Transcending Territories: Exhibitions in January 2023
Transcending territories may mean leaving one’s homeland to acquire knowledge through experience in a foreign land which they could bring with them back home.
Written by Amanda Juico Dela Cruz
January 30, 2023
Transcending territories may mean leaving one’s homeland to acquire knowledge through experience in a foreign land which they could bring with them back home. It could mean the coming together of like-minded individuals with diverse background to critique a hegemony. Little known struggles from arguably isolated regions could be struggles shared by many across the globe. Transcending territories may refer to metaphysical boundaries too. The artists featured break laws, overstep boundaries, and defy limitations in using art as an advocacy, as an empowerment, as a curiosity cabinet, and as means to meditate on life.
Installation photo from Ateneo Art Gallery
Gale Encarnacion, Martha Atienza, Nathalie Dagmang, Constantino Zicarelli, and Cian Dayritt, “Ateneo Art Awards Fernando Zóbel Prizes for Visual Art Return Show”, Ateneo Art Gallery.
Gale Encarnacion’s muse is the kapok, cotton pods that move at the slightest wind, as she meditates on the physical and visual attributes “to what is there.” Martha Atienza empowers the community of compressor divers along the Marilejos coast affected by climate change, illegal fishing, and threats of tourism. Nathalie Dagmang recreates the sense of communal relationship shared during Flores de Mayo. Constantino Zicarelli goes back to history to show that history repeats itself amidst new forms of disinformation. And Cian Dayrit merges archival tools into his art to tell the narrative of nation building anchored in colonialism, power, and space.’
Meriem Bennani, still from Guided Tour of a Spill (CAPS Interlude), 2021.
4K single channel digital video, 15 min 49 sec. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles 1
Meriem Bennani, Nicholas Grafia, Josh Kline, Mikołaj Sobczak, and Pow Martinez, “Sate of Flux”, Silverlens Gallery.
Artists examine the contemporary meaning of existence. Meriam Bennani collides themes of geopolitics, dance, and athletics through the aesthetics of reality television, documentary, and animation. Nicholas Grafia paints figures gliding through issues of genders, skin tones, and psychologies amidst powerful global structures. Mikołaj Sobczak stages spoken word, choreography, and disguise to reconcile social hierarchies still existing in the 21st century. Josh Kline perverts the iconic outfits of Alt-Right Leaders and merges them to technology, video, and installation to critique the American social-political breakdown. Pow Martinez pokes fun at the power of American popular culture through imageries he transposed from YouTube.
Photograph of the information board on Goli Otok 2020-2021
Andreja Kulunčić, “You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It”, UP Vargas Museum.
“You betrayed the party just when you should have helped it,” Goli Otok Camp warden Marija Zelić said in a speech spoken to new convicts. Scant official records, improper judiciary procedure, and ruthless punishments scarred countless Yugoslavian women that generations after inherited. When narratives of female trauma, violent heritage, and gender-specific political violence are still refused to be heard of globally, Andreja Kulunčić brings awareness and remembrance to initiate artistic production, collaboration, discussion, and activism. This anti-monumental project urges discussions on memory: How do we remember? What do we remember? What is the significance of what we remember?
Renato “Jojo” Barja Jr., installation of pairs of shoes lined up in front of a large scale painting
Renato Barja Jr., “Skeletons and Secondhand Shoes”, Blanc Gallery.
Mortality. Renato Barja Jr. meditates on the ephemeral, the transitory, the fleeting. He immortalizes the people who walked by whom he remembered through their shoes. He grieves for the fish that was alive in the sea that was turned into a daing served on our plates. He offers his condolences to the family of the bird that died without saying good bye to its family the same way he could not say his farewell to his mother when she was in the ICU for ten days for kidney failure. His distinct gloomy palette gave life to all these longings and mournings.
Ivy Marie Apa’s work, “Fall”
Ivy Marie Apa, “Mythologies”, Qube Gallery.
FedEx. Rolex. H&M. Netflix. Twitter. Facebook. Google. These household names line one wall of the gallery with their logos printed on sheets from the Bible. Brown paper bags of brands like Starbucks, Healthy Options, Adidas, Uniqlo, and Zara are framed as if sacred images housed in a church. Details of mythological and divine images from the Greco-Judeo-Christian tradition are appropriated on logos on these shopping bags. The deconstructed elements of capitalism and of religion put together ignite a conversation, if not a criticism, of the god-like power of capitalism and the consumerist behavior akin to that of a blind devotee.
Catalina Africa’s “a view from the womb” (remix) 2
Catalina Africa, He Kun Lin, Li Kuei-Pi, Li Yi Fan, Lin Shu Kai, Mark Salvatus, Yuyu Yang, and Alvin Zafra, “Phantasmapolis x Manila: Select Works from the 2021 Asian Art Biennial”, Metropolitan Museum of Manila.
At the center of the curatorial project is the theme and the sense of temporality. Largely drawn from the novel “Phantasmagoria” by Wang Dahong in which both the fictional narrative and the act of writing the novel itself are gravitated towards a temporal loop as if the creative process mirrors the creative work and the other way around. Contemporary art has fully embraced different modes of archival work that seemingly imitate the dynamics between the sci-fi novel and its creation. In the exhibition, the works of Asian artists move questions on spacio-temporality to the surface, magnifying its role in determining the future.
