Para Site

Bunny Cadag: ‘PORTALS’

Start
Feb 22, 2025
End
Feb 23, 2025

Venue

10B, Wing Wah Industrial Building
Quarry Bay, Hong Kong
Courtesy of Bunny Cadag｜圖片由Bunny Cadag提供

Sat 22 Feb & Sun 23 Feb 2025
5–6pm
Para Site, 10/F
In English
Registration recommended here
(followed by Closing Artist Talk for ‘The Embrace and the Passage’ on 23 Feb 2025)

 

PORTALS is the final commissioned work of ‘The Embrace and the Passage’, concluding the exhibition’s dialogue on shifting host-guest dynamics. This site-specific performance invites audiences to traverse both material and symbolic portals within the space through collective rituals.

Leading up to the performance, the artist hosted workshops in Hong Kong where participants crafted figurines that form a shared, transcendent presence along her own embodiment, Vera Maningning, whose name means ‘the light of truth’. Clad in white lace—a motif resonant in both Filipino households and Western rituals—she inhabits this figure to embody a spectrum of fluid identities. At the performance, through singing, shapeshifting, and healing practices inspired by pre- and postcolonial Filipino shamanism, she casts the foreign, trans body as a sanctuary of queer struggle and survival, overcoming the imposed borders of geography and power that continue to shape our world.

Participants are encouraged to bring a personally significant object to join the artist during the performance.

Residency and Programme Partner

Special thanks: Bethune House and all workshop participants

About the artist

Bunny Cadag

Bunny Cadag is an artist creating at the nexus of craft and performance; within the tensions and transitions between theatre, film as well as installation; and through the voice as a fundamental site of creative resistance and poetic reexistence. Her practice is anchored in indigenous gender diversity and contemporary gender equality, and shared through a trans approach to healing and song, alongside which she nurtures a decolonial composure toward folklore and tradition. Cadag’s performances are often participatory and community-based, amplifying voices of the marginalised while thoughtfully navigating defamiliarised shapes and spaces with compassion and generosity. In 2021, Cadag was a recipient of Para Site’s No Exit Grant for Unpaid Artistic Labour. Cadag’s work titled Munimuni was featured in ‘Myth Makers-Spectrosynthesis III’ at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2022). She graduated with a Certificate in Critical Practice in Contemporary Performance at Dance Nucleus Singapore in 2023. She lives and works Nasugbu, Batangas, Philippines.