Riza Manalo is a visual artist based in South Australia. Born in Manila, Philippines. Manalo creates work that spans public performance, sound, video and installation. Most of her work explores embodied experience through interdisciplinary practice based on sensoriality and sociality that involves participatory engagement and informal encounters in public space. In her research and practice, she examines the importance of artistic re-presentation of lived experiences in the understanding of the production of social and cultural meanings in public realm. Her practice has become increasingly focused on materiality and spatial sensing in relation to memory, body and transitional spaces.
At present Manalo’s art practice has been in the production of transitory public artworks that reflect on shifts, transitions and the condition of living between polarities of culture and geography. She currently works in open collaboration with artists and non-artists to explore how experiential performance and engagement plays in constructing identity and shaping public and mind space.
Riza Manalo has been exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions since 1994. Her work has been shown in galleries and film screenings internationally, including Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; ABC NO RIO, New York, NY; Minna Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Dumbo Art Centre, Brooklyn, NY; P.S. 122, New York, NY; Contemporary Museum of Honolulu, HI; New York Video Film Festival, Lincoln Centre New York, NY; National Geographic All Roads Film Festival, Washington, DC; Rotterdam International Film Festival, Netherlands; Federation Square Light in Winter Festival, Melbourne; Australian Centre for the Moving Image; White Night Melbourne, among others. Her works are held in collections in Australia, Philippines and U.S.A. She has received a Master of Fine Arts in Art in Public Space and is currently pursuing a PhD in Art focusing on spatial empowerment.