PEARLS

Joshua Serafin is a multi-disciplinary artist who combines dance, performance, visual arts, and choreography. Born in the Philippines, they are currently based in Brussels. They are a house artist of VIERNULVIER for the season 2023–2027.

Having graduated from the Philippine High School for the Arts where they majored in Theatre Arts, they moved on to major in contemporary dance at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Joshua graduated from P.A.R.T.S. later on in 2019, and gained their Bachelor’s degree in performance from KASK in 2021, where they also completed their Masters in Fine Arts in Visual Arts in 2022 with great distinction. Their Masters work additionally earned them the Horliet-Dapsens Prij 2022. They premiered their first solo work Miss in VIERNULVIER and have collaborated with multiple artists in Asia and Europe ranging from performance to visual arts. Their work has been shown internationally, most notably at Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay in Singapore, BIT Teatergarasjen in Norway, ANTI Festival in Finland, Nightshift in Ostende, beursschouwburg in Brussels, Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, Haus Der Kulturen der Welt HKW, and in the coming months, HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin.

They have been officially invited to participate in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Adriano Pedrosa.

Exploring themes of transmigration and queer politics, Joshua centers their practice on Otherness, aiming to translate ideas of alterity and otherworldly narratives into embodied performance and forms of speculation. Their series Cosmological Gangbang is the result of their most recent artistic research, having unfolded in several iterations across different media, namely: Timawo, Creation Paradigm, VOID and PEARLS, for which they are currently touring.

Serafin’s artistic process is an intense sociological exorcism of Filipino identity about global ideologies and contemporary phenomena, unpacking the historical violence of its feudal contemporary society and its dehumanising normality. Enfolding these sites of creation into queer and trans methodologies intuited from within tropical myth but also inspired by the dreamwork of a nonbinary cosmopolis, populated by figures emancipated from colonial gender and embodied by turns in diverse states of solemnity and play. Joshua’s globally acclaimed performance is committed to dwelling within interstitial spaces, a refusal to participate in dimorphic structures so they can craft an idiom where they can speak from the said in-betweenness.