Cian Dayrit

Working in painting, sculpture and installation, Cian Dayrit’s practice explores colonialism and ethnography, history and archaeology. Born to a middle-class family in Manila, Dayrit’s works, as well as his socially-engaged and community-based projects, address struggles and oppression that are normalised as a systematic imbalance within a society that holds a colonial past. His mixed-media, cartographic, or counter-cartographic works, made with textile, embroidery and collage, propose a challenge to a monopolised framing of history and a spatial understanding of the world. His counter-maps depict a world map viewed from upside-down; a trajectory of displacement of the Ayta community; marginalisation of the peasant community of the Philippines, among others. By addressing the deeply imperialist and feudalist legacy of displacement and exploitation, Dayrit proposes an alternative mode of narrative construction, empowered through resistance and protest. Dayrit’s practice is a call for social quality and powerful visualisation of the struggle for land, history, culture and identity.