AAA 2009: Memories of martial law

The third artist who won in the 2009 Ateneo Art Awards is Kiri Dalena, who is also a film-maker, for her installation at the Lopez Memorial Museum's "Keeping the Faith: Acts of Mediation" exhibit from November 13, 2008 to April 4, 2009. Dalena's art installation was titled "Barricade, book of slogans, erased slogans and isolation room" and is her interpretation of the Philippines' martial law years, which she didn't experience because of her young age. Of all the pieces in the current exhibit, I feel that the small portion from Dalena's installation which was transported to the Ateneo Art Gallery does not do her original work justice. In the Lopez Museum, she had an entire room for her installation, which was much more complex than what is in the gallery right now. If you care to understand her original piece more, please read the gallery's notes below. 2009 ATENEO ART AWARDS SERIES #3 OF 4



Dialogues between archives and contemporary art practice are inevitable as induced tensions. Museums and libraries are repositories of memory and they are appointed as sites for preservation and education , where silence, stasis and stringent controls on tangibility and visibility are imposed. The artist enters this realm and causes a disruption of order. Within this context, installation art offers avenues to liberate memory from reliquary confines.

Dalena embarks on this dialogue by referencing photographs of protests and rallies during the period of Martial Law and adjuncts this to present-day extrajudicial killings. The sentiment is just to be expected. A portrait of state brutality in these past visual journals resonates in the unsolved and unresolved executions and disappearances that the artist deals with in her advocacy work. But this is not simply an emotional confrontation between past and present. Dalena had chosen instead to employ a conscious placement of transcriptions within a setting of school chairs and tables. Read as evidence after the fact, the transcripts are regarded in the texts removed from the photographed placards which have then been transferred into little red books. A pile of chairs recall the barricades built during the First Quarter Storm, of which one arm had been detached and reattached to cradle a copy of the book. Fallen clay bodies are strewn among the rubble, their outlines repeated on the wall. The museum's storage is transformed into an isolation room for one more crouching figure where the texts are again transcribed as a haunting recitation.

The installation sums up what the artist admits to as borrowed memories which she cannot help but manipulate within her own sphere of meanings. By transferring archive into transformative action, Dalena not only opens a renewed awareness of the past. She makes us confront our comfortable tendency to bury history within its silent and stately demarcations.

AAA 2009: A silent ode to Bach

"Death to the Major, Viva Minor" was the opening exhibit at the new Silverlens Lab (SLab) art gallery from October 16 to November 22, 2008. Twelve pieces using various media were created by artist Patricia Eustaquio (b. 1977) for the gallery which used to be the location of a piano school. And it was for this exhibit that Patty was chosen as one of the three winners of the 2009 Ateneo Art Awards. Three of the pieces are in the current exhibit at the Ateneo Art Gallery. Again, the gallery's notes on Patty's exhibit is below. 2009 ATENEO ART AWARDS SERIES #2 OF 4

Arteria Axillaris, ceramic

Untitled (Piano), carved leather and ceramic

Psychogenic Fugue, layers of crochet lace and epoxy


Dissonance transposes into harmony within the location of a former piano school where SLab's gallery now stands. Eustaquio's suite of works is read as an installation of very different objects united not by a message but by the artist's harmonious manipulation of what constitutes the skin, bone and organs of these crafted objects.

The artist's allusion to Johann Sebastian Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, equally a suite of short and progressive piano pieces that utilizes all 24 major and minor keys without perceptively going out of tune, is suggestive of an interest in tempering or harmonizing divides firstly between art and craft, given her practice as both a maker of art and a maker of clothes. She meanders through this discourse through fragments, wholeness and overtures on historicity in works of canvas as well as constructed and found materials.

What she aims to put together is not easily deduced; these are not visual translations of music. The process does not deign to parallel the making of music nor the sensation of music. As Eustaquio admits, she knows nothing about music and it is exactly this ignorance which allows her to experiment freely. Yet the works are evidently studied; there is nothing arbitrary in the play of color, texture and pattern. These are astute works of design, achieving sensuality and quiet elegance while evoking mixed memories and an unfolding of possibilities. Undoubtedly, it is a collection that comes together as a well-composed and thoughtful piece.

