ayaw ko kalimti | don't ever forget me

To kick off the Meet Me at the Dinner Table Series, Excel Garay will have an interactive installation on view at the Halifax Central Public Library (5440 Spring Garden Rd) from October 2nd @ noon until  October 5 on view during library open hours.

Boxes are common materials associated with transnationalism, globalization of goods and services, as well as connection. Through this material, Garay seeks to convey unseen desires and longings within them. 

The tradition of Filipino balikbayan boxes is a common practice in diasporic communities. When translated, balikbayan means “to return to one’s home”. Members of the diaspora would often take large boxes and fill it to the brim with locally-sourced items to send to their loved ones . It would contain a wide range - from articles of clothing, chocolate, to cute kitschy trinkets, and more. These care packages would often get so large that it would occupy the entire family living space for months as it gets slowly filled. These packages become a stand-in for family care, an attempt for their presence to be felt by their loved ones. It may even act as a promise to return home knowing fully that may no longer be possible.

EXCEL GARAY (she/they) is a Filipina-Canadian diasporic settler occupying Mi'kma’ki territory in Kjipuktuk, Eskikewa’kik (Halifax, Nova Scotia). She is a curator, expanded-media painter, and community worker. Garay is interested in contradictions that lead subjects, like them, into complicity and complacency. 

Garay is an expanded-media painter, community worker and curator. She is interested in contradictions and paradoxes that lead subjects, like her, into complicity and complacency. She enjoys creating moments of hesitation as a beneficial form of affect that allows both the artist and viewers to better understand abject experiences of epistemic violence, fugitivity, time, and invisible labor. She employs methods of layering everchanging reflections and fiction onto difficult realities to create an extra-potential, surreal or intoxicating effect. Hauntology and Queer Phenomenology under a necropolitical lens foregrounds her practice. These materially manifest through paintings, immersive installations and interdisciplinary assemblage.