Bhen Alan: Sometimes My Accent Slips Out

CUE presents Sometimes My Accent Slips Out, a solo exhibition by Bhen Alan with mentorship from Jade Yumang and curatorial guidance from Jon Santos. The exhibition, on view until May 18, builds upon the artist’s ongoing investigation of the banig, an indigenous form of mat weaving in the Philippines that, for the artist, serves as a memory bank in the face of personal upheaval, new territories, and shifting cultural landscapes. 

Sometimes My Accent Slips Out parallels the practice of weaving with the sociolinguistic impact of migration and personal transformation. Alan reflects upon his own ancestry, contemplating the significance of the banig to everyday life, spirituality, and culture in the Philippines. These mats—used for sleeping, eating, gathering, rest, and ritual—serve as extensions of individual self and collective heritage, as objects that mediate birth and death, celebration and mourning. They serve as a material legacy of resilience and community, with forms and techniques passed down from weaver to weaver despite centuries of colonization, globalization, and foreign imposition. 

“Banig weaving does not start at the first fold of a reed over another, but with seeds that are planted and tended to until harvest […] the banig is entwined in a natural cycle of living and dying that is essential to human and nonhuman survival, a stark contrast to the ‘destroy, extract, exploit’ approach to the land’s resources in much of the West,” writes catalogue essayist Sasha Cordingley. “Taken altogether, banig is not just object, but a stand-in for a Filipino identity, which has firmly resisted the steamrolling of culture, memory, and tradition by colonial enterprises.”

The banigs Alan creates are, in a sense, autobiographical. In emigrating from Cagayan Valley, Philippines to Canada and then to the US, the artist struggled with speech, compelled to code switch between accents and dialects in ways both subconscious and overt. Alan repositions the process of weaving as a proxy for this hybridity. In intertwining the material, the maker must balance the warp and weft of the mat, maintaining an even tension. In Alan’s banigs, he breaks and disrupts this grid, embracing inconsistencies and using his body as a loom. Pushing beyond tactile representations of identity, his practice is a testament to the dynamic craft of communication. Accent serves as the warp in the fabric of speech, influencing the texture and quality of spoken language. The desire to be understood and accepted within new communities is often a pursuit to countervail inherited accents with acquired ones. Alan rejects this notion. Working within an intricate grid, he embraces errors and glitches that fracture its borders; in the process creating new ways of seeing—and of embodying—what is in between. 

Through these explorations, Sometimes My Accent Slips Out unravels the complicated legacies we navigate in an increasingly globalized world. Alan’s practice is a site of negotiation, of reconciliation between multiple cultural and social identities. He employs a variety of weaving techniques, presented in brightly-colored works that drape the gallery in palm, abaca, and coconut leaves from his homeland, interwoven with cattails and other materials from North America. Positioned alongside these large-scale works are banigs of pandan, tikog, and buri from his recent Fulbright fieldwork in the Philippines, during which he collaborated with weavers in various regions of the archipelago. 

Sometimes My Accent Slips Out is a celebration of our multiplicities and a declaration of presence. Alan embraces a wholeness that uplifts the nuances of cultural legacy, activating future narratives of tradition that may be carried through generations and across geographies.

Gallery hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 12–6pm. 

Public programming: A performance and food-related event are forthcoming; follow @cueart or sign up for emails to learn more.

Credits: Sometimes My Accent Slips Out by Bhen Alan, mentored by Jade Yumang. Curatorial guidance from Jon Santos. Catalogue essay by Sasha Cordingley, mentored by Ana Tuazon. Graphic design by Corinne Ang.

CUE team: Jinny Khanduja (Executive Director), Jasmine Buckley (Gallery Associate), Keegan Sagnelli (Communications Associate)