It has been a great honor to write, converse, and think alongside the artmakers of Southeast Asia for the last two years. This TOP TEN list, while shedding light on critical artistic practice and unconventional exhibitions, is nowhere near exhaustive. Wrapping up 2024 and preparing for 2025 with a heart filled with joy and gratitude. […]
Detail of CONSTANTINO ZICARELLI’s Dust of men (vertigo records sunset), 2023, sticker (originally graphite on paper). Courtesy the UP Vargas Museum, Metro Manila. “Fevers are our bodies’ biological defense against illness. They also serve as a metaphor for the calenture of overwrought passion, the heat of the city, or the need to self-regulate and attune
In Gaian Assembly XVI, the dark-navy atolls and white volcanic islands on beige canvas conjurevisions of inkblots or torn photocopies.
For Screenshot 11-03-2023 at 03:03 PM (philhuat 2GO) (all works cited, 2023), Darma collected vinyl strips bearing wall texts from previous exhibitions and wove these information-packed strands into striated collages that suggest sinuous oceanscapes.
As we viewed the trees surrounding Vargas through these magnified blueprints, our eyes aligned and deconstructed the terrain against the diagrams’ perpendicular angles, vanishing point, and grid tracks, alluding to how we have been educated—according to Western art’s pillars—to view natural landscapes in a detached and scientific manner, while forfeiting our existence embedded within them.