with Bree Jonson, Wantanee Siripattananuntakul, and Patrick Flores
Facebook Livestream
Saturday, February 6, 2021 | 4 PM
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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UP Vargas Museum presents an online conversation between Bree Jonson, Wantanee Siripattananuntakul, and Patrick Flores on 06 February 2021, Saturday at 4:00PM. The online conversation is a collateral event for the current exhibition at the UP Vargas Museum, “Displace, Embody.”
“Displace, Embody” is an exhibition, in partnership with Aura Contemporary Art Foundation, that seeks to reflect on how bodies, species, and spaces transform constraints in simultaneously urgent and playful ways. It features Bree Jonson, Eisa Jocson, garbanzos, Patipat Chaiwitesh, Samak Kosem, and Wantanaee Siripattananuntakul to reflect on discourses around transfigurations within the contexts of agency, location, and future.
Jonson’s works such as Needles and Urchins deploy the image of sea anemones to juxtapose gender identities with an environment that may resemble the human body. Through the sound and video installations SAWA and Vulnerable voice, Siripattananuntakul engages viewers to explore how the body migrates to different places or homes. 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.
Join the discussion as curator Patrick Flores engages with Bree Jonson and Wantanaee Siripattananuntakul in a conversation about their works and artistic practices, and as they attempt to dissect the concept of gender laid evident by their cross-cultural tendencies and use of non-human tropes.
The “Vargas Conversations Online: Displace, Embody” will be live streamed online via the UP Vargas Museum’s Facebook page.
“Displace, Embody” is on view by appointment at the UP Vargas Museum 1F and 3F Galleries until 13 February 2021. 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.
Speakers Profiles:
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.
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.
Patrick Flores is a professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines College of Arts and Letters, and is the current curator of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center. Notable projects in Flores’s extensive curatorial experience include “Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art” in 2000, “Position Papers” during the 7th Gwangju Biennale in 2008, and the Philippine Pavilion, titled “Tie a String Around the World” for the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. He was also the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale in 2019, which was titled “Every Step in the Right Direction.”
