The Weight of Walking: Indigenous Temporality in Ljuzem’s Walk at the Taiwan Art Biennial 2022

This paper examines Ljuzem’s Walk (路之行走), a performance by the Paiwan choreographer Ljuzem Madiljin (路之·瑪迪霖), founder of Tjimur Dance Theatre, presented at the Taiwan Art Biennial 2022, Love and Death of Sentient Beings, at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. Wearing twenty-five kilograms of ceremonial regalia, she walks from the museum plaza through its galleries and lays the regalia on earth inside the company’s installation. I draw on firsthand observation and a June 2024 interview with the artist, writing as a co-curator of the Biennial and a long-term collaborator of the company. I argue that the walk folds ancestral memory, personal history, and present Indigenous life into a single embodied duration. Visitors may choose how long to stay; Ljuzem carries the weight throughout. This unequal demand on time links spectatorship to the gendered labor of sustaining family and company while carrying cultural responsibilities. Claire Bishop’s critique of dance in museums distinguishes the event from its exhibition framing. In light of decolonial museum scholarship, I read the performance as proposing relational repair. Its force lies in making other relations to time perceptible; its institutional consequences remain open.