Bio
Taiane Linhares is a painter and audiovisual contemporary artist based in Berlin. Her work explores memory, ecology, and colonial legacy through oil painting, embroidery, and audiovisual media. Born in a small town surrounded by the Atlantic Forest in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Linhares investigates inherited memories drawn from oral histories, family archives, and an extensive personal collection of photos and videos.
Ecological entanglements are at the center of her practice. In her creative coding project, “named after Men”—a database of plants named after male botanists—she creates a storytelling framework that examines how Western patriarchal culture is reflected in botanical science. Her recent paintings and writing further reflect on more-than-human kinship, specifically her family’s relationship with the endemic Coco de Macuco palm.
Her essay short film, “Parda,” offers a critical and intimate look at structural racism in Brazilian society and the ambiguities of growing up in a mixed-race family. Linhares’ films have been screened at festivals across Brazil, China, Ecuador, Finland, Poland, Portugal, Germany, and Sweden.
Artist Statement
I explore ways of inhabiting memory ecologies through oil painting, embroidery, and audiovisual media. I excavate my personal archive and family photographs to question how memory is shaped, edited, and obscured through images tied to specific ecologies. In these figurative scenes, living and non-living beings share a common ground, expressed through their gradual merging with the landscape. The canvas carries the heat and humidity of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, articulated through a warm, high-contrast palette.
The riverbed—a recurring motif in my work—permeates the narrative as a central metaphor for ancestry, memory, and loss. Family stories of floods and drownings inform and deepen my kinship with the river that runs through the village where I grew up. This connection surfaces through repeated gestures of looking: revisiting the river in archival photographs, observing it at different moments in time, and painting stones collected from its depths onto the canvas. Rather than treating memory as purely personal, my work considers it an ecological process—formed through rivers, soil, humidity, and material conditions that endure or disappear over time. The river becomes a site where personal lineage intersects with environmental history, raising questions about which forms of memory survive ecological transformation—and which are lost.
The figures in my paintings inhabit moments of solitude, proposing intimacy and stillness as alternatives to extractive relationships with the landscape. Gestures as simple as choosing where to stand for a photograph—midstream in a river or tenderly touching a plant—reveal how memory is actively produced in relation to the surrounding ecosystem. The work questions what it means to inherit stories tied to environments that are continually reshaped or endangered.