Receding Triangular Square (RTS) is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between Virlani Rupini and Leon Tan. Commissioned originally for the Taipei Biennale 2012, the project used the mediums of conversation and moving-image to ’analyze’ colonization and decolonization, psychosocial trauma and repression, and potentials for constructing new assemblages of enunciation in Taiwan (Republic of China). Through an unsettling arrangement of sound, voice and moving images derived from on-location interviews, footage and archival material, the single-channel video installation invites audiences to explore Chinese and Aboriginal (indigenous Taiwanese) philosophies and practices of healing as well as the dominant (’official’) Euro-American mental health paradigm, and to relate these to the larger social and historical framework of Taiwan’s development as a post-colonial and capitalist state. RTS relays fragmented blocs of sensation, sense-knowledge, in uneasy relations to each other. In so doing, it mirrors orrelays fault-lines in Taiwan as a nation-assemblage, at the same time provoking the imagination of possibilities for new and more life affirming subjectivities, not only in Taiwan, where it was shot, but also wherever Rupini and Tan exhibit the work and extend it through conversations with different audiences and cultures.

(The text is by Leon Tan and Virlani Rupini)

Leon Tan (PhD, MHSc.) is an art and culture historian and critic,artist, educator and registered psychotherapist. He researches and publishes on contemporary art, public art, globalization, digital culture, social activism and mental health, and is a professional member of the International Association of Art Critics. He is the co-curator of the Art and Schizoanalysis exhibition and symposium.

Virlani Rupini (MFA) is a video artist based in Berlin. In 2012 she participated in the  Taipei Biennial, Cinelux in Genève, the 58th International Kurtzfilmtage in Oberhausen, Germany, the Berlinale Film Festival, Germany. In 2013, a group show at Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz, Austria, a solo show at Galleri Riis in Stockholm, a solo show in San Francisco, California, USA, and a solo show in 1335MABINI, Manila, Philippines. In 2014 she exhibited at Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden.