FAR AWAY BUT STRANGELY FAMILIAR EXHIBITION TOUR – UPSTAIRS!
Dina Gadia. Paintings
The Philippines has long had a thriving culture of comics and comic books. The title for the We All End with Lines of Aging Cliché II, came from a comic book. her paintings work, as do adverts, by combining text and images: originally, she studied advertising not Fine Art. The images of trees in her two recent paintings were developed from a poster of fruit trees that she remembers from her school days. Sides, Bends and Angles is of an acacia tree, Stem, Swash and Lobe Lines of a chico tree in the centre and a tamarind to the side. The larger painting grew out of remembering a story that she was told when young, that her grandfather had been stabbed to death when he was peeing on a tree, a man looking for an enemy had mistaken him for that enemy and attacked from behind.
DINA GADIA. All States, No States.
Dina Gadia was amused by how at events the national flag is brought out whilst the anthem is sung and then put back behind the stage, like a sweeping brush or mop. She wanted to make flags or banners that were enigmatic, representing not nation or faction
Nona Garcia. Portraits
Earlier in her career Nona Garcia often made portraits, but from behind. She has returned to this concept to make portraits of all the artists who have been important to her. This group is the first instalment of that project. They include, as well as artists in this exhibition, MM Yu the photographer who she has sometimes collaborated with, and three older artists Roberto Chabet, (1937-2013), the conceptual artist who taught her, the film-maker Kidlat Tahimik (b.1942) and Alfredo Aquilizan, (b. 1962) who taught Garcia drawing in high school.
Leslie de Chavez. Pinalapak: After Prometheus Unbound
This poem accompanies the installation Pinalapak: After Prometheus Unbound
Prometheus Unbound,
I shall never exchange my fetters for slavish servility. ’Tis better to be chained to the rock than be bound to the service of Zeus. –Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
Mars shall glow tonight,
Artemis is out of sight.
Rust in the twilight sky
Colors a bloodshot eye,
Or shall I say that dust
Sunders the sleep of the just?
Hold fast to the gift of fire!
I am rage! I am wrath! I am ire!
The vulture sits on my rock,
Licks at the chains that mock
Emancipation’s breath,
Reeks of death, death, death.
Death shall not unclench me.
I am earth, wind, and sea!
Kisses bestow on the brave
That defy the damp of the grave
And strike the chill hand of
Death with the flaming sword of love.
Orion stirs. The vulture
Retreats from the hard, pure
Thrust of the spark that burns,
Unbounds, departs, returns
To pluck out of death’s fist
A god who dared to resist.
Ruben Cuevas
Some context: In fact the poem was written by Pete Lacaba in 1973 a year after Ferdinand Marcos had declared martial law and closed down all but the most subservient press. Lacaba sent it to the government approved magazine Focus who thinking it was praising the Marcos government published it. Only then was it pointed out that the poem had an acrostic: the first letters of each line spelt out a popular chant used in protests against Marcos: “MARCOS, HITLER, DIKTADOR, TUTA”. Tuta means “puppy”, “doormat” or “slave” in Tagalog, and refers to how Marco related to his backers, the USA. The next year Lacaba was arrested and tortured by the Philippine Constabulary. When he emerged from prison two years later it was to discover his brother Eman had been shot with other protesters and buried in a shallow grave.
Geraldine Javier. The Blue Hour 1 & 2
These paintings respond to living in the country and having a garden after living in Manila for twenty years. They are made in a complex way. Firstly, the canvas has a layer of beeswax applied. Secondly, she makes flower arrangements which are then photographed digitally. These are then scanned onto paper, placed upside down on the canvas, dampened and then rubbed, normally with blocks of wood, by her assistants until all the paper is rubbed away and only the coloured inks are left impregnated on the wax. This is a very laborious time-consuming process. There is a certain amount of moaning about wrists and the palms of hands being sore. Thirdly, she paints over these flower arrangements, adjusting the colours and textures. Fourthly, a layer of beeswax is applied, sealing everything underneath. Then the whole process is repeated, and once again a layer of coloured ink from the scanned photographs is impregnated into the layer of wax and so on. Both these paintings have five layers of paint and five of beeswax with on top an extra layer of encaustic, beeswax mixed with resin. Eventually, she turns the painting upside down, gets a blow torch and heats the painting in places so that the wax and paint melt and form streaks down the canvas; then the canvas is put the right way up and blow-torched again. After so many hours of work this may seem an extraordinary thing to do! But this how a composition is finally arrived at.
