Taey Iohe

Biography

Taey Iohe works with a diverse range of media spanning moving images, text, performance, social practice and assemblage, often research-based works that resonate with political, cultural and linguistic resistance in botany, ecology, reproduction and the collective nature of human and non-human lives.

Taey’s work engages with intimate and relational moments in racialised gender materiality, evoking subversive voices from loss of language, both colonial and personal. Taey is working on the possibility of a collective imagination towards decolonising botany and social medicine through an Asian queer feminist lens. They hold a PhD across trans-disciplinary gender studies and translation studies through art practice, funded by Writing On Borders from John Hume Institute at University College Dublin.

Taey is also passionate about collectivising communities and nurturing co-growth and co-production for building solidarity through art-making and space-making. Becoming Forest (2020-2022, Breakwater), is a solidarity practice with Southeast and East Asian migrants, building care infrastructure through creative workshops through understanding the nature of the forest funded by Arts Council England.

They co-founded the Decolonising Botany Working Group with the support of the Liverpool Biennial (2021), challenging colonial entanglements of knowledge-making around nature and migration. Together they have presented a durational performance, A Refusing Oasis at Documenta 15 (2022). Taey also initiated the Care for Collective Curatorial group to explore a decolonising art curriculum and exercise a care practice while learning from each other. Taey was a Constellations Cohort in 2022, which is public art practitioners development programme at Up Project in partnership with Liverpool Biennial & Flat Time House (2022). They are currently a Resident in Somerset House supported by Somerset House Exchange Bursary.