This exhibition derived from a discussion with artist Xyza Bacani about places of refuge. In Hong Kong, domestic workers live in the cramped quarters of their employer’s home where there is little to no privacy available. Where migrant workers carve out places of refuge are small, sometimes invisible, and fiercely protected - whether this may be on a Sunday dancing near the underpass, wearing angel wings at a self-organised festival for one hour, or carrying a Catholic handkerchief inscribed with the text of the Lord’s prayer.

For over half a decade now, Xyza Cruz Bacani has documented the migration narratives of Filipino workers that have left their own country out of love and necessity to provide for a family back home. We Are Like Air is an exhibition about those stories that are intensely personal and individual and yet also in many ways universally understood and recognised. This exhibition does not privilege dominant narratives of tragic suffering; which is perhaps the more conventional photo-narrative essay about migrant workers. This exhibition attempts to do is weave individual polyphonic narratives into a fabric of understanding and belonging.

In her book Stranger Magic, Maria Warner has referred to the fairytale genre as ‘arabesque,’ using a performative metaphor to incite the idea that patterned narratives are recurring and endlessly generated with arrangements that engages the previous theme but evolves out of the original pattern into a new story. This visual metaphor, related to ideas of material and aesthetic practice is analogous to not only dialogical forms of practice - where one story responds to another, and one utterance echoes the experience of another in a call and reflective pattern - but something more akin to polyphony,  a celebration of multiple voices that chime in together in cacophony as much as harmony in dialogic patterns.

The narratives shown here display universal stories about powerful women, and yet they are also intensely personal tales that create a dialogue and refer to each other and recur and echo in narratives to each other. The stories here are Xyza’s story, and yet they are also her mother’s. All of Xyza’s photographs, the stories that she documents are stories that interweave with each other into a larger tapestry - they echo, create a dialogical practice and a narrative with each other into a larger tale.

Publication:

https://artbooks.ph/products/we-are-like-air

Press Coverage:

New York Times PAPER ON INK South China Morning Post Tatler  The Culturist 文化者