luna beller-tadiar

Artist's statement:

 

I am an artist making my home on the bridges between worlds. As a racially and gender ambiguous body moving between languages, cultures, and places, I’ve embraced the body as polyglot and chameleon. I excavate a body language made up of fragments: remnants of lands, communities, and machines. Via an intense, mercurial, and emotive presence, my work commits to a bodily poetics that re-worlds these fragments, tracing them to the social-material worlds they emerge from, and playing with those they might create.

As a queer, mixed-Filipinx artist I take inspiration from queer collaborative fabulation; from postcolonial Filipino practices of mimicry and re-use; and from contemporary interfacing of the body and technology. I draw from my childhood with an anti-imperialist feminist mother, and from my personal history of deep pain and deep joy in being this body, to seek to understand the daily ways marginalized people make their lives (and bodies) amid violent imperial structures. My movement is grounded, androgynous, and gestural; incorporates video-games and emojis; and draws from my practices of Aikido, Capoeira, (queer) Argentine tango, and contemporary dance.