Celebrate the opening of Mark Valenzuela's Bantay-Salakay exhibition.

Join us on Friday 1 August to celebrate the opening night of Bantay-Salakay by Mark Valenzuela – the 2025 Porter Street Commission recipient.

See 'Alingasa', a performance featuring Florian Cinco (Yan Yan); Clai Pasion; and Tating Distroso.

Our bar will be stocked by our sponsors Alpha Box & Dice.

–

In Bantay-Salakay, Valenzuela explores the offensive and defensive strategies embedded in our environments, and the role of power in determining whether these strategies represent resistance or oppression. Audiences will enter a hostile environment of spikes, weeds, walls, shards, and noise, in an installation that combines ceramics, steel, timber, textiles, sound, and more. This exhibition can be seen and experienced from multiple angles, through an installation layered with colliding ideas. Spiky ceramics, for example, in some cases reference the encroaching spread of introduced weeds, and in turn colonising and oppressive forces; while elsewhere in the installation they are a nod to anarchic resistance to dominating forces.

–

Feature Image: Mark Valenzuela's studio (2025). Photography by Morgan Sette.