River Lin (TW): My Body is a Queer Library

Conceived and devised by artist River Lin for the framework of Shortlist LIVE of ANTI Contemporary Art Festival and the Kuopio City Library, My Body is a Queer Library is work composed by a series of live actions such as dance, story-telling, workshop, fashion show and other acts in an actual library.

A library is a cultural, educational and scientific institution that organize and collects knowledge production open to the public. While a contemporary library today has also functioned as a cultural centre, performing cultural collectivity to engage with community members through events or public programs has been as well taken into account. In this context, the artist wonders what a queer library would look like when a library goes live through living bodies as a temporary library within an existing spatial structure of a library.

My Body is a Queer Library will be bringing together a mixed group of Europe or Finland-based performers as a durational takeover to open up discussions and question what makes a library, what makes a library queer, what a queer library look like, and how ‘queer’ can facilitate our practices and understandings of acknowledging our bodies as a container and collection of of knowledge, education and everyday life.

Concept, choreography, visual design & artistic direction: River Lin
The venue of the performance is Kuopio City’s Main Library.

River Lin (TW)

River Lin is a performance artist working across the contexts of visual art, dance and queer culture through making, researching, and curating. He stages live works in gallery settings as choreography, installations, encounters or situations to speculate notions of heteronormative construction, social engagement and performativity of mediums.

River’s work has been presented by the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Lafayette Anticipations, Centre National de la Danse (Paris), KANAL Centre Pompidou (Brussels), ANTI Contemporary Art Festival (Kuopio), Live Art Development Agency (London), M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), Asia Contemporary Art Week (New York/Dubai), Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa), 2016 Taipei Biennial, Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, Tokyo Real Underground Festival, and Liveworks Festival (Sydney) among others.

Born in 1984 in Taiwan, River lives and works between Paris and Taipei.