ArtFairPh/Projects
Kidlat Tahimik
Kidlat Tahimik
Multi-awarded filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik has been a leading force in independent cinema, by establishing a distinct cinematic language that straddles the personal and the political, and by essaying narratives that are uniquely his people’s own.
At the fair, Tahimik exhibits wooden sculptures of what he considers the two opposing goddesses of the wind: Inhabian, the deity to whom Ifugaos pray when typhoons approach; and Marilyn Monroe in her immortal Hollywood pose. The juxtaposition recalls themes explored in his previous films: the ubiquity of the white ideal; cinema favoring Western myths over local narratives; and identity forged through lores and relics.
Tahimik’s installations are a bid to project how cinema, as well as any other art form, carries the weight of borrowed myths, and simultaneously, how it becomes a potent site for reclamation and self-invention.
Antipas Delotavo, Renato Habulan, and Pablo Baen Santos
Antipas Delotavo, Renato Habulan, and Pablo Baen Santos
Antipas Delotavo, Renato Habulan, and Pablo Baen Santos were once prominent members of the social realist collective called the Kaisahan. Highly critical of the Marcos regime, they created art for the purpose of articulating conflict and effecting social change.
In contemporary art where both painting and social realism have been deemed passe’, the three artists push form beyond the limits of the frame and return to the ethos that has always defined their practice: to draw on the wellspring of current events and depict a nation in a state of conflict. Delotavo constructs a coffin alluding to the lack of social justice. Santos paints Duterte’s cusswords and the shouts of angry masses. Habulan fashions a multi-media installation of war’s dystopic aftermath.
Asserting the idea that art is a comforter of the afflicted, afflicting those who live in comfort, Delotavo, Habulan, and Santos prod at society’s open wound and expose conflict’s visible debris.
Neal Oshima
Neal Oshima
Neal Oshima has spent more than four decades photographing indigenous tribes and traditions, tapping the capacity of the medium as a data-gathering tool to examine culture. A prolific photographer whose body of work encompasses advertising, editorial, and documentary photography, Oshima upholds the belief that cultural practices are revealed through the nuances of a photograph
Oshima has long been fascinated with the way we classify, and with whether or not the common thread that binds us would show itself in captured images. Oshima’s “Kin” brings Austronesians into focus, a folk linguistic group that includes tribal Filipinos. In Oshima’s images, issues of land, tensions between past and progress lend a narrative backdrop to portraits shot during different periods and encounters.
Oshima’s show consists of the tribes of Bukidnon, Batanes, and Cotabato, all Austronesians, all kin. It is a visual tribute to tribes, across places and across generations, encountered through one man’s lens.
Leonard Aguinaldo
Leonard Aguinaldo
A recipient of CCP’s Thirteen Artists Award in 2003 and a champion of ethnographic art, Leonard Aguinaldo has crafted depictions of Cordillera life and highland traditions. For the Art Fair, Aguinaldo’s work with the rubbercut medium extends his usual subject from indigenous culture to the beliefs and rituals of the common Filipino.
He anchors the show in an idea of play-as well as the myths, beliefs, and gods that govern the machinery of the game. Presenting a tapestry of dreams and numbers in the game of jueteng, a board game dotted with politicians and words culled from campaigns, as well as a depiction of god in Leondardo da Vinci’s $450 million painting, the artist shows how different elements intertwine: vice and magic, science and superstition, faith and chance.
The show hints at the notion of belonging in a culture: To play is to participate. Spectators are compelled to scan the palpable surface, as though tracing hieroglyphics, gaining insight into a way of believing and a way of life.
Nilo Ilarde
Nilo Ilarde
The exhibit of conceptual artist Nilo Ilarde follows his penchant for employing situational interventions. His Art Fair exhibit takes cue from a statement declared by conceptual artist Douglas Huebler in 1968: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It reflects the mood of an era where artists explored the dematerialization of art, believing that a work could exist primarily as pure thought. Ilarde then turns Huebler’s statement on its head: “The art fair is full of objects, more or less interesting; I wish to add 24,124 cars.”
Thousands of die-cast cars, like pixels on a plane, call attention to the venue’s nature as a car park and recast it as a space for excess and unending free play. At the Art Fair, do these die-cast cars tell of our inexhaustible compulsion to create, commodify, and collect? Ilarde’s playground insinuates: The spectators are also part of the landscape navigating the traffic and terrain of the art world.
Lyra Garcellano
Lyra Garcellano
Language has long played a central role in the works of visual artist Lyra Garcellano. Her works, covering a wide range from painting and installation, to video and photography, hints at the link between word and world, language and territories.
Recurring themes in Garcellano’s exhibits revolve around issues of national identity and the art world’s contested systems of valuation. Essaying institutional critiques and subtle provocations, her work is both pit against and set within the context of the fair as a display system. They hint at the rising art world archetypes that these display systems have helped establish.
In Garcellano’s installations, text becomes a powerful medium and subject with which the artist explores and interrogates the art world, perhaps for the reason that art is also a language game.
KAREN H. MONTINOLA SELECTION
Alvin Zafra
Alvin Zafra
The recipient of this year’s Karen Montinola section, Alvin Zafra presents an exhibit with video as the central piece, calling attention to the act and gesture implicit in his practice. Zafra, conferred CCP’s Thirteen Artist Award in 2015, has been recognized for his works on abrasive paper, in which he grinds objects to limn images on the surface: stones to city, bones to portraits.
At the fair, Zafra presents a two-hour long video “Revolver,” documenting the artist destroying a gun with a steel grinder. Zafra teases out questions surrounding violence and power. Taking cue from its title, when tables turn and roles reverse, can revolutions be read as a balancing act? What is willed into being in the wake of a gun’s demise? In a glass box, three resin spheres contain the grinder’s disks and dusts, each like an unmoving galaxy that has completed its revolution.
