Tiyan Baker: Mouth Mnemonica

What is a mnemonica? This is the first question posed by Tiyan Baker’s solo exhibition Mouth Mnemonica, closing this weekend at the newly revamped Newcastle Art Gallery. From a quick google, I learn of the Mnemonica Stack—a memorised sequence of playing cards popularised by Juan Tamariz that allows magicians to perform impossible-seeming card tricks by knowing the exact position of every card in the deck. Naturally, this led me down an internet rabbit hole of mnemonic devices. There are the classic examples, which make use of acronyms (e.g. Never Eat Soggy Weetbix to recall the order of the cardinal directions), chunking (e.g. breaking your mobile phone number up into smaller groups of three or four), and memory palaces (e.g. picturing an imaginary room where you can visually “store” information). Then there are more niche examples such as the Guidonian Hand or the Person-Action-Object (PAO) System (you can look these up for yourself). And if that’s not enough, there’s even a mnemonic for spelling “mnemonic”: Memory Needs Every Method Of Nurturing Its Capacity.

Mnemonica, then, are curious things: in a manner that seems simultaneously mechanical, architectural, and digital, they are ways of structuring knowledge and memory in a way that makes them accessible for easy retrieval. What then is a mouth mnemonica? What might it mean to shift the locus of mnemonics from the brain to the messy aperture of the mouth?

The central work of the exhibition is the three-channel video installation, To tangle together like coursing water (video) (2026). Baker has used an intraoral 360-degree camera to capture footage from inside her and her mother’s mouths as they conduct a poetic exchange in Bukar (accompanied with English subtitles). Bukar is the language of the Indigenous Bidayǔh Bukar people of south-western Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, and of Baker’s mother. Baker was born in Australia and, like many of the second-generation (including myself), grew up away from her ancestral lands and without learning her mother’s language. I am reminded of the linguistic phenomenon known as the “Three Generational Loss” theory, which posits that language is lost by the third generation as a result of assimilation pressures. The first generation (immigrants) maintains the language in the home; the second becomes bilingual or only partly fluent; and the third loses it. However, since 2019, Baker has been teaching herself Bukar with very limited resources, acquiring fluency mostly from a few books authored by elders in the Bidayǔh community, a Bukar-English dictionary, and a Whatsapp chat. The video gives us a unique kind of access to this intergenerational practice of language retrieval. Each of the horizontal screens display a different vantage point. To the left, the viewer is positioned inside Baker’s mother’s mouth. To the right, the viewer is positioned inside Baker’s mouth. We are quite literally viewing the world from the disorienting position of the back of their throats. If mnemonica are ways of framing the world, then, in the first instance at least, mouth mnemonics might allow us to see the world from a mouths-eye view.

This is not the first time Baker has placed the camera inside of her mouth. In mouthbreather (2023), a video work commissioned by the Institute of Modern Art and Nowness Asia for the online exhibition Now You’re Speakin’ My Language (2023) by Taungurung curator Kate ten Buuren, Baker’s ancestral lands are viewed entirely through her mouth. As her mouth remains mostly open throughout the entirety of the video, the script is displayed in green-coloured Bukar text and subtitled in English—we do not hear Baker herself utter these words, but rather a combination of her breath and diegetic sound as she walks throughout her family’s Bidayǔh village. Indeed, Baker’s mouth becomes an ancestral landscape.

In the newer work, Baker continues to probe the tension between oral histories and the written word. If in mouthbreather the mouth functions as an aperture through which to view the world, then in To tangle together like coursing water (video) the mouth appears solely as the vehicle for the mechanics of speech. In composing this poem, Baker and her mother drew from the part-ethnographic-part-literary monograph Poems of the Indigenous Peoples of Sarawak: Some of the Songs and Chants (1973) by the late American poet Carol Rubenstein, which was published by the Sarawak Museum. As the twenty-minute narrative unfolds, we listen to Baker and her mother take turns reciting an epic poem—one that “tangles together” lines from Rubenstein’s monograph, her mother’s memories of Bidayǔh village life, and Baker’s own reflections on the difficulties she faced learning the language while physically distanced from the land. In the middle, a floating 3D modelling mesh continuously morphs into various stone-like shapes—people, flora, fauna, infrastructure, and the local environment—as Baker and her mother interrupt the narrative by repeating to each other lists of singular words (e.g. sand fly, wild mango, durian, amaranth, pied hornbill etc.). Morphing in and out of these shapes, the same spherical mesh reveals the plasticity and transformative nature of language, all while maintaining a point of connection.

Behind the suspended screens of To tangle together like coursing water (video) is a sculptural work: a tactile mnemonic device developed by Baker that helps the artist and her mother recall the Bukar words they recite in the video. Displayed on an elevated steel-frame armature that resembles the structure of a Bidayǔh longhouse, the sculptural mnemonic device is comprised of a series of vinyl-sticker-decorated resin cast teeth (presumably Baker’s and her mother’s) and glass beads, which are threaded together with lyocell twill and nylon thread. The fabric drapes over the edge of the frame towards the floor, almost like a limp tongue or with the suggestion that the poem “rolls off the tongue.” Both the teeth and the beads are threaded in such a way as to imply a sense of rhythm, some sort of organising logic in the sequence of their arrangement. As I looked closely at the mnemonic device, I found myself wanting to know more: How, exactly, does it work? Yet, as I continued to linger, the more that demand for intimate, familial knowledge seemed to echo the violence of centuries-old extractive logics that put such knowledge on display. Baker seems to be acutely aware of this, anticipating the audience’s desire to “know,” and thus perhaps inevitably consume, asserting instead what Édouard Glissant might call a “right to opacity”—this cultural and linguistic knowledge remains hers and her mother’s to know.

