stories we are told

In a solo exhibition at the Angad Arts Hotel, Ria uses books from Western classic literature and American textbooks as the framework for portraits inspired by family photographs. Ria is interested in memory—how we perceive, retrieve, and recover the past; how we transmit and translate the past into the present; how our present stories create our future. Language is a conveyor for memory, shaping what is remembered and brought forward. With American English established as the de facto national language in the Philippines, what was effectively erased; what future possibilities, eradicated?

 

Her conflation of personal memories with the stories we are told is one way she grapples with my transnational and post-colonial experience. In these works, she envisions a simultaneity of place and time, an attempt to cultivate meaning out of the fracture and invisible violence of cultural assimilation.