Neal Oshima and Angel Velasco Shaw
Neal Oshima and Angel Velasco Shaw
Curated by Neal Oshima and Angel Shaw, it marks Art Fair Philippines’ first exhibit dedicated to documentary photography. Gathering image-makers who are not affiliated with galleries, the exhibit intends to show the range of established and emerging documentary photographers: Jes Aznar, Nana Buxani, Geloy Concepcion, Tommy Hafalla, Carlo Gabuco, Kawayan de Guia, Paco Guerrero, RJ Fernandez, Jose Enrique Soriano, and Veejay Villafranca, among others.
Most of the works presented are the outcome of covering beats, of photojournalists pursuing stories in the field. Culled from the artist’s long-form narratives, photographers present an excerpt of stories unfolding in the course of years, put in dialogue with one another, all giving light to an aspect of Philippine culture.
WEEGEE
WEEGEE
Art Fair Philippines is pleased to announce the inclusion of an exhibition of a selection of photographs by Weegee [Arthur (Usher) Fellig, 1899-1968] from the International Center of Photography in New York. Featuring exhibition prints from the 1930s to the 1940s, the selection provides a sampling of images that evidence the iconic photographer’s standard-setting eye for seizing the moment. Weegee’s photographs capture the sordid aftermath of street crime, the gaudy gloss of society, the abandon of laughing children, or the heat of kissing couples. By distilling moments of grit or glitz, of faces in grin or grimace, of bodies of the murdered lying limp, of arms and lips locked in embrace, the flash of his camera affixed in the most graphic stills what long past these moments continue to curdle or smolder in the human condition. Although known for delivering on the claim “Murder is my business,” the thrum and beat of life-bewildered, ragged, languid, or lurid-is what he captured even in the thud of death.
This exhibition with loans from the collection of the International Center of Photography provides a chapter-small but tight-in the historical arc of photojournalism.
International Center of Photography Collections Manager JamesKopp will provide a presentation on Weegee and on the history of ICP. Philippine photojournalists EzraAcayan and RaffyLerma will then join him in a discussion of their coverage of the night beat and the critical importance of the camera in bearing witness and of the photograph as a visual record of events.
On photo: Self-Portrait, Weegee with Speed Graphic Camera, ca. 1944 © Weegee/International Center of Photography [21773.1993]
Plet Bolipata
Plet Bolipata
“I live in my own little world—but it’s OK, they know me here,” are words that best describe my artistic process.
In a space generously provided by my sponsor Globe Platinum, I will create my Little Red Riding Hood tableau. Her fairy tale story will come to life, in great detail. I plan to maximize the visual content with a short lm I made in New York that will be projected on a wall and other short lms that will be viewed on Huawei cellphones scattered in my imagined playground. A visual feast is what I want to o er my viewers and will cover topics relevant in a woman’s world: sexual predator predicament and a young woman’s coming of age.
I will also introduce a limited edition art capsule, “Plet-in-a-box”, that captures my essence as an artist—my hopes, my dreams and my vision.
Photo Credit: At Maculangan
Igan D’Bayan
Igan D’Bayan
Igan D’Bayan is an art writer for The Philippine Star, as well as an actively practicing band musician and visual artist. His work often aims to amplify the concept of art-making as something ritualistic, esoteric, ba ing and absolutely essential in building universes. The visual elements he chooses are often inspired by wide-ranging in uences such as the horror, magical and occult genres, the darker works of the painter Francisco Goya, and world religions. In this exhibition, the artist focuses on the process of alchemy and re ects on its purpose of turning base metal into gold – turning it into a metaphor for painting and sculpting. A transformation of pigments, paste and clay into something mysterious and oracular.
Pete Jimenez, Art Lozano, Dan Raralio, Reg Yuson
Pete Jimenez, Art Lozano, Dan Raralio, Reg Yuson
“AC Automotive is a member of the country’s oldest business house, Ayala, and the country’s preeminent automotive distribution and retail organization. With strong brand partners in Honda, Isuzu, Volkswagen, and KTM, AC Automotive taps the creative minds of four renowned visual artists showcasing today’s automotive architectural landscape.”
AC Automotive taps the creative minds of four renowned visual artists to showcase today’s automotive architectural landscape. As part of AC Industrials, the industrial technology arm of Ayala, the country’s oldest business house, AC Automotive has strong brand partners in Honda, Isuzu, Volkswagen, and KTM, nearly 30 years of industry experience, and 24 wholly owned dealerships, making it the country’s preeminent automotive retail and distribution organization.
Artists Reg Yuson, Dan Raralio, Art Lozano, and Pete Jimenez will render and de ne the melding of science and art, machine and human expression.
Sculptor Yuson’s Fear or Desire presents Honda as the perennial toy for speed enthusiasts, using the aggressive front fascia hood and grille of the new Civic to depict a full-scale toy model kit in a box, signifying the childlike, albeit ageless, appreciation of the Japanese marque.
Painter-sculptor Raralio’s Abstract out of Concrete assembles Isuzu truck parts embedded in concrete blocks, representing the artist’s creative ngerprint traversing the gurative to abstract, interspersed with subtle word play.
Baguio native Lozano translates his 18-year love a air with the Volkswagen Beetle into a depiction of Urban Progress, a multi-hued 3-dimensional installation using an actual Beetle hood and parts of Volkswagen vehicles, conveying the essence of an iconic machine.
Jimenez’s Racing Heart, on the other hand, focuses on the KTM big bike’s orange frame, pounding it into the shape of a heart, and encasing motorcycle parts-the sculptor’s visual gem of a pun.