Join artist Mark Valenzuela for a walk-through of Bantay-Salakay at ACE.

Explore the exhibition with Mark as he discusses the themes, processes, and strategies behind the works, and how power shapes whether these strategies represent resistance or oppression.

Artist: Mark Valenzuela
Curator: Danni Zuvela

About the Exhibition:

In Bantay-Salakay, Valenzuela explores the offensive and defensive strategies embedded in our environments, and the role of power in determining whether these strategies represent resistance or oppression.

Audiences will enter a hostile environment of spikes, weeds, walls, shards, and noise, in an installation that combines ceramics, steel, timber, textiles, sound, and more. This exhibition can be seen and experienced from multiple angles, through an installation layered with colliding ideas. Spiky ceramics, for example, in some cases reference the encroaching spread of introduced weeds, and in turn colonising and oppressive forces; while elsewhere in the installation they are a nod to anarchic resistance to dominating forces.

Valenzuela considers the offensive and defensive characteristics of a place through the prism of his experiences in his home country of the Philippines and adopted country of Australia. The Philippines, Valenzuela believes, has a certain level of protectiveness, if not defensiveness, which stems from its history of colonisation. Defensiveness also typically appears in relation to the economic hierarchy, in the ways those with money and resources seek to protect and defend themselves from the majority poor. At an interpersonal level, however, Filipino culture is not characterised by defensiveness, but quite the opposite. The Tagalog term pakikipagkapwa translates to a kind of shared unity with another person, a term that means there is no space between oneself and another.

Comparatively, Valenzuela considers the lack of pakikipagkapwa he has experienced in dominant Australian culture. Through his work, he seeks to explore the reasons for this absence of pakikipagkapwa – population size, the individualistic nature of the dominant Western culture, the tenuous hold that most Australians have on this land that was never ceded by First Nations people - which manifests as a ubiquitous and pervasive defensiveness.

About the artist:

With a career spanning two decades, Mark Valenzuela is an Adelaide-based artist who works between Australia and the Philippines. Although his practice wilfully resists categorisation, ceramics is an enduring medium for Valenzuela and has functioned as a linchpin to his many-parted installations that combine elements of painting, drawing, sculpture, video, assemblage and street art.

Working between the two countries, Valenzuela’s expanded ceramic practice is sensitive to space. It considers ideas of occupation and annexation; examines themes of conflict, dominance and resistance – reflecting on his early experiences growing up in army base camps throughout the southern Philippines – and frequently combines the personal with the political.

Valenzuela was the Feature Artist for the 2022 SALA Festival and the recipient of the 2022 SALA Publication, a monograph dedicated to his twenty-year practice. His works have featured in the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (2020), the 15th Australian Ceramics Triennale (2019), and the 3rd Jakarta Contemporary Ceramics Biennale (2014). He is a recipient of the 2015 Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award and is represented by Artinformal Gallery.

Image: Mark Valenzuela's studio (2025). Photography by Morgan Sette.

Support:

Mark Valenzuela is the 2025 recipient of the Porter Street Commission – ACE’s annual award supporting new artwork commissions by South Australian artists.

ACE is supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body and by the Government of South Australia through Create SA.

The performance program is supported by City of Adelaide.

Presented as part of the South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival.