Joar Songcuya is a Visayan self-taught painter whose multidisciplinary practice combines painting, maritime expertise and personal narrative. Influenced by the artist’s background as a marine engineer working onboard ships for over a decade, Songcuya’s work engages with water through the lens of his experiences as a seaman. Other topics he explores include colonial continuities, Filipino labour migration, statelessness and working conditions at sea. Recent projects include Moments of Delay, The Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; Musafiri: Of Travelers and Guests, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; At The Edge of Land, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai/Hayy Jameel, Jeddah; Pilgrimage to the Ancient Seas, Art Central Hong Kong; Sea People, Country Shores, Koganecho, Japan; The Sea Is Not a Quiet Place, Altro Mondo Gallery, Makati City, the Philippines; and Atlantiko, Pasipiko, Artiko at VIVA ExCon in the Philippines.

Residency Project

During my two-month residency at Kalba Ice Factory, I began working on 100 drawings titled Logbook of Sharjah: Oil, Blood, Water & Salt. It is a diaristic series in pen, crayons and ink that stems from my ongoing Sea People, Country Shores project, first developed in my 2023 Yokohama residency. Through this logbook, I chart the relationship between industry and humanity. ‘Oil’ and 'water' represents the Gulf’s identity as a premier maritime gateway, while ‘blood’ and ‘salt’ honour the hard work of people who made a home within this region. Composed of sketches, texts, numbers and patterns, these drawings document my observation of my surroundings in direct visual and introspective responses to the land, its people, mountains and waters. As I developed these works, I drew on my engineering and seafaring background as well as the eye of a Filipino traveller. This residency represents a full-circle moment for me, from transporting the Gulf’s primary export years ago to returning this year to do artistic work.

Alongside my exploration of photography, poetry writing, moving images and sound recordings of the city, I am currently completing Land of the Golden Earth (working title), a massive 6-by-12-foot mural in pencil that I started and developed at the walls of the Kalba Ice Factory. Like a ship engine with thousands of small moving parts, every square inch of the 12-foot canvas is filled with coloured pencil markings, a tribute to the millions of people shaping the UAE, including Filipinos, through their labour. Every The friction of the pencil’s lead against the canvas also became a way of honouring every grain of sand in the desert, every current of flowing water and every individual dispersed across the land.

Beyond traditional mediums of art-making, I integrated cooking into my residency as a special form of care and connection. In order to reconnect with land and people organically, I gathered my co-residents several times a week to share home recipes, a ritual from my numerous years working on ships. This intuitive, communal practice of food-sharing allowed me to map the complex relationships of this maritime city of Sharjah.