Kiri Dalena who deals with Philippine’s sociopolitical issues is an artist and a social activist. The title of her work <After Mebuyan>(2016) is a goddess of the underworld in Philippine mythology which controls life and death using rice. Mebuyan, which is a figure with multiple breasts, sits on a table for pounding and grinding rice with her hands full of rice grains, the symbol of life. The scattered grains after falling from her hands are a ‘proclamation of death of the crowd and the public’. In another Mindanaon tribe, the Manobos, they perform a rites and ritual of sculpting a human figure out of cooked rice after a burial which all partakes of.
In 2016, the farmers of Province of Cotavato located in the northern Philippines confronted extreme draught due to El Nino. More than 6,000 farmers formed a human barricade across the highway in order to ask for rice aid. The government of the Philippines sent armed police to dissolve them by compulsion using water cannons and bayonets. A farmer was killed and scores were injured in the forceful dispersal.
The number 635 in <After Mebuyan>(2016) is the number of tenant farmers and human activists killed by the governmental authority of the Philippines over the past 15 years. The artist borrowed a ritual in Philippine mythology and made 635 grains of rice with 14K gold to pay homage to those wrongly killed.
