“Tahi-tagning Pagsibol (New Life from Sewn Patches)” a group exhibition by KASIBULAN is exhibited from March 07 – 31, 2022 at the NCCA Gallery.

Tahi-Tagning Pagsibol (New Life from Sewn Patches) is the featured art exhibit for Women’s Month at the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Gallery in Intramuros. Manila. For the KASIBULAN group of women artists, stitch-work side by side with painting, printmaking, and digital technology proved to be a most effective art project that helped in responding to personal and social crisis during the pandemic lock-down. In isolation, they embroidered, carved, printed and painted while keeping close touch with their co-members through group chats and zoom workshops. These constant activities saw them through with faith, love and hope while in processes of family caring, medicating, healing, declining, recuperating or dying of loved ones. This exhibit mirrors today’s Filipinas rising together to become whole again from lives shattered by a two-year pandemic that has disrupted daily living, health, livelihood, well-being, relationships, and mobility. 

The exhibit is in two parts: Collaborative Installations at the Open Gallery are by four women artists who sew and facilitate projects for women empowerment in the communities. In Tahi-Tagning Kwento, mixed media artist Yllang Montenegro together Amihan National Federation of Peasant Women and Rural Women Advocates (RUWA) , and Buklod Tao, created installations of hand-sewn aprons printed with plant and flower pigments they have learned to used for artistic livelihood. In Tahi- Tagning Kabayanihan, quilt and fabric artist Jing Sinay-Ocampo worked with a community of women who sew masks and PPEs in her barangay in Pangasinan, and her network in Payatas in Quezon City. In Tahi-Tagning Paghilom, Alma Quinto recognizes the importance of women caring for community advancement through four tapestries she hand sewed in collaboration with caregivers. Tahi-Tagning Pelikula by multimedia artist Eden Ocampo, digitally patched selfie-videos of her KASIBULAN colleagues and their collaborating crafters doing their needlework, embroidery, painting, and sculpting.