Geraldine Javier. Seventeen Women with Bats and Flowers,
For this year’s biennale in Havana Geraldine Javier made life-sized tracings of twenty-two women in her community who supported their families by taking on a myriad of jobs and ventures. She admired their perseverance, their everyday heroism. This hanging installation for Danubiana, Seventeen Women with Bats and Flowers, uses some of the same tracings of local women on pineapple fibre. But now the figures have been turned upside down and, as well as embroideries, extra flowers and images of sleeping bats, have been painted on. The panels are predominantly blue, the colour of dusk when bats wake up
‘The landscapes I paint are apocalyptic, they are dead landscapes. In Midnight Run the land is getting flooded, you are travelling, but never getting anywhere, perhaps because you are using the wrong form of transport. It’s just like the Philippines. As in the companion painting Smoke, you are stuck in the same place. Fifteen years ago, I moved from Manila to Silang, a rural area.
But over those years I have seen the place change, the lush landscape disappearing, so many trees have been cut down, all the industrialisation – I think it has affected me sub-consciously,’ Mariano Ching
‘I use drawing because it is the most direct way of expressing very personal thoughts: it is immediate, almost like writing on paper. Somehow, it’s subconscious. I work with the immediate thought, my concern of the moment.’ Jose Legaspi came from a dysfunctional family but has not been in contact with them for many years. An openly gay man, he uses drawing to express trauma, hallucinations, fears and hopes.
The first paintings on fibreglass Louie Cordero made were in 2014 to act as very strange table-tennis tables. ‘It was the first time,’ he said, ‘that I utilized jeepney artisanal strategy, using amorphic shapes and lines rather than rectangular straight edge to convey adaptation, survival and the Filipino sense of horror vacui.’ Jeepneys are the highly customised extended jeeps used as buses in the Philippines. This work is called Ghana because he likes High Life music from Ghana very much.
Wawi Navarroza is fascinated by what she calls the “tropical gothic”. “Melodramatic situations.” “Folklore and centuries-old Catholic rites.” “The Spanish colonial past in all its baroque splendour and excess.” ‘This is about markets like Divisoria and the ukay-ukay (second-hand clothes) everywhere, the horror vacui of the sidewalk, umbrellas, people, rows of consumer goods, trash, parades, banderitas, fiestas, corner beauty pageants, election banners, all the colours and textures vying for one’s attention. It all comes together and results in a thick, vibrant, soulfully too-much, melodrama.’ Wawi Navarroza.
I Want To Live A Thousand More Years (Self-Portrait after Dengue, with tropical plants and fake flowers) shows her surrounded by cliché images of the tropics. This is, as she points out, very different from most Asian culture: not calm, serene and mystical, but boisterous, a mix of fake and real.
Dengue is a very common and very dangerous tropical disease.
These are the relatives the victims of the current “war against drugs,” in the Philippines. At least 4,000 people have been killed, probably many more. All the people in these photographs have lost husbands or sons or brothers in official or unofficial police raids. These people are scared that the police or vigilantes will come after them too, so not only are they wearing masks but the backgrounds have been disguised. This is an ongoing series: so far Kiri Dalena has made fifteen photographs. In the first of the three shown here, a photograph of a group of six, the husband and the oldest son have been killed in an official police operation. In the second photograph, the group of three, the husband is in jail, the father and brother killed in an official police operation. The husband of the woman in the third photograph has been killed. They must hide and mourn.
(Alas, these three photographs did not arrive at the museum for the exhibition.)
The drawing on the left is of a Colt 38. This is the gun that is often found on the bodies of drug dealers, or supposed drug dealers, who have been shot dead by police in President Duterte’s war on drugs. This was the weapon used by the Philippines police in the Eighties. Many people assume that these guns are in fact old police stock which have been planted on the dead after they have been shot, and that the police were not, as they claimed, acting in self-defence. The drawing on the right is of a Colt 45. This is the gun currently used by the Philippine Police.
As in his two larger drawings Mike Adrao is fascinated with the act of drawing, with making new imaginary anatomies or making hard objects appear organic.
She did not get to his death bed to say all she wanted to say. Pam had not been able to see her father often in his last years, so was desperate to see him when he was close to death, but failed to get there in time. The words printed on the bedstead, ‘is he a sculpture now’ are what her young son said when they got to her father’s house and found him dead and placed in a wooden box.
71 Ways Up is about her father’s life. Taking seventy-one drawings on children’s lined paper by her two youngest sons, five and seven years old, and some by her husband Jose Santos III she has filled and coloured them in, imagining herself as a child to make these – ‘scribbling, filling up a space.’ They make a seventy-one-part painting, (one panel for each of the years her father lived) that moves, as it goes upward from brown to green to blue. Earth, grass and sky.
Of Viva la Suerte (Long Live Lucky): ‘The nude I bought in a Kitschy souvenir shop in Ho Chi Min City. With all these three paintings I make references to classical European painting. Perhaps I am mocking the old ways or perhaps paying homage.
‘The carving at the bottom depicts a “mumbaki” or Ifugao high priest who has fallen into a trance. And while the marriage of the East and the West happens, the kids or babies celebrate and forget about the changing times (like the Trojans dancing round the horse that carries their downfall.)
