Sa Tahanan Collective: On Taking and Making Space Open Access

“For Filipino overseas artists in Dubai, being temporary laborers and practicing artists forces us to negotiate the existence of our labor-driven bodies with art-making, inclusion, representation, and identity-building in migratory places. Ours is an identity hyphenated by our day and night jobs. As we navigate Dubai as non-citizens, we tread in the in-between as cultural and labor producers, exchanging the taxation of our labor income for the taxation of our emotional labor in a place that isn't ours.”¹

So writes Anna Bernice delos Reyes, cofounder with Augustine Paredes of the Sa Tahanan Collective, a UAE-founded arts platform. “Sa tahanan” means “in my home” in Tagalog. As the name for a collective, it names a desire to explore manifestations of home by other means—nostalgia and remembrance, generosity, desire, consumption, and community. Within the context of a global Filipino diaspora that not only displaces labor but also alienates creative work from the economy of overseas employment, Sa Tahanan Collective exists to be a bridge between practicing Filipino artists and opportunities to showcase and advance their work.

Since starting Sa Tahanan in December 2020, delos Reyes and Paredes have organized various collaborations between the global Filipino diaspora and organizations and institutions in the fields of art and culture. Through art exhibitions, poetry performance programs in galleries and museums, and the creation of a digital community of Filipino creatives to exchange resources via WhatsApp and Instagram, Sa Tahanan seeks to make Filipino artists more visible in the Gulf. Sa Tahanan aims to empower Filipino creatives to take their work into shared and public spaces of exhibition, humbly following the footsteps of the Filipino street art collective Brown Monkeys, who have pioneered the prominence of Filipino creatives in the UAE's art scene.

This issue of Critical Times features two commissions from artists affiliated with the Sa Tahanan Collective. Anna Bernice contributes a poem exploring the immanence of home, meant to be read firstly in Tagalog, with an English rendering provided as a translation for non-Tagalog readers. Meanwhile, UAE-based photographer Preschelle Ann Bigueras shares a set of photographs of different modes of appearance captured in the UAE.

You can learn more about them at satahanan.co.

Kapag ako'y nakatalikod

Anna Bernice delos Reyes

When I have my back towards you

Observations on Shared Spaces

Preschelle Ann Bigueras

Note