Salawaki (Filipino, b. 1996) is the online persona of Mirjam Dalire, who makes internet-based installations, CGI environments, photography, video, sound and paintingthat unravel the power structures embedded in online spaces and the global art market.She treats the digital not as an escape but as a terrain, using humor and satire to confront the systems of visibility that shape how art and artists are seen.,
Dalire, who works from Siquijor Island in the Philippines, began making digital work at university, producing videos that mimicked the disinformation content of troll farms tied to Filipino politicians. Her online persona, Salawaki, was born within the blockchain and NFT space. She joined hic et nunc on the day the platform launched, after a friend, the GAN artist Sintang Ligalig, shared it and sent her three Tezos to get started. She was part of the first objkt labs Residency cohort, curated by Anika Meier, where a talk by Boris Eldagsen on patience and sustained practice in a fast-moving market left a lasting impression.
Her installation series Salawaki Biennale shrinks and multiplies the white-cube gallery booth into a miniature, repeated form, treating the format itself as both subject and material. The series draws a line from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair's colonial exhibitions to the algorithmic attention economy, comparing walking through a hall of art-fair booths to scrolling online. In works within the series such as Fiesta Pavilion and Compyuteran Projects, she points to how Western internet culture engagement-baits Filipino users for views. She has also described her practice as positioned at a distance from international art events because of visa and financial restrictions. The series was released through the residency's group exhibition “Training Data and Other Heartbreaks: Signals Between Us”, following an earlier group show, “Proof of Presence”.
A recurring trout companion appears across her work, including in The Fish Is Present, shown at a Tezos Realm event in Singapore.She has also shown in “Virtually Yours”, a Gallery Weekend Berlin exhibition curated by Anika Meier.,At Digital Art Mile in Basel, she showed the series Becoming a Ghost for the Machine in the group exhibition “We Emotional Cyborgs: On Avatars and AI Agents”, curated by Anika Meier. The work brings light to the unseen digital labor behind AI, such as data annotation and content moderation, often outsourced to the Global South.
