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 the pavilion, I resurrected Lucbanin symbols as subtle gestures through which the audience can anchor their thinking and draw their own meaning.
In the globalized age where a nomadic lifestyle is normalized, there is an ever-growing, parallel current that begs the question of returning to our roots. While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact location of these mythical roots, locality (a sense of belonging to the ground on which you are standing at this moment) remains a fertile field of exploration for artists. Viva EXCON 2023, titled Suba sa Iraya (“Swimming upstream” in Kinaray-a), with its historical focus on local engagements and trans-island connections in the Visayas, continues upholding this sense of curiosity about locality across different venues in two Antiqueño municipalities of San Jose de Buenavista and Sibalom.
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.