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Islands in the Wind

Islands in the Wind reimagines the island not as a place of isolation, but as a site of movement—shaped continuously by currents of air, water, memory, and exchange. In this edition of TAIWANfest, we turn our attention to the unseen forces that connect rather than divide, asking how cultures travel, transform, and take root across distance.
Wind, as both material and metaphor, becomes our guiding presence. It is intangible yet deeply felt: it carries languages across oceans, disperses songs and stories, and shapes the rhythms of migration and return. Through this lens, islands emerge not as fixed geographies, but as fluid nodes within larger networks—linked through histories of trade, colonization, diaspora, and resilience.
The festival unfolds as a living environment rather than a sequence of discrete events. Works drift across disciplines and spaces, inviting audiences to move with them. Sound, breath, and motion play central roles—activating installations, performances, and gatherings that respond to presence and participation. Here, boundaries between artist and audience, tradition and contemporaneity, local and global, become porous and dynamic.
At its core, Islands in the Wind embraces hybridity. It foregrounds encounters between artists of different backgrounds and practices, creating space for collaboration that resists singular definitions of identity. These intersections reflect the lived realities of island cultures, where adaptation and exchange are constant, and where belonging is shaped through movement as much as place.
The festival also acknowledges the precarity embedded within island life. Climate change, environmental fragility, and shifting political landscapes are not approached as distant abstractions, but as lived conditions that inform artistic expression. Rather than offering fixed narratives, the works presented here hold space for complexity—tracing both vulnerability and resilience, loss and imagination.
Structured through overlapping currents—memory, crossing, turbulence, and future-making—Islands in the Wind invites audiences to navigate their own paths. There is no singular entry point or conclusion. Instead, the experience is one of continual unfolding: a circulation of voices, gestures, and atmospheres that evolve over time.
In gathering these works, we propose a shift in perspective. To see islands not as edges, but as centers of relation. To understand culture not as something contained, but as something carried. And to recognize that, like the wind itself, the forces that shape us are often invisible—yet profoundly connective.
Islands in the Wind is an invitation to listen, to move, and to be carried.
Mobile - Scotland

ABOUT TAIWANFEST

TAIWANfest is an annual cultural festival exploring the connections between Taiwan, Canada, and the world. Through live performances, films, talks, culinary programs, exhibitions, workshops, and more, we examine the influences of history and human migration on today's culture.

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In 2016, TAIWANfest began a "Dialogue with Asia" series. Each year, the festival starts the conversation with a different culture, sharing untold stories of Taiwan in the global context. In 2022, TAIWANfest has embarked on a new chapter with the "Dialogue with the World" series.

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Toronto TAIWANfest is grateful to be held on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples, that is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. We acknowledge our privilege to be gathered here, and commit to work with and be respectful to the Indigenous peoples of this land while we engage in meaningful conversations of culture and reconciliation.

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