AAA 2009: A tumor and an alien

As I promised last month when I posted a photo of the 2009 Ateneo Art Awards event, I visited the Ateneo Art Gallery where the short-listed pieces are on exhibit until September 19. There are three winners and these are what I will show in the next few days. Among the winners, two of the four art residencies were granted to one young artist, Jan Leeroy New (b. 1986), for his installation at the 2008 Singapore Biennale. Titled "Terratoma II: War of the Worlds," the large tumor-like growths and aliens were fastened onto the Singapore City Hall from September 11 to November 16, 2008. For the current exhibit, only one tumor and one alien were installed on an exterior corner of the Rizal Library, where the gallery is located, but it is still quite startling when one first notices it. And for those of you who, like me, are modern art-challenged, the gallery's notes on New's art installation is below. 2009 ATENEO ART AWARDS SERIES #1 OF 4



New's Terratoma was exactly that, jutting out like an organic growth on top of Singapore's City Hall during the 2008 Singapore Biennale. To some habitués of this bustling city state, the humongous fiberglass tumor was a stranger sight than the alien figures surrounding it, emanating it seems from the saucer-shaped dome of the building. A shared language is at work here, an unquestioned memory shaped by science fiction and extra-terrestrial fascinations.

Such a figuration of aliens serve an expected prototype, but to this artist, aliens are part of his exploration of hybrid forms where deities and supernatural beings from various cultures meld into curious creatures that nonetheless retain the iconic pose and placements of their origins. The stance paradoxically reconnects us with its intrinsic narratives, the world of myths made tangible and explored anew through accessible industrial-grade materials.

Subject to the play of Biennale tastes and motives, the installation emitted an appealing universality; but further on, the challenge of fastening the work on top of a state edifice takes on enduring themes of justice, heroism and struggle. Science and fiction is a paradoxical mix, but as New opines, this is part of the human exercise of explaining the unexplainable. It is a mythology that continues to contemporary times, just as there will always be constructs to attain the unattainable.

AAA 2009: Precious junk

I've already shown you all three winners of the 2009 Ateneo Art Awards in the three previous posts. Now let me show you my favorite out of the twelve short-listed artists. Michelline Syjuco's "Armadillon" was originally exhibited at the gallery of Mag:net Bonifacio High Street from August 8 to October 8, 2008 and the entire piece is currently on display at the Ateneo Art Gallery although in a more compact version. The two winged figures are made out of wood and beaten rusty scrap metal. In the display case are mannequin's hands carrying various kinds of handcrafted jewelry made not only out of precious metals and semiprecious stones, but also ordinary metals and rocks, and even hardware. Michelline caught many of my favorite things in her piece: science fiction and fantasy, earth tones, chunky jewelry, wood, stone, metal and texture—so it's little wonder why I immediately fell in love with it. I've again written the gallery's notes of the artwork below but this was one piece where I didn't need to read the notes to know that I like it.


The problem with modern art pieces like this (and those of the three winners, actually) is, I can't imagine them outside a gallery or museum. If the artist is willing to break up the parts though, I wouldn't mind having this spiky, rusty winged warrior in our living room. My dear Dogberry just might protest though. 2009 ATENEO ART AWARDS SERIES #4 OF 4



Design and merchandise are part of the language of function, and they figure prominently in this installation of hand-crafted objects. All pieces are molded or else made for the functions of the body. Or so it seems. Syjuco proceeds to subvert our ideas about functionality foremost by addressing the divide between precious and 'worthless' materials. These are exquisite pieces of jewelry rendered from gold, silver, coral and amethyst, but also common metals, stones, flawed pearls and even hardware materials. What she achieves is design informed by conversation, where the quality of each element is brought out in contrasts and combines of intricate yet hard-edged details. Even rust is employed here, its color adding depth to embossed and beaten metal plates.

Syjuco promotes "Armadillon" as her own imaginary world. It is sheer baroque extravagance recalling the grandeur of churches and church ornaments, but clearly she is most inspired by the production design of epical fantasies, drawing on themes of magic and warriorhood.

What Syjuco attempts in her ornamentation are translations of beauty and danger; avid introspections on material and spiritual flight.