Transmediale 2026 By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road: Compassing, Protocoling, Metaphoring
2026 January, Silent Green (Germany)
 

Curated by Juan Pablo García Sossa

List of works:

Tilapia Shrine (closed system for care and circulation)
Mixed-media installation: glass aquarium, speakers, audio mixer, amplifier, contact mic, photovoltaic transducer, ultrasonic mist maker, LED display, bubble maker, robotic toy fish, plastic aquatic plant, river sand; 2026. Dimensions variable.

Tilapia: A Berlin Tasting Experience
Tasting session featuring tilapia dishes ordered through Berlin’s online food delivery platforms.

Supported by the Goethe Institue Malaysia & the Goethe Institut Indonesia.

This installation was first presented at the transmediale 2026 alongside a tilapia tasting programme. Tilapia is a deceptively simple fish—nutritionally plain, economically powerful, and culturally loaded. It sits at the intersection of subsistence, aquaculture, migration, and aspiration. The installation functions as a compression device, holding multiple lines of inquiry that emerge from the artist’s long-term preoccupation with tilapia as a cultural and material figure.

Drawing from the artist’s own upbringing, shrines and aquariums are familiar features in many middle-class Malaysian Chinese households. The work takes the form of a syncretic domestic shrine paired with a tropical ornamental aquarium—a system of belief, care, and maintenance embedded in everyday life. Centered on tilapia, a globally farmed freshwater fish often associated with affordability and resilience, the shrine gestures toward how food, value, and survival are shaped by ordinary infrastructures, from aquaculture and cold-chain logistics to experimental closed ecological life support systems (CELSS), where tilapia is frequently cited as a candidate species for future space-based food production.

Using simulated aquatic life rather than living organisms, the installation stages a closed, aestheticised ecological system that mirrors both domestic aquariums and speculative models of sustenance. Here, tilapia becomes not an object of worship but a post-religious deity of survival.



Alongside the installation, a tasting experience explored how tilapia circulates through Berlin’s food economy. In the city, tilapia lives a “double life.” While African, Caribbean, and other migrant communities celebrate it as a heritage staple, the commercial food industry often obscures its identity by rebranding it as “perch” (Barsch in German) or other fish. To examine this dynamic, a tilapia sampling session was conducted by ordering dishes explicitly labelled “tilapia” through Berlin’s online food delivery platforms.

The tasting experience made the tilapia food chain visible by contrasting three distinct market identities. The first presented tilapia as a heritage staple: a whole fish served bone-in and celebrated by name. The second appeared as an anonymous commodity, sold as affordable oven- or microwave-ready meals renamed Buntbarsch (“Colourful Perch”) to sound familiar and local to German consumers. The third introduced a sustainable Berlin-grown tilapia, marketed as Hauptstadtbarsch (“Capital Perch”) and sourced from an eco-friendly aquaponic farm in Malzfabrik, Schöneberg.