PRESENTATION: Bhen Alan-Sometimes My Accent Slips Out

Bhen Alan has many identities: artist, scholar, queer man, Filipino immigrant. His textile works, which draw on the traditional weaving practices of his homeland, thread each of these various identities together and allow them to amplify and complement one another. They are his badges of honor, sources of endless inspiration. But Alan says that when he first left the Philippines for North America as a teenager, he wanted to leave who he was behind.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Cue Art foundation Archive

The exhibition “Sometimes My Accent Slips Out” builds upon Bhen Alan’s ongoing investigation of the banig, an indigenous form of mat weaving in the Philippines that, for the artist, serves as a memory bank in the face of personal upheaval, new territories, and shifting cultural landscapes. The exhibition parallels the practice of mat weaving with the sociolinguistic impact of migration and personal transformation. Alan reflects upon his own ancestry, contemplating the significance of the banig to everyday life, spirituality, and culture in the Philippines. These mats—which are used for sleeping, eating, gathering, rest, and ritual—serve as extensions of the individual self and collective heritage, as objects that mediate birth and death, celebration and mourning. They serve as a material legacy of resilience and community, with their forms and techniques passed down from weaver to weaver despite centuries of colonization, globalization, and foreign imposition. “Banig weaving does not start at the first fold of a reed over another, but with seeds that are planted and tended to until harvest […] the banig is entwined in a natural cycle of living and dying that is essential to human and nonhuman survival, a stark contrast to the ‘destroy, extract, exploit’ approach to the land’s resources in much of the West,” writes catalogue essayist Sasha Cordingley. “Taken altogether, banig is not just object, but a stand-in for a Filipino identity, which has firmly resisted the steamrolling of culture, memory, and tradition by colonial enterprises.” The “banigs” Alan creates are, in a sense, autobiographical. In emigrating from Cagayan Valley, Philippines to Canada and then to the United States, the artist struggled with his speech, compelled to code switch between accents and dialects in ways both subconscious and overt. Alan repositions the process of weaving as a proxy for this hybridity. In intertwining the material, the maker must balance the warp and weft of the mat, maintaining an even tension. In Alan’s banigs, he breaks and disrupts this grid, embracing inconsistencies and using his body as a loom. Pushing beyond tactile representations of identity, his practice is a testament to the dynamic craft of communication. Accent serves as the warp in the fabric of speech, influencing the texture and quality of spoken language. The desire to be understood and accepted within new communities often becomes a pursuit to countervail inherited accents with acquired ones. Alan rejects this notion. Working within an intricate grid, he embraces the errors and glitches that fracture its borders, and in the process, he creates new ways of seeing—and of embodying—what is in between. Through these explorations, the exhibition unravels the complicated legacies we navigate in an increasingly globalized world. Alan’s practice is a site of negotiation, a place of reconciliation between multiple cultural and social identities. He employs a variety of weaving techniques, presented in brightly-colored works that drape the gallery in palm, abaca, and coconut leaves from his homeland, interwoven with cattails and other materials from North America. Positioned alongside these large-scale works are “banigs” of pandan, “tikog”, and “buri” from his recent Fulbright fellowship fieldwork in the Philippines, during which he collaborated with weavers in various regions of the archipelago.

Photo: Bhen Alan, Installation view of Banigs 1-11, 2022-23. CUE Art Foundation-New York, 2024, Photo by Leo Ng, © Bhen Alan, Courtesy the artist and CUE Art Foundation

Info: Curator: Jade Yumang, CUE Art Foundation, 137 West 25th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 4/4-18/5/2024, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://cueartfoundation.org/