Art as activism

Kiri Dalena, here being photographed by Cocoy Sarmenta, is a visual artist and film director.




Her installation Watch History Repeat Itself is on display in the Ateneo Art Gallery until August 16.




This is not art which is meant to decorate a room to make it pretty. It is art that wants to say something. And in Dalena's case, that something is Philippine political commentary, executed ironically in blinking, commercial neon. Below is an excerpt from the essay "History in Translation" written by film maker and writer Adjani Arumpac, and a video tour of the complete exhibit taken by Manila Art Blogger.

A blinking white neon sign screaming Liar! Liar! Liar! randomly illuminates a black room, recalling reactions to statements issued by the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo government—from the infamous Hello Garci controversy to over 1,000 alleged extra-judicial killings throughout its nine-year reign. A red neon sign that floods red light in a white vacant area reads Dear activist, write a slogan for me tenderly invites one to contemplate past and ongoing brutalities denounced by various sectors in countless angry statements against the government. 

That neon signs, ubiquitous visual polluters and commercial vendors of the modern world, give light to such provoking statements reveals what the artist sees as a paradox—commercial and political interests of the ruling elite are protected by the state through various mechanisms such as brute armed strength. 

Dalena's aesthetics banks on a pervading sense of terror in real-time, continuing. But this sense of immediacy and urgency, an energy usually taken out in the streets, is forcefully brought to a standstill by the artist. She chooses to show tragedy as history, as clearly advertised by a blinking neon light that spells History. In the same vein, transferred in the Yellow Book of Slogans are rally calls culled from photo-documentation of rallies waged against the nine-year Arroyo regime. Likewise, inscribed in a single funerary slab are the haunting words: Watch History Repeat Itself, an abridged text displayed during Cory Aquino's funeral march. 

Dalena wrests these texts out of the streets and entombs them in forms and mediums that significantly depart from traditional protest art, wherein prime is given to fast production, accessibility and portability, whose end is to provide visual support for street mobilizations. She doubly gives weight to her cause, literally, by trading permanence for transience through writing ephemeral protest call in black and white and in stone.