Cian Dayrit is a Filipino multimedia artist. Dayrit’s interdisciplinary practice explores colonialism and ethnography, archaeology, history, and mythology. He has exhibited at venues such as Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Manila. Dayrit was featured in the 2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage at the New Museum.

Cian Dayrit's textile works engage with faith-based symbols to analyze the images, objects, and institutions that dictate what power "is." In his works, created especially for this exhibition, Dayrit monumentalizes the anting-anting, a type of charm often inscribed into handkerchiefs carried by Filipinos. Intended to protect the carrier from harm, Dayrit embroiders his works with an imagined iconography and Latin words, creating a constructed sense of mysticism and spirituality.

Dayrit’s first solo exhibition, The Bla-Bla Archaeological Complex, opened at the Vargas Museum in 2013. The show examined the role that varying strategies of display and representation, such as archaeological and architectural structures, play in understanding history. The show explored issues of identity, heritage, and nationhood. Dayrit’s second and third solo exhibitions, Polycephalous and Spectacles of the Third World, continue his inquiry into, “origins and histories, and their representations in visual apparatuses, from the map, curiosity cabinet, and on to the museum.”