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4:00 PM-10:00 PM
Dealing in Distance Exhibition
Art Exhibit|By Various Artists
- Price Free admission
- Part of series: Dealing in Distance
As part of the festival, Dealing in Distance — Manila presents a multi-venue exhibition featuring installations, video works, and living archives by artists from Southeast Asia and the diaspora based in Southeast Asia and Germany. The exhibition takes place across six venues in Quezon City.
The exhibition is open to the public from 4:00PM to 10:00PM, from January 30 to February 1. Admission is FREE.
January 30 — Exhibition Opening and Art Walk
One of the festival’s main events is the exhibition opening, which takes place on January 30 and begins with a guided Art Walk, followed by the Opening Reception.Beginning between 4:00 PM, the walkthrough will start at NO Community-run Space and move as a group through several exhibition spaces across the city. Participants will spend approximately 15 minutes at each stop, offering an introduction to the artworks, artists, and key ideas behind the festival. The walkthrough is designed as a shared experience, encouraging participants to walk, listen, and reflect together as the exhibitions unfold across different locations.
Walkthrough overview and route:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/MbUduzNRe7GXmCuB7
The walkthrough will end at Gallery 119, where the Opening Reception will take place. This gathering marks the official opening of the festival and offers space to meet fellow visitors and artists, and to continue conversations around the works presented.
1st stop: NO Community-run Space
Minh Duc Pham — Fountains of a High Mountain, A Sweet Dream
A ceramic and sound installation reflecting on memory, loss, and the silenced histories of Vietnamese contract workers in former East Germany.
2nd stop: COCO Co-working Space
Sarnt × Krisanta × Universe —
Those Girls Work Hard Too / What Lies Between Our Broken Pieces? / Mamula-mula
A group of installations and video works exploring women’s labor, migration, online intimacy, and self-empowerment across cultural and geographic distance.
3rd stop: Kusina Sa Balangay
House of Dirty — Leave Your Kalat on the Floor
A living archive installation examining labor, care, and collective practice through ballroom culture.
4th stop: Chapterhouse
Jules Leaño — Muyas (Inheritance) and Iba ’Yon, Dagat (On the Other Side of That Sea)
A video and installation reflecting on family, language, and migration from the perspectives of both leaving and staying.
5th stop: Gallery 119
Thu Hien Hoang — Made in Rice
A three-channel video work responding to racism and stereotypes around Asian identity.
Zelin Seah — Will You Come With Us?
An installation reflecting on migrant labor, invisibility, and belonging.
The January 30 walkthrough introduces the festival’s central themes of migration, distance, and connection, and sets the tone for the exhibitions and programs continuing over the following days.
January 31 and February 1 — Exhibition Continues
On January 31 and February 1, the exhibition continues across the same venues without a guided walkthrough.Visitors may explore the artworks independently and at their own pace during exhibition hours (4:00PM–10:00PM). The same artworks and installations remain on view as part of the festival’s Manila program.
About the Artists
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Sarnt Utamachote is a Southeast Asian nonbinary filmmaker and curator based in Berlin (Germany). They are co-founder of un.thai.tled collective, platform for Thai diasporic artists based in Germany. They are also a part of the Cruising Curators collective. Their recent curatorial projectYoung Birds From Strange Mountainsat Schwules Museum Berlin (2025) focuses on queer artists and archives from Southeast Asia and its diaspora. Their research about exiled Cambodian artists in East Germany was featured at D21 Leipzig, MDBK Leipzig, Echoes of the Brother Countries (2024) at HKW Berlin, and at Kunst Raum Mitte Berlin. Their recent short filmI don’t want to be just a memory(2022–24) had its premiere at 74th Berlinale Forum Expanded.
