Curatorial Text
Hiraya Manawari
Co-curated and Co-written with Anna Bernice delos Reyes
Seeds of Memory: Migration as Ceremony, Survival, and Renewal
Abu Dhabi Art 2025 Gateway Exhibition
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For this year’s Abu Dhabi Art Gateway Exhibition, Sa Tahanan Co. presents Hiraya Manawari: a curated selection of artworks from contemporary Filipino artists in diaspora; a response to Seeds of Memory - Migration as Ceremony, Survival, and Renewal, curated by Brook Andrew.
Foregrounded by reflections on the effects of colonialism and capitalist labor export, our presentation is a hopeful invitation to understand the complex emotional experience of migration, offering a deeper purview into the pluralistic Filipino migrant and diasporic experience.
In a futile attempt to capture this feeling, we encounter the ancient Filipino phrase hiraya manawari. Hiraya Manawari is a phrase with no singular, direct, literal translation into English. Hiraya refers to a deep, inner vision of one’s aspirations; Manawari is an earnest plea for that vision to become a reality.
We refer to this ancient yet familiar phrase, for it bears the weight of hope and pain: a juxtaposition of emotions that yearns for something still tenuous, uncertain, and completely dependent on fate or grace for its manifestation. For many immigrants, departing from home carries a bittersweet mix of nostalgia and hope for a better life elsewhere.
In Hiraya Manawari, we present Filipino contemporary artists from across geographies, contexts, and stages in their practice, who look at singular, personal narratives of migration and offer their own poetics of remembering this vision.
Their artworks become manifestations of inherited memories, physicalized in passed-down recipes, healing rituals, fragments of collected textiles, archival images and letters, and speculative stories of the genesis of our migration history. As a collection, they glance through Filipino immigration from the 1500s to the present day. At once, they acknowledge that migration is a personal, emotional experience, not a sociological phenomenon studied in academia.
Tethered by the coexistence of joy and sorrow, celebration and mourning, past and present, Hiraya Manawari is a hopeful insistence on plurality in our narrative as a diasporic community, defying the idea of the Filipino migrant experience as a monolith.✶