Western Front presents moving-image exhibition Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon, July 13 to August 10

Filipina-Australian artist Bhenji Ra’s first solo exhibition in Canada, made in collaboration with a Tausug elder, documents a process of ancestral learning

SPONSORED POST BY Western Front

Bhenji Ra’s Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon. Design by Hannah Bronte

Western Front is presenting Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon, a new moving-image commission that marks Filipina-Australian artist Bhenji Ra’s first solo exhibition in Canada, from July 13 to August 10 in the Grand Luxe Hall. An opening reception will take place on July 13 from 5 pm to 7 pm.

Curated by Susan Gibb and Kiel Torres, Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon documents a process of ancestral, intergenerational learning. Its starting point is a ritual journey taken by Ra with her teacher and collaborator Sitti Airia Sangkula Askalani-Obeso. A Tausug elder, Obeso is a cultural bearer of the pangalay, a pre-Islamic dance of the Tausug people of the Sulu Archipelago and the eastern-coast Bajau people of Saba in the Philippines.

Falling into a dreamlike ancestral plane, Obeso and Ra develop the roles of student and teacher, mother and daughter. Whilst relaying the history of the pangalay, they explore the cultures and structures of movement practices in the Sulu Archipelago and their relationship to precolonial understandings of gender and identity, in particular the bantot or bayot relating to a trans-feminine person.

Video still from Bhenji Ra’s Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon.

A fabulation unfolds in which a celestial being that resembles a woman with wings and supernatural beauty, known across the Sulu as the Biraddali, reveals itself through dialogue and dreaming. Translated from Tausug and other Samal languages as “angel” or “skymaiden”, the Biraddali are believed to live in the sky and possess the power to change their form. As imagery unfolds, the pangalay dance and Biraddali become symbolically interrelated, with Ra interpreting the Biraddali as a trans, non-human figure and the originator of the dance.

Initially appearing documentarian in style, Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon develops languages of movement that connect vocabularies of gender with past and present colonial realities in the Asia-Pacific region. This continues Ra’s ongoing work of exploring performance methods that decentre Western dance conventions, and which engage critically with expressions of gender and sexual difference.

Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon runs for 30 minutes, and a new musical score composed by Tati au Miel accompanies the film.

More information about the free exhibition is available at Western Front.

Post sponsored by Western Front.

Bhenji Ra. Photo by David Mesa