An Autobiographical Installation Art, An Institutional Critique
February 22 – March 21, 2020
Opening reception
Saturday, February 22 | 6 PM
Silverlens Galleries
2263 Don Chino Roces Avenue Extension, Makati City, Philippines
SILVERLENS is pleased to present Judy Freya Sibayan’s ‘Performing My Self-archive, My Other Body: An Autobiographical Installation Art, An Institutional Critique’. This work is a continuation of Sibayan’s ongoing project on her self-archive of 45 years. The conceptual artist intends to engage the audience in conversations on artists and their archives.
For inquiries, email us at info@silverlensgalleries.com
Performing My Self-archive, My Other Body: An Autobiographical Installation Art, An Institutional Critique
By Judy Freya Sibayan
Performing My Self-archive, My Other Body: An Autobiographical Installation Art Performance is my first iteration of Moving House, Unpacking a Life of Critical Artmaking performed at Calle Wright in 2018. Basically a collection of signs, the archive needs to be read and interpreted—that is, made meaningful in the present. Something needs to be created from it for the present if it is to be useful. A few tropes used to describe the archive are the compost, the construction site and the laboratory. Thus as archival art, my work is a reclamation of the past arriving in the form of the archive made useful for the present.
Without using my self-archive to reclaim it for the present, I am dis-membered from my body of autobiographical materials. So that in performing my self-archive, I “re-member” my past to the present and even envision possibilities for the future. On the other hand, performance art does not have a past nor a future. As live art, performance only has a present with its documentations (the archive) mere prompts to memory. But the archive as a memorial space, as a mode of remembrance, as storage memory, is uninhabited; making the archive antithetical to performance. However, in performing the record making and telling of my life story “re-membered” with my body of autobiographical materials, artist and self-archive are one work, one presence. Once the performance ceases, the subject disappears but the other body, the body of self-representational materials remains, awaiting to be “re-membered” again by/with the artist in the presence of other living bodies.
Read the full artist’s note here: http://bit.ly/SLG-SelfArchive
