“West Space Window”
Bea Rubio-Gabriel
29 Nov → 3 Feb 2026
Window

A girl holding a microphone behind a wooden platform holding text, pears upward as they talk. Behind there is a large green tree, out of focus. They are depicted from the knees up.
Beatrice Rubio-Gabriel performing as part of Rayleen Forester, 'buhay kubo', 2023, text-based installation, lecture performance, West Space Window, Collingwood Yards. Photography by Janelle Low.

Next in the West Space Window is a new work by Bea Rubio-Gabriel as the recipient of the West Space x Victorian College of the Arts Honours Award.

Bea Rubio-Gabriel is a Naarm (Melbourne) based artist using performance and writing to challenge euro-centric modes of exhibition-making. Their practice explores care and Resistance Aesthetics, with a focus on pre-colonial writing systems in the Philippines (namely, Baybayin) and Indigenous (Ipugao) approaches to community, imagining new spaces and systems built on re-connection and solidarity. Recently, Rubio-Gabriel's research has focussed on the moral economy of labour, migration and familial sacrifice, the politics of translation, and the transformation of care™ into the act of ‘tending to.’

"Bea Rubio-Gabriel is interrogating labour rights in the arts, and framing this within an exploration of the socio-cultural pressures that shape our professional choices, and the ways we see ourselves in relation to our work, family and community more broadly. We are thrilled to support this exciting artist.” — Joanna Kitto, West Space Director

The West Space Window is supported by the City of Yarra through their Annual Grants Program.

Bea Rubio-Gabriel is a performance artist, writer, and curator born in the Philippines now based in Naarm (Melbourne). For Bea, performance becomes a way to re-imagine the ‘&/’ space as cultural imaginary for the utopian present as it interrogates the scaffoldings of power. Approaching writing as artform and ephemera, they use ergodic texts and handmade print-publishing to create new modes of access and dismantle dominant knowledge and power structures.