PostColonial Survival Kit

A group exhibition featuring visual artists Kimberley Arteche (US), Wilfred Galila (US/Philippines), Caroline Garcia (Australia), and Talaandig artists, Marcelino Necosia Jr. and Salima S. Agra-an (Philippines), PostColonial Survival Kit addresses the ways Pilipinxs have coped, survived, and adapted to the diasporic life that includes the challenges of racism, marginalization, and the ways that colonization has affected the interpersonal, the familial, and intra-communal relationships. Through sculpture, installation, and media art, PostColonial Survival Kit explores these adaptations and nuances within the diaspora.

Kimberley Acebo Arteche is an educator, cultural worker, and interdisciplinary artist working in photography, installation, social practice, and performance. Her work explores the hybrid cultures formed by technology, movements of immigrants in America, and the way movements through space and spaces has been affected by these two. Arteche received her BFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and MFA from San Francisco State University where she received the School of Art’s Distinguished Graduate award.

​She has been awarded the Murphy Cadogan Contemporary Art Award by the San Francisco Foundation, was Kearny Street Workshop’s Featured Visual Artist in the 2015 APAture Festival, and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Growlery. She has shown at East Tennessee State University and at the Wailoa Arts & Cultural Center in Hilo, Hawaii. She serves on Southern Exposure’s Curatorial Council and is committed to collaboratively creating decolonial practices within arts institutions, and creating visibility and providing resources for emerging Asian Pacific American and BIPOC Artists.

Wilfred Galila makes use of various media for storytelling and art making as a means of gaining a deeper understanding of postcolonial identity and culture through a transpacific diasporic lens, framework, and experience.

He collaborated with multi-awarded dance artist Alleluia Panis on the multimedia dance theater productions, She, Who Can See (2015) and Incarcerated 6x9 (2018), and the dance film She, Who Can See (2017) that was screened at the 2018 CAAMFest. Their latest collaboration is In the Belly of the Eagle: Man@ng is Deity.

Galila is the lead artist for Kodakan: Pilipinos in the City, a photography and media project that explores the diverse identities of Filipinos in San Francisco through time, exhibited at the San Francisco Main Library (2013-2014), the I-Hotel Manilatown Center (2015), and the A.C.T. Strand Theater (2015).

His films were screened at the 23rd and 26th annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

His writing was published in Beyond Lumpia, Pansit and Seven Manangs Wild, an anthology of prose and poetry by Filipino American writers, and in Milvia Street Art and Literary Journal of Berkeley City College.

Galila was nominated for a 2019 Isadora Duncan Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Visual Design.

Caroline Garcia is a culturally promiscuous, interdisciplinary artist. She works across live performance and video through a hybridised aesthetic of cross-cultural dance, ritual practice, new media, and the sampling of popular culture and colonial imagery.

Caroline’s practice is shaped by alterity. In her work, she centers peripheral bodies by adopting the role of shape shifter - sliding into the gaps between cultures, experiences of otherness and timeless clichés of exotic femininity. She takes an intersectional approach to contemporary dance (read: twerking), the politics of diasporic identity and representation through a lens of cultural piracy. She is concerned with reimagining forgotten choreographies, alternate ways of viewing images of the past that eschew classical myths, liminal spaces, and the mimetic capacities of the Filipina.

Caroline's recent projects include Flygirl, developed at The EMPAC Residency in New York, facilitated by Australia Council for the Arts in 2016/17, and performances at the Manila Biennale, Art Central Hong Kong, The Vera List Center for Arts and Politics NYC and DARK MOFO in 2018. Caroline was one of the eight artists curated into Primavera 2018: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and is the 2018/19 recipient of the American Australian Association’s AUSART Fellowship Award. She is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Arts at The New School (Parsons) in New York City in 2018-20.

Caroline has presented at The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, The Australian Center of the Moving Image, The Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, and Fremantle Arts Centre; as well as DARK MOFO, Channels: The Australian Video Art Festival, Proximity Festival, Underbelly Arts Festival, NEXT WAVE, The Festival Of Live Art, Junction Arts Festival, Sydney Contemporary and Art Month Sydney, among others. She has exhibited at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, the Center of Contemporary Photography, Carriageworks, The SUBSTATION, Firstdraft, BLINDSIDE, Blacktown Arts Centre, Penrith Regional Gallery and the Lewers Bequest, Cement Fondu, and Darren Knight Gallery, among others.

Marcelino ‘Balugto’ Necosia, Jr. is a multi-talented visual artist, musician, and instrument-maker, who grew up in the foothills of Mt Kitanglad fully immersed on his Talaandig culture. His strong influence would come from the gentle mentoring of his uncle, Datu Rogelio "Waway" Saway.  Despite the lack of formal education, the Talaandig School of Living Tradition prepared Balugto to participate in a much larger artistic platform. He received the prestigious 2010 Philip Morris Philippine Art Awardee. He has performed and exhibited throughout the Philippines, including the National Museum of the Philippines and internationally at the Singapore Biennale, Singapore National Museum, International Music & Art Festival-Nami Island-Korea, and The Lower Branch Gallery-San Francisco, CA. This intimate familiarity with the land and its people provides him with opportunities for artistic expression. He is appropriately nicknamed “Balugto” (Talaandig for rainbow), as his talents are a true kaleidoscope of various arts: visual, performance, and music. Balugto recorded an album which features his musical talents as a percussionist. He has been creating visual art since 1997, a practice that includes painting, sculptures, and constructing the best sounding drums in the community. Balugto prefers to use natural pigments, and pen and ink in his paintings. Mountain soil itself provides Balugto with a vast variety of hues for his palette. Balugto performs as percussionist with Datu Rogelio “Waway” Saway in national concerts and cultural festivals in the Philippines. His vision is to share the perspectives of the Talaandig tribe with the world.

Salima Saway Agra-an is from the Talaandig tribe of Bukidnon. She has been practicing art for 15 years. She uses soil, grass, leaves, latex paint, acrylic, and water color as her medium. She wants to tell the world about the existence of their tribe. Salima has worked with tribal elders to document the epic chants and mythologies of her people and layer them into her paintings along with Talaandig cultural practices, symbols, and metaphors. She has exhibited works in the Philippines and internationally, with notable exhibitions including with the Kalinawa Art Foundation, and the 2013 Singapore Biennial. Salima’s contemporary soil paintings are included in collections in both the Philippines and abroad.

Philippine Tribal Leader Datu Rodelio 'Waway' Linsahay Saway, of the Talaandig people in Bukidnon, shares and expands on tribal tradition as a composer, singer, instrument maker, and visual artist. A co-founder and teacher of the Talaandig School of Living Traditions, he has performed throughout the Philippines and Asia with his musical group, and with Grace Nono's Tao Music. He is the creative force behind the development of sustainable livelihood in tribal arts, including soil painting and instrument-making. A consummate innovator, he creates music instruments that are musically-sound works of art. He has performed  Lincoln Center, performing in the Grammy-nominated DEORO: THE BROOKLYN MANILA PROJECT, Featuring Dave Eggar and Chuck Palmer.

The Luggage Store Gallery

1007 Market Street,
San Francisco, CA 94103

Gallery Hours:
Wed - Sat, 12-5PM and by appointment