Battered suitcases. An ironing board adorned with the ray of the Sorrowful Mother. A crumpled blouse inscribed with the word “dignidad”.  These are some of the objects that compose the installation Filipina DH by Imelda Cajipe Endaya. First exhibited at the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Gallery in 1995, the work evoked the brutal conditions that Filipina migrant domestic workers faced at the time. Women who were often treated as invisible, save for when their most sensational stories rocked the media. 

In the late 1990s, as part of an exhibition organized by the Asia Society, the work traveled from New York to Vancouver to Bombay to Perth. It makes its homecoming for Endaya’s second solo show at Silverlens Manila, Kahapon Muli Bukas. After roughly 30 years, Filipinos are finally seeing it again — its disappearance and return a mirror to the stories of the women it honors. Its current iteration compels audiences to question: Where are these women now? How are their children, who also bore the brunt of their sacrifice? Have the families whose sufferings became public spectacle ever seen justice? 

Kahapon Muli Bukas situates Filipina DH alongside Endaya’s more recent mixed media works, which tackle issues ranging from the struggle against religious oppression to the catastrophic effects of climate change in the Philippines. Here, women across the country’s vast history take center stage: a precolonial priestess, a transwoman, a grandmother. Endaya refuses their erasure from grand narratives. These women act. They labor. They fight. They guide. They exorcise. They heal. They hope. The migrant domestic workers of Filipina DH stand on the shoulders of these women. Collapsing centuries in one space, Endaya moves us to close the distance between ourselves and the neglected Filipino women of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Imelda Cajipe Endaya’s (b. 1949, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Manila, Philippines) artistic career has been devoted to contemporary social issues from the viewpoint of women empowerment. In her art, she has dealt with issues such as cultural identity, human rights, migration, family, reproductive health, globalization, children’s rights, environment, and peace. Her mixed media paintings and installations are richly colored and textured with crochet, laces, textiles, window, flatiron, suitcases, papier mache craft, and found objects from home and popular culture. In so doing she developed a visual language that is distinctly womanly and Filipino.

Endaya is also a writer, curator, and art projects organizer. She co-founded KASIBULAN, a collective of women artists, and Pananaw: Philippine Journal of Visual Arts, an initiative in contemporary art discourse. She was affiliated with the Philippine Association of Printmakers from 1970 to 1976 and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts Committee on Visual Arts from 1995 to 2001.

Endaya’s works are in the collection of Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Philippine National Art Gallery, National Gallery of Singapore, Metropolitan Museum Manila, Okinawa Prefectural Museum, and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Among her awards are Ani ng Dangal from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in 2009, Republic of the Philippines CCP Centennial Honors in 1999, Araw ng Maynila Award in 1998, and the CCP Thirteen Artists Award in 1991. An art educator in the non-formal set-up, she conducts lectures and art workshops.