The home-grown arts and design center Warehouse421 dedicated to showcasing and nurturing creative production across the region, announces three dynamic exhibitions in January 2021. Float: Stephanie Comilang, an exhibition that features the works of artist and filmmaker Stephanie Comilang will open in conjunction with Mina Zayed: Reflections on Past Futures, an image-based exhibition presented in partnership with Gulf Photo Plus (GPP), that documents Mina Zayed through narrative photography. The Center also announced the third iteration of the 100/100 Hundred Best Arabic Posters, featuring the winning entries from the Biennial competition that celebrates graphic design in the Arab world. All three exhibitions are accompanied by a public engagement program and open on January 30, 2021.
Curated by Murtaza Vali, the exhibition presents two films by Berlin-based Stephanie Comilang that narrate the lives of overseas Filipino workers, bringing together documentary forms with references to science fiction.
Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise) (2016), follows three domestic workers in Hong Kong on their day-off. As they gather with peers in the city center to engage in rituals of self-care, leisure and community, claiming if only temporarily, their right to a city supported by their otherwise invisible daily labor.
The film attempts to document intentional gestures of care and community that help collapse the distance from home and soothe the heartache of separation from kin and culture, land and language.
The second film, Diaspora Ad Astra (2020) imagines the plight of Filipino seafarers quarantined offshore as a result of the pandemic. Interminably adrift, alone and unable to communicate with their families, tantalizingly close but ultimately unable to return home.
“Float: Stephanie Comilang” follows “The Stonebreakers” in the four part series “Substructures: Excavating the Everyday.” The series, curated by Murtaza Vali, investigates some of the infrastructures that shape the spaces, contours and rhythms of Gulf urbanism, revealing forms and networks so embedded within the Khaleeji quotidian that they are commonly overlooked.
Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital, and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at Transmediale Berlin, Ghost : 2561 Bangkok Video & Performance Triennale, S.A.L.T.S Basel, Tai Kwun Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Asia Art Archive in America, New York. She was recently awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.
On February 2, The filmmaker, Stephanie Comilang, will talk about her wider practice and the works on display in Float exhibition. The talk will be streamed online via Zoom at 7:00pm (UAE Time) To register visit www.warehouse421.ae
