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Tindahan Sa Tahanan Co.
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When The Typhoon Ends
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Exhibition 01
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DATE:
25 - 26 OCT 2025
Alserkal Avenue
Tindahan
Tindahan
Sa Tahanan Co.
LOCATION:
DXB, UAE
Tindahan Sa Tahanan Co. Zine
Sa Tahanan Co.
Exhibition
October 25 - 26
Warehouse 46
Alserkal Avenue
Commissoned by
Alserkal Avenue
Curated by
Anna Bernice delos Reyes
Augustine Paredes
Production Manager
Jam Moreno
Printing & Install Support
Gulf Photo Plus
In the Philippines, the tindahan or sari-sari stores are vital quotidian elements of our urban social fabric. Often family-run and a protruding extension of a home, tindahans compact plenty of essential groceries into a few square meters. Beyond its criss-cross wire window hang single-use sachets of everything from coffee to shampoo: dangling above reused jars filled with candy, cigarettes, and biscuits. On the wall lies a shelf filled with every canned food and instant noodles you can imagine. Each can be bought, in small quantities, with a few coins.
Its presence in every street corner make them potent neighborly sites of gathering, often the place where neighbors converse and linger over assorted snacks and soda sipped off a plastic bag. Though its utility is a mirror of the Philippines’ economy (the average Filipino barely affording food and everyday needs beyond the daily), the tindahan is a cultural icon of everyday Filipino life, its architecture and visual language embedded in our contemporary.
Like the export of Filipino labor abroad, tindahans have become cultural exports to cities with high concentrations of Filipino migrants. For the diaspora, tindahans are more than grocery stores: they are places of encounter for kabayans, momentarily easing homesickness through purchasing sentimental, imported Filipino foods.
In this exhibition, nine Filipino artists based in the UAE, UK, Italy, Qatar, and the Philippines create a communal portrait of experiences and relationships with the tindahan. Through photography, digital collage, sculptural installations, and film, the artists respond to the notion of the tindahan as a site of memory, source of food, and emotional nourishment.
Tropical Futures Institute (IT/PH) interprets the visual merchandising of tindahan signboards and store fronts through a large-scale digital collage that adorns the exhibition front windows, each ‘sachet column’ a digital visual reference or symbol. Adjacent, artist duo Assi Abogado and Nathaniel Enriquez (UAE) present a sculptural food installation that ruminate on Filipino food preservation practices and the economic logic of tingi (purchasing single-use goods) as embodiment of resilience and longing. Clyde Gabriel (UAE), Laxmi Hussain (UK), Carina Santos (UK), and Pyong Sumaria (UAE) present a series of still-life photographs that capture their personal grocery lists as Filipinos living abroad. The grocery list here becomes a deeply personal collage of a migrant’s life, telling rich stories of nostalgia, longing, and gustatory memory. Jam Moreno (PH/QA) screens a docu-fiction film on his mother’s own sari-sari store in the Philippines, complemented by an installation of speculative writing on the iconographies of everyday sari-sari goods.
Assi Abogado
DXB
DXB
Jam Moreno
QT/PH
QT/PH
Pyong Sumaria
DXB
DXB
Laxmi Hussain
LDN
LDN
Clyde Gabriel
DXB
DXB
Carina Santos
LDN
LDN
Tropical Futures Institute
Chris Fussner
IT/PH
Chris Fussner
IT/PH
Tropical Futures Institute
Bea Cruz
PH
Bea Cruz
PH
Nathaniel Enriquez
DXB
DXB