“Mentorship”
Bea Rubio-Gabriel
25 Nov → 31 Jan 2026
Window
Bea Rubio-Gabriel presents new work in the West Space Window as the culmination of their mentorship with West Space in 2025.
Bea Rubio-Gabriel uses 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 healing and community, imagining new spaces and systems built on re-connection and solidarity.
“Bea 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. West Space is thrilled to support this exciting artist." — Joanna Kitto, West Space Director
This mentorship was awarded in partnership with the Melbourne University's Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Honours Program. The West Space Window is supported by 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. Their research currently focuses 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.’