While the video installation and the sculptural mnemonic device command the majority of space within the exhibition, earlier works by Baker are displayed on the perimeter. A series of four framed photographic prints titled nyati’ maanǔn mungut bigabu (2021) depict the verdant hinterland surrounding the Bidayǔh villages near the Bung Sadung mountain range and are split across two walls. For those familiar with Magic Eye (a sort of 1990s revival of Op-Art but freakier), one might immediately recognise the digitally manipulated and tessellated optical illusion of Baker’s prints as autostereograms. I cross and uncross my eyes, waiting for something to appear. Perhaps it is my short-sightedness or simply my failed attempt at deep, close looking (an art historian’s most-prized tool), but I don’t immediately see anything reveal itself. So, I readjust my distance, the angle at which I look at the landscape, and try again, taking off my glasses this time. I do this multiple times until the words from the title of the work appear, some more easily than others. Here, Baker suggests that if we retrain our eye to see the world in a slightly different way, then we can access another way of knowing. The words remain opaque, yet Baker (generously) grants the viewer access to them—if we only take the time to look closely.

Nearby is My mother’s tongue (2022), a kinetic sculpture that materialises in an upscaled replica of Baker’s mother’s mouth. The list of materials alone is impressive: foam, epoxy resin, fibreglass mat, sand, water-based epoxy, paint, mica pigment, green food dye, yellow food dye, titanium dioxide, water, miniature water pump, and duckweed. Projected onto the water of the pond (which fills the mouth cavity) are passages from the very first book Baker completed reading cover-to-cover in Bukar called Antung dengan Awan. The passages surface in neon-green light and remain immersed within the “pond” of her mother’s mouth.

In Mouth Mnemonica, Baker employs immersion as a tactic. As I made my way through the exhibition, I became bathed in a glow of fluorescent green light. The light emitted from a large window recess in the opposite wall, bleeding onto the floor, across the walls, and over many of the works on display. Here, Baker invokes the recognisable shade of neon-green reminiscent of old computer code (gamer-green or “Baker green,” if I can call it that) which appears as a kind of formal throughline in much of her work—think of the neon glow of her underlit keyboard in Personal Computer : ramin ntaangan (2022-23). As a direct “mirror” to the entrance of the exhibition, the void of the green-lit window simultaneously appears immersive while also gesturing elsewhere, that is, perhaps to her earlier works as well as the verdant hinterland surrounding the Bidayǔh villages near the Bung Sadung mountain range. Immersion, then, seems important in multiple ways in Baker’s work—not only the immersive effect of light, but also the idea of language immersion, and the literal immersion of the viewer in the mouth of the speakers (Baker and her mother).

Baker’s work refuses the loss of language, which is further evidenced in the smallest (and perhaps sweetest) work of the exhibition. Dental camera study with Toba (2026) is a single-channel video that plays on a tiny screen installed within a circular peach-coloured protrusion from the wall. It is situated close to the ground—toddler-height—and requires one to bend down to make out the looping video on the screen. As in To tangle together like coursing water (video), the footage is shot using a small dental camera; however, this is neither Baker nor her mother’s mouth. As the title makes clear, the footage in this work has been filmed by Baker’s young son, Toba, using a small dental camera that he placed within his own mouth. The footage is less controlled and more haphazard. The “shaky” nature of the footage itself is perhaps suggestive threefold: of the unstable grounds upon which language develops, of the inherent mutability of language itself as it continues to be transformed, and of the wobbly process that Baker is currently undertaking with Toba as she teaches him Bukar. Here the transmission of intergenerational knowledge reveals itself as the overarching conceit of Mouth Mnemonica.

In Mouth Mnemonica, language and place are bound together; almost as if the two are mutually constitutive. Yet, Baker’s exhibition also reminds us that, while place is inextricably linked to language (as other forms of cultural productions are), inheriting and practising language (and culture, more broadly) needn’t always or only be dependent on being located within said place—in Baker’s case, on Bidayǔh land in south-western Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. To be clear, this is not to say that critical endangerment of Indigenous languages is therefore productive for artistic and aesthetic investigation, but rather to bring our attention to the experimental and novel ways in which language—however fragmented and partial—might survive. Indeed, while Bukar remains an endangered language, Baker resists framing Mouth Mnemonica as an institutional rescue-effort. Baker seems conscious that contemporary exhibitions addressing linguistic disappearance frequently risk repositioning museums as custodians of Indigenous cultures. Baker’s exhibition quietly unsettles this framework. After all, the language we encounter here is not representative of all Bukar Bidayǔh people, but only that found in the mouths of Baker, her mother, and her son.