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Sa Tahanan Co. platforms Filipino creatives and focuses on arts practice as a means of diasporic representation in creative and cultural industries.

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DATE:
APR 2025
Sharjah Biennial 16

Sa Ating 
Pag-Tahan


In Our Stillness


LOCATION:
SHJ, UAE




In Our Stillness | Sa Tahanan Co. at Sharjah Biennial 16
Filmed by John Gatapia of Seeing Things Studio



Sharjah Biennial 16
April Acts

April 19 2025
Africa Hall, Sharjah

Commissoned by
Sharjah Art Foundation
The name Sa Tahanan Co. is a play on the Filipino phrase, ‘sa tahanan ko,’ meaning ‘in my home’. This is an embodiment of the space our collective has been cultivating for Filipino creatives across all mediums, diasporas, and experience levels since 2020.

Overseas, the gathering of migrant bodies is a respite; a site of reckoning and endurance. The root word of tahanan, tahan, means to stop crying; to find comfort — referring to ‘home’ as a feeling of respite from struggle. Drawing etymological connections to our language’s pre-colonial roots, we find resonance in other languages. In Malay, tahan means to endure or withstand; in Javanese, it translates to stay or to hold; in Malagasy, its cognate mitàna translates ‘to carry, to keep.

These derived meanings serve as our curatorial invocation to invite Filipino artists and thinkers to reflect on their practice within the context of their migrancy. Sa Ating Pag-tahan / In Our Stillness is a series of performances that weave together dance, poetry, audio, and video work within the emotional context of tahan and its meanings— to stay, to keep, to hold, to endure.

Our gathering overseas is honoring the heritage and plurality of our narratives. In collectivizing, we continually ask — how do we strengthen the space that we claim? How do we carry new formations of community that both hold who we were, are, and becoming? In the journey longer and further away from the motherland, how do we hold each other?

This work is commissioned and supported by Sharjah Art Foundation for Sharjah Biennale 16’s April Acts program. Thanks to the biennale’s co-curator Amal Khalaf for the invitation.





a house is not a home by Memoryall — Martin Yambao & Yasha Estrada
Live visual projection by Memoryall
Paraluman by Augustine Paredes
In Our Stillness Zine produced by Sa Tahanan Co.
Dear Mama by Pauline Doctolero
MY TROPICAL BODY AND SEASONAL RHYTHM by Anna Bernice delos Reyes
LAYAG by Rei Co
The Sisterhood of Filipino Nannies by Ana P. Santos
Talk back with Amal Khalaf and Anna Bernice Delos Reyes

In Our Stillness | Sa Tahanan Co. at Sharjah Biennial 16
Photographed by Niño Consorte of Seeing Things Studio

Curatorial Concept
Anna Bernice delos Reyes
Augustine Paredes

Performers
Memoryall 
Pauline Doctolero 
Augustine Paredes 
Anna Bernice delos Reyes 
Rei Co 
Ana P. Santos

Technical Direction
Thomias Radin

Acknowledgements
Alexandra Chaves
Alexis Convento 
Salber Lee Williams 
Joanna Settle





Printed Matter
Illustration, Design, and Publishing
by Augustine Paredes