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• Multimedia Lecture Performance One-on-one + Artist talk in English
• Militarization
• Queer Resilience and Liminality

• Fr., 12.09.2025, 21:00

Artist Talk following 'Retina Maneuver'

A queer love story in the shadow of war: Retina Maneuver weaves memory, identity, and longing into a visual elegy. The following artist talk will feature creator Ping-Hsiang Wang in conversation with producer, curator, and researcher Karen Ka Wan Cheung.

• 1Foto ©Elzo Bonam. Frozen in a beam of light, Ping-Hsiang Wang contorts in a moment of raw tension—caught between personal memory and the looming shadow of war.
• 2 Ping-Hsiang Wang, theatre director

In conversation with producer and researcher Karen Ka Wan Cheung, artist Ping-Hsiang Wang reflects on the emotional, political, and cultural dimensions of creating Retina Maneuver—a work shaped by the looming threat of war and personal identity. While Taiwan faces growing military pressure from China, public response has often been marked by emotional numbness and avoidance. It was only after Russia's invasion of Ukraine that the reality of a potential conflict began to resonate more deeply within Taiwanese society. This artist talk explores how personal memory, queer identity, and geopolitical uncertainty intersect in Wang’s work. Together, Wang and Cheung will discuss what it means to live and create under chronic threat, and how art can serve as both resistance and reflection. They will also consider how individual and collective coping mechanisms emerge in societies under pressure. What role can performance play in making visible the unseen, the feared, and the denied?

About the venue

TATWERK | Performative Forschung

TATWERK | Performative Forschung is dedicated to supporting artistic creation and connecting it meaningfully with the public. Over time, a dynamic network has formed around its multifunctional space—an ecosystem of independent artists and practitioners collaborating on ideas and projects. TATWERK offers audiences direct and immersive access to the world of the independent performing arts. Its program includes showcases, open rehearsals, installations, premieres, guest performances, and happenings—both onsite and in digital formats.
Beyond its physical venue, TATWERK also expands into public and unconventional spaces, becoming a nomadic performance site. In close collaboration with artists, it explores new and unexpected ways for their work to resonate, with a strong focus on participatory projects that engage local communities and foster neighborhood connection.

https://tatwerk-berlin.de/en/ 

About the piece

Retina Maneuver

Why is a Taiwanese military reservist so fascinated by Alicia Keys’ chart-topping hit Girl on Fire – a gay anthem he has sung countless times in karaoke bars? As he launches into the song’s climax, he is struck by a disorienting realization: He can no longer place himself in the timeline of his own life when this transformative song was released on September 4, 2012. A fanatical search through his digital archives unearths fragments of memory and confronts him with a past haunted by violence and destruction. In a live performance that assembles a visual monument entirely from memory, Wang wrestles with the fragility of memory – and the unsettling reality that everything he has preserved could go up in flames in an instant, consumed by forces beyond his control.  

About the artist

Ping-Hsiang Wang

Ping-Hsiang Wang (he/him) is a theatre director from Taiwan. His work has focused on how human behavior is being disciplined and modified through the evolution of materiality, the internet, systems, machinery, the environment, and commerce. Wang’s signature aesthetic is honed on the transference of normal daily landscapes into fantastic digital realities. He views theater as a perceptual vehicle for enabling new means of communication, and combines multiple performative elements using text, spoken language, sound, movement, live streaming video, objects, and scenography. His work posits narrative as a full sensory experience. In recent years, he has worked with diverse international theatre companies, including Agrupación Señor Serrano, Rimini Protokoll, and cmd+c company. Many festivals throughout Europe and Asia have presented his works, such as Romaeuropa in Italy, Grec Festival de Barcelona and TNT Festival in Spain, Festival de la Cité in Switzerland, and ¡Viva! Spanish & Latin American Festival in the UK.