17 December 2020 – 13 February 2021
UP Vargas Museum | 1F and 3F Galleries
Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center, Roxas Avenue, University of the Philippines, Diliman, 1101 Quezon City, Philippines
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Participating Artists:
Bree Jonson, Eisa Jocson, garbanzos, Patipat Chaiwitesh, Samak Kosem, Wantanaee Siripattananuntakul
UP Vargas Museum, in partnership with Aura Contemporary Art Foundation (@auramekongartproject), presents 𝘿𝙞𝙨𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙚, 𝙀𝙢𝙗𝙤𝙙𝙮, an exhibition that seeks to reflect on how bodies, species, and spaces transform constraints in simultaneously urgent and playful ways. This project between the Philippines and Thailand acknowledges the issues brought about by prevailing boundaries and restrictions set on subjectivities. Prefixes prompt the probe of these conditions: “trans,” in the sense of location and direction, and “dis,” in the sense of resistance.
𝘿𝙞𝙨𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙚, 𝙀𝙢𝙗𝙤𝙙𝙮 gathers artists to reflect on discourses around transfigurations within the contexts of agency, location, and future. The works reveal gestures of subjection and presence, expressed through selfie photo manipulations, performances in a KTV room, creatures morphing through textiles, paintings of an inter-species ecology, and films on cross-border male sex work, among others.
The exhibit will open virtually on 17 December 2020, Thursday. Physical visits may be arranged by appointment only to be scheduled with the UP Vargas Museum via vargasmuseum@up.edu.ph or the museum’s Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/vargasmuseum.upd
New museum safety protocols will be implemented to protect visitors and museum personnel. Walk-in visitors will not be allowed.
About the Artists:
Bree Jonson paints animals and plants to dissect the relationship that humans have with their environment, and the divide that has grown between them, a divide that is the unconscious and continuous displacement of animal and nature as Other, different from humans, and lower in importance and hierarchy. She also is exploring various ways of translating her ideas into space and has thus created installations and sculptures that pursue this. Jonson graduated from the Ateneo de Davao University, with solo exhibitions in Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, Norway, and the United States.
Eisa Jocson is a contemporary choreographer and dance maker from the Philippines, trained as a visual artist, with a background in ballet. She recently premiered a new work commissioned by Sharjah Biennale 2019 titled: The Filipino Superwoman Band, a work that looks into the affective labor of Overseas Filipino Musicians. A recipient of the 2018 Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artists grant, she won the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award 2019.
garbanzos is a multimedia artist based in Cavite. He is an undergraduate student in University of The Philippines Los Baños, taking BS in Agriculture. He is a member of magpies press, a collaborative and experimental collective based in Laguna. His interests are jewelry making, gardening, pottery, photo editing, and acting.
Patipat Chaiwitesh is a graduate of the Department of Textile and Tapestry, Ecole supérieure des beaux-arts TALM – site d’Angers, France (2016) with a background in Visual Arts from Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand (2009). In 2018, he was chosen to participate in Bangkok Art Biennale 2018 and was part of a group exhibition Taste Test selected by the Thailand Creative & Design Center for Bangkok Design Week 2018. He was recruited in the Artist Residency Program at Bamboo Curtain Studio in New Taipei City in 2019. His latest solo exhibition Traveling treasures was held at the Subhashok The Arts Centre in Bangkok (2020).
Samak Kosem lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He works in the field of anthropology and his ongoing research in Northern Thailand on transnational sexuality and remaking of borders-bodies as part of his PhD project at Chiang Mai University. Since 2017, he has merged social sciences and art practice to shape knowledge on queer studies as portrayed through photography and visual ethnography. His projects focus on “queer Muslims” in the Deep South border through the study of nonhuman subjects; his work “Sheep” was part of the first edition of Bangkok Art Biennale in 2018. His work “Nonhuman Ethnography” has been presented in galleries and museums in Bangkok, Taiwan, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
Wantanee Siripattananuntakul lives and works in Bangkok. She works mainly in multimedia. She received her BFA from Silpakorn in 1999, and is one of the master pupils of Prof. Jean-François Guiton, University of Arts Bremen in 2007. She has been a lecturer at the Faculty of Painting, Sculpture and Graphics Arts, Silpakorn University since 2009. She is recognized for exploring the potential of works of art to raise many social questions and to increase awareness about present-day concerns. In 2007, she participated at the 53rd Venice Biennale.
The exhibition runs until 13 February 2021.
Displace, Embody will be on view by appointment at the UP Vargas Museum 1F and 3F Galleries beginning 17 December 2020. To book a viewing appointment or to request more information, please send an email to vargasmuseum@up.edu.ph, message the UP Vargas Museum on Facebook via https://fb.me/vargasmuseum.upd, or on Instagram or Twitter via @upvargasmuseum. You may also check our website at https://vargasmuseum.wordpress.com.
