Christine Hudson's "tabi-tabi po" in the CCS Art Gallery ; Photo Credit: Jeff Liang

Closing Reception & Event for Visiting Artist Christine Hudson's tabi-tabi po

Saturday March 07, 2026 3:00pm
Location
CCS Art Gallery

The College of Creative Studies Art Gallery and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara would like to invite you to the closing event for Visiting Artist Christine Hudson’s exhibition, "tabi-tabi po".

Please join us for an afternoon reception followed by live performances by Christine Hudson, Christine Dianne Guiyangco (author of the exhibition text), and Dulce Soledad Ibarra. These performances extend the Hudson’s core gesture of shared space, deepening its engagement with memory, migration, labor, spirituality, and communal care.

Performing Artists:

Drawing on psychoanalytic notions of the transformational object, this performance begins from the premise that certain objects of attachment and hope are sought not for what they signify but for how they alter the subject, carrying traces of pre-verbal memory and forms of existential knowing that precede narration. For a diasporic subject, such an object cannot remain singular or stable; it is stretched across borders and temporalities, reshaped through migration within regimes of movement and belonging. The transformational object thus becomes transnational, circulating among past attachments, present pressures, and future longings, caught in rotational dreams of revolution that cannot halt. This unresolved search, and the velocity of its blunt force, is rendered as a single phonetic collision—kkkrrrrrrkkk—performed as sound, body, and endurance.

 
With a nod to mixed ancestry and mixed spirituality found on lands now known as North and South America, Dulce Soledad Ibarra’s current work focuses on the concept of susto or soul loss (and its variation of terms within different cultures) as a starting point for understanding the universal trauma of dehumanization; a prime tactic of those in power. The path to soul retrieval is complicated and/or restricted by Western legislations, laws, social and territorial constructs, and at its utmost sinister: through the unaliving and delegitimization of generational cultural knowledge carriers such as shamans, curanderxs, and other spiritual healers. In our contemporary world, we see Western leaders and lawmakers heatedly (re)enforcing hierarchies and categories of humans, through whatever it means to be legal and illegal, whatever it means to be faithful and patriotic, whatever it means to elevate oneself through capital and its inherent extortion.
 
In the performance piece tell me, Ibarra makes physical mends to onlookers as gestures of healing and a practice of communal care.

Christine Hudson 

Christine Hudson’s performances utilize process as a way of exploring different forms of labor and their shifting visibilities, rendering work that is often unseen, disregarded, or erased. Their work confronts the tensions that arise within transformation, grappling with the notion of being and forever becoming. Labor turns into ritual and emerges as a way to contend with affect, both to reflect on the quotidian and to question the frictions that accompany change. By centering a queer, racialized body, one that moves across borders and inhabits the in-between, viewers are subject to reflect on the gestures of endurance and resilience positioned on said body. Utilizing the objects that draw from Filipino folklore and historical narratives, these distilled artifacts act as anchors and speculative tools for the performance, offering ways to imagine and posit a queer futurity, where the potentiality for change and hope are endless.