Belonging is a slippery concept\u200a\u2014\u200ait is a response to and an affirmation of the mutable concept of the home. At the heart of the exhibition was Comilang\u2019s Spirit House<\/em> (Phra Phum)<\/em> series (2022), a group of maquettes that she affectionately calls \u201carchitectures of belonging.\u201d Five of them are 3D-printed, made to look like speculative futuristic domiciles, and a single handmade one resembles a traditional Filipino home. These enigmatic models were inspired by spirit houses\u200a\u2014\u200ashrines for protective land deities and ancestors across Southeast Asia\u200a\u2014\u200aand interviews with Thai women living in Berlin who recounted memories and sketched layouts of their family homes in Thailand. Through the lens of the diaspora, the video How to Make a Painting from Memory<\/em> (2022)converged spiritual, familial, and communal ties between the women and the ever-shifting terrains of placemaking. Comilang deploys geospatial technologies as a conduit of connection, linking these memories to sites in Thailand; the drone-captured footage floats above the land like a spirit returning home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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$\"Stephanie-Comilang\"$
Stephanie Comilang<\/strong>
Spirit House<\/em> (Phra Phum)<\/em>, 2022, installation views, Gallery 44, Toronto, 2024.
Photos: Darren Rigo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Stephanie-Comilang\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Stephanie-Comilang\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Enveloping the gallery were wallpaper prints portraying men engaged in bayanihan<\/em>, a communal tradition in the Philippines of assisting neighbours to relocate by physically lifting and carrying their entire home to a new site. This collective effort of moving an abode parallels the interdependencies and mutual aid that carry diasporic individuals across time, space, and lands. Within Filipino households, bayanihan<\/em> paintings honour the nation, memorializing the people\u2019s unity, to uplift national history and cultural identity in the aftermath of colonialism. Bayanihan <\/em>expresses the scales of relational interdependencies, from the immediate, local community to the broader national imagination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Stephanie-Comilang\"$
Stephanie Comilang<\/strong>
How to Make a Painting from Memory<\/em>, installation view, 2024.
Photo: Darren Rigo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Bayanihan <\/em>served as the ideological scaffolding of this show, which revealed as much about spatial and temporal relationships as about memory and devotion to land. Through storytelling and sketches, the Thai women construct a communal sphere in which memories form the foundation of a home always in movement, a diasporic reality of carrying traces of homelands left behind. Within How to Make a Painting from Memory, <\/em>physical and emotional topographies unfolded, giving shape to the idea of home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As an art historian, curator, and writer, Noor Al\u00e9 examines how contemporary art intersects with geopolitics, migration, and land relations as it pertains to the Global Majority.<\/p>\n
Noor Al\u00e9, Stephanie Comilang<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gallery 44,<\/strong> Toronto
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