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I am Salmon, Oncorhynchus masou formosanus W.I.P. is part of Research Pavilion #5, originally organised in connection with the Biennale in Venice, the fifth Uniarts Helsinki Research Pavilion hosted a series of artist and artist-researcher. On 2023, the Research Pavilion was funded by Niilo Helanderin säätiö. It took place at HIAP in Suomenlinna in June with a tagline "Puzzled together".
She took off three green salmon scales and left it hanging in the ceiling of Gallery Augusta, where her
colored body transformed into the shape of woman who wonders in the same ceiling.
I am Salmon, Oncorhynchus mason Formosans, work in progress is an installation that is created in such aquatic layering of wet history behind the blue paint under Suomenlinna’s Augusta Gallery archways,ceilings, windows, doors.
Transparent skins of endangered species hooked and hung. Opaque colonial legacies washed off from Taiwanese high mountain river mixed in sulfury hot spring. A temporary whiteness, and fading tan. That “water”, a symbol of slippery (trans-)humanness carries her there. And there she is, in the Sápmi lands, diving into cross-species politics of gender. The work consists of vertical and horizontal movements that embody changes in the species’ migratory sensations for reproduction as well as its adaptability to salinity, temperature, climate change, and human interference.
How does a salmon feel submerged in air?
How is it that water is everywhere yet sometimes nowhere to be seen, only sensed and felt?
I am Salmon continues Lin Ni's long-term artistic research on Planetary Water, approaching water as a fluid medium that traverses national borders, species boundaries, and systems of knowledge. The work invites viewers to reconsider the continuously evolving relationships between humans and the more-than-human world.