60 Steps to Home Intervention-based Performance, Statue Square, Central Hong Kong | 2016 Photography by: Leah Valle
Riza Manalo is an artist and researcher who lives in the regional town of Mannum on the west bank of the Murray River, South Australia. Manalo creates work that spans public performance, sound, video, and installation. In her research and practice, she examines the importance of artistic representation of lived experiences in understanding the production of social and cultural meanings in public space. Her practice has become increasingly focused on materiality and spatial sensing in relation to memory, body, and transitional spaces. Manalo is interested in arts-based participatory social research practice that reflects on shifts, transitions, and the condition of living between polarities of culture and geography and the nature of interstitial realities. She has been exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions since 1994. Her work has been shown in galleries and film screenings internationally, and in Australia. She has received a Master of Fine Arts in Art in Public Space and completed a PhD in Art focused on spatial empowerment. Her dissertation, Transitory Encounters: Embodied Artistic Research to Understand the Lived Experiences of Filipino Domestic Workers in Hong Kong can be downloaded here.