Alliance Française de Manille presents Home Works, a collaborative four-woman exhibition by sculptor Julie Lluch, filmmaker Sari Dalena-Sicat, multimedia artist and musician Aba Dalena, and filmmaker-visual artist Kiri Dalena.

Home Works creates a space where four artists, bound by blood, reflect and represent how their individualities interact, shared histories converge, and artistic influences intersect.

The exhibition centers on their own works and strengths as individuals. Yet it also inescapably acknowledges and engages the reality of their being a family of artists in the Philippines, and the personal, symbolic, and aesthetic relationships that such kinship births.  

Incidentally, while all the four artists have long embarked on defining their own respective paths within Philippine contemporary art with their respective solo shows and projects, Home Works will be their very first time to hold an exhibition together.

The show features their recent works in film, sculpture, and installation, threaded together by a conscious engagement in dialogue and interaction with each other's creations.

For the exhibition, Julie Lluch creates large-scale cold-cast marble replicas of terracotta crucifixes produced and exhibited by Aba in her 1981 show, Pieta ni Aba. Aba Dalena, in turn, creates a series of terracotta-based dioramas based on archived posters of past exhibitions and personal photographs: images of Julie surrounded by her works; of Aba and her sisters playing together as children. By embarking on a dual process of enlargement and miniaturization, mother and daughter engage each other's works and memories and challenge conventions of originality.

A currently-pregnant Sari Dalena-Sicat produces and positions her self within a short film, Issa's Self-Portrait, which references an earlier self-portrait painted by Julie in 1972, while pregnant with Aba. Kiri Dalena, meanwhile, creates a series of installations and sculptures, presenting a contemporary take on images culled from her family's art practice in the 1970s and reflecting on the shifting dynamics of gender relations..

The exhibition “Home Works” by Julie Lluch, Sari Lluch Dalena, Aba Lluch Dalena, and Kiri Lluch Dalena opens at the Alliance Française Total Gallery of the Alliance Française de Manille, on Tuesday, October 5, 2010 and runs until October 23, 2010.