on the 2nd Floor at Galleria Huuto and can be accessed via the elevator. There is no threshold to the main project space. The library room has a 3 cm threshold, and the door is 80cm wide.