This installation represents their ongoing projectIn Nobody’s Servicewhich took place already at Galerie Wedding Berlin (2024), and Thailand Biennale in Phuket (2025). -
Krisanta Caguioa-Mönnich, a single working mother, originally comes from the Philippines. After studying and working in the furniture, architecture, and interior design industry in the Philippines, she has been involved for the past eight years in the social sector. Krisanta is a language and cultural mediator (currently on sabbatical leave) at Ban Ying (Thai for “House of woman”) Counselling and Coordination Center and Shelter against Human Trafficking. Being also a freelance artist, she has been able to overcome her personal and professional coping difficulties being a migrant woman and working for migrant women*, who have experienced exploitation, violence, or human trafficking. Against the background of her own migration stories, she interprets and transforms the observable ways in which the women* deal with their migration experiences in paintings/artworks. The women* are included in the artistic creative process through photos and talks with them
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Universe Baldoza is a multidisciplinary artist and independent filmmaker deeply engaged in cultural and community-based art practices in the Philippines. Her video-installation work explores the intersections of sound, video, archival material, training datasets, text, and found objects. Her previous installation documentary called Marciano was part of the Japan Foundation's exhibition Modes of Liasions (Bangkok) and Almost There (Manila). In 2011, she was one of the filmmakers commissioned to create new work for the courtyard space of the Sharjah Biennale in 2011. Currently she is developing works around the topic of interracial dating and sexuality.
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Minh Duc Pham is a Berlin-based artist and performer. He studied Exhibition Design and Scenography at the University of Art and Design (HfG) Karlsruhe as well as Performance Studies and Design Theory at the University of the Arts (UdK) Berlin.
His artistic practice engages between visual and performing arts and explores identity at the intersection of gender, race and class. His works have been exhibited at the Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig, Stadtmuseum Dresden, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, the Vietnamese Women’s Museum Hanoi and most recently at the Museum Utopie und Alltag Eisenhüttenstadt and Kunsthalle Osnabrück. -
The House of Dirty is a local ballroom Kiki House that started from four friends who once had the same objective of finding a sugar daddy to fund their functions. In its formation, the house was brought together by the following principles: 1) the acceptance of one’s flaws or Dirt/ ‘Kalat’ as parts of an individual which should be embraced, accepted, and celebrated 2) advocacy for sex positivity and reproductive health 3) bridging ballroom culture and the queer Filipino experience.
Since debuting in 2021, the House of Dirty has become a household name in the Philippine ballroom Kiki scene. Its members have snatched trophies and made moments in the categories Realness, Face, Best Dressed, Fashion Killa, Bizarre, Body, Sex Siren, and Voguing/ Performance (Old Way, New Way, Vogue Fem). The house also organized functions such as The Kalat Kiki Ball and The Surftown Ball.
Currently led by Dirty Mother Ozkurr, a fashion designer, and Dirty Father Jaja, a performance artist, the house is composed of diverse individuals, whose presence and impact extend from the ballroom to the drag scene, dance, fashion, performance art, theater, and film. And in all of these, they have yet to succeed in finding a sugar daddy. -
Jules Leaño is a Scottish-Filipino artist based between Berlin and Scotland. With a background in experimental film and visual anthropology, her work explores the relationship between visual media, collective memory, and the various social and political realities we experience. Her work engages with the materiality of the moving image, utilising analogue film, digital video, expanded cinema installation and performance. Playing with the processes of destruction, preservation and reconstruction, her work explores the parallels that these images and processes may have of the reality they portray.
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Hiền Hoàng (b. 1990) is an interdisciplinary artist working between Germany, UK and Vietnam. Her practice moves across photography, moving image, installation, and scientific research, exploring how violence and displacement leave traces on landscapes and humans, reflecting on the tension between cultural belonging and distance, between data and emotion. Her current research returns to Vietnam to investigate the ecological and psychological legacy of Agent Orange, examining how the land continues to hold histories of trauma and transformation, and how art can open new ways of sensing these entangled memories.
In 2024, Hoàng received the prestigious Paul Huf Award, leading to her solo exhibition at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam in 2025. Her work has also been shown at VCCA Vietnam, Les Rencontres d’Arles, CentroCentro Madrid, and other international art venues, reflecting on the evolving role of photography in postcolonial memory and technological mediation.