Filmmaker and visual artist Kiri Dalena gently interrogates past and present atrocities in her most recent multimedia installation project, traversing transit points across tragedy, memory, and history.

Dalena constructs a grid of 24 found slogans engraved on gray marble slates spanning a wall of the gallery. Sourced from photo-documentation of protest actions from the past and present, the otherwise transient texts of dissent are simultaneously entombed and memorialized. The artist creates funerary slabs for words that have their own weight, denoting realities which the establishment would rather see buried and forgotten.

Dalena deliberately references the realities of our time by resurrecting texts and scapes that are marginal, fleeting, and even ironically picturesque. In a video installation projected on the floor, the artist shares documentation of routes passed by in the aftermath of tragedies: roads, highways, and landscapes shot in transit to, from, and around sites that she has previously visited as a human rights advocate—places where massacres and forced evacuations have taken place. All roads here lead to grief, indiscernible though it may seem.

Dalena’s central pieces for this show are fragmented figures, bodily evidence of some transgression. The story behind the fallen forms tells of the continuity between the artist’s works. A life-size terracotta figure produced by Dalena for an exhibition at the Lopez Museum began to crack, ending up as a dismembered form. Later on gathering the fragmented pieces, she collaborated with wood carvers from her hometown of Pakil, who then translated them into wood sculptures for the Sung-duan show at the National Museum. This time around, Dalena translates the forms produced in wood into cast marble. This translation of the accidental into the intentional and the use of marble as a medium signifying the act of memorializing points to the artist's own resolve to remember—daring those who enter to commit to memory the realities referenced in Dalena’s haunting works.

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