‘The text around the central eye comes from an Anting-anting or talisman. These were deconstructed prayers that gave power and protection to the spiritual movement of the Katipunan (freedom fighters of the late Nineteeth century) in their fight for “Liwanag” or Light and Liberation. It was developed during their fight for freedom against Spain. Because many of the fighters were illiterate, a hybrid sense of language and symbolism was developed. These were based on catholic prayers in Latin but adapted into a native tongue. Often, they mixed Tagalog, Spanish and Latin and created a more syllabic text that translated into codes. This way the Spanish authorities could not read the movements of the secret society.
‘In the end I create stories that may or may not be understood, but like a good reader or a code breaker you can find a clear narrative.’ Kawayan de Guia
Of Fuckin’ Chinese: ‘In recent years China has occupied several islands in the South China Sea legally belonging to the Philippines and turned them into military bases. They also try and monopolise natural resources. The Philippines does not have the military resources to challenge this.
‘This China business has been going on for some time now. It always stirs me up when I think about it. A helpless feeling falls over me and I’m left staring at the wall, not knowing how to approach the problem. What struck me recently when I was on a plane going home and looked down out of the window was that I could see, like a systematic grid, a fleet of Chinese fishing boats. They stretched out as far as the eye could see! This was the first time I witnessed what was going on. The invasion was happening and we aren’t doing anything about it.
‘I’ve always had that miniature porcelain sculpture of the couple by my bedside and one morning I woke up and decided what I will do: enlarge the image. Yes, I am getting out my frustration but I attempt to capture it in a beautiful way that you won’t get to see my intentions until you read the stupid title. I’ve always been attracted to porcelain sculptures: that quality of something pure, serene and delicate.’ Kawayan De Guia
‘All of my works are images of power or formats of power, be they museums or monuments, maps or currencies.’ One of the textile works shown here is a parody, or detournement, (re-routing) of a bank note. On his two textile maps of the NATO and non-aligned nations look for your own country: where is Slovakia? Where is the Philippines? What does “non-aligned” actually means, especially now. The great moment of the Non-aligned movement was its 1955 conference in Bandung, Indonesia attended by those countries who had been “de-colonised” and who did not want to be a satellite of either the USA or USSR. As Dayrit himself notes the Philippines attended, but mainly as a spy for the USA. He talks of Counter-cartography as ‘a process in which people get to be the authors of their own maps. It counters traditional canons of cartography wherein maps are authored from a seat of power. In the case of marginalized communities this has many possibilities and applications.’
KAWAYAN DE GUIA, Colonial Coils
‘Lion Tiger is a brand of mosquito repellent coils.
‘Today we witness under our noses the selling and buying of our nation’s natural resources. If you want visual symbolism you can say that the lion is Mother Catholic old school Spanish Conquistador and the tiger is hyper commu-capita China.
‘The image of the boy comes from a brand of cigarillos popular around the end of the Spanish regime. We had hundreds of tobacco brands like this then. Of course, this is before king Philip Morris monopolized the market with American brands. The boy also so happens to look like my best carpenter; you can say he represents a cliché: the hard-working man. He gazes into the future, not really knowing how to deal with the big cats?
‘In the end, perhaps things boil down to survival, food and hunger. The Philippines like other less developed nations find itself in a cross fire of stronger empires. In a way that’s just the law of nature. The bigger fish eats the smaller one. The only difference now is that we are witnessing China’s conquest in our lifetime. China is not doing anything new. They were once the underdog and have learned the ways and the game of their colonial masters and now are applying the same formula of conquest to its neighbours and the rest of the world. The problem is, we are the prey. Once again, we are falling into the paws of another foreign power.’ Kawayan de Guia
Terra Rationarum is a sort of land inventory presented in what looks like five specialised domestic houses. Or, you could say they present different ways in which to view the colonial people and their land. From the left they talk of (1) the land and the fertile soil, (2) minerals and other things that can be mined or extracted, (3) in the centre, the military-industrial complex, (4) the market, both the captive market and the market where people go to buy things – such as Coca Cola and spam, (5) people or labour, hence the ID images, which are of ex-students.
Many Filipino dancers take jobs in Disneyland Hong Kong, but they never get to be Snow White, only minor characters such as a a zebra in The Lion King, a coral in The Little Mermaid or a Monkey in Tarzan – where they must always look cheerful and servile. Of course, they want to be Snow White, like all other girls would. Here Jocson and friends dress up as Snow White even though they have brown skin, and parade along the seafront to the American Embassy. She is also referring to the big tradition of parades in the Philippines, especially the month-long celebrations for the Virgin Mary which culminate on the last day of May in the Santa Cruzan parade which has become as much a beauty pageant where young women wear spectacular gowns as a religious event.
