Art changes the world

SINGAPORE — Kidlat Tahimik’s Memories of Overdevelopment Redux: A Castaway’s 33-Year Celluloid Journey (1980-2013 version) had its Asian premiere last Saturday at the 8Q adjunct venue of Singapore Art Museum. A repeat screening followed yesterday.

As of this writing (last Friday), I was still looking forward to spectating what has been billed as “a never-ending film-in-progress” — while anticipating loads of laughs, the way they can only be provoked by Baguio boy Eric de Guia’s antic insights.

I understand that the 16mm film started in 1980, shelved in 1987, and jumpstarted anew this year will screen as a 33-minute showreel, followed by a discussion with the director. Why, it should be “the” definitive indie film on the first circumnavigator of the globe, Enrique de Malacca, believed to have come from the Visayas before being bought as a slave by Ferdinand Magellan.

Happily do I still recall the old privileged hours spent on proto-historical humor on the top deck of the Laperal Bldg. on Session Road, where Kidlat’s film set and props, inclusive of a mock galleon, had come to roost — in what eventually became a vegetarian resto cum theater called Oh My Gulay.   

That was exactly my reaction when I spotted the yet hirsute Eric, sans loin-revealing g-string, chatting it up with SAM director Suzie Lingham, the day media were given a briefing and preview of the Singapore Biennale 2013. 

Eric/Kidlat and I quickly posed for duo selfies; we hadn’t been mistaken for one another for some time now, we both noted. I was lucky to run into him, too, much as I had already high-fived it with a good number of Pinoy artists taking part in the Biennale, and kababayans rooting them on.

These included his son Kawayan de Guia, Frank Cimatu, Tad Ermitaño, Leonardo Aguinaldo and Carlo Villafuerte of the strong Cordillera contingent, Kiri Dalena with her mother Julie Lluch and sister Aba Dalena lending support, Nilo Ilarde, Eileen Ramirez, Claro Ramirez, and Annie Sarthou with her escort, National Artist Benedicto Cabrera. Many other Pinoy artists and cheerleaders would also eventually be present, or so we heard.

The art biennale is Singapore’s fourth since its inception in 2006 — this time with SAM spearheading the gallant effort that would quickly convince all and sundry of the admirable generosity of spirit that went into the collation of no less than a stunning display of artworks from SouthEast Asia — from a total of 82 artists and artist collectives.

Conducted under the theme title “If the World Changed,” SB2013 was put together with the intimate engagement of a 27-member curatorial team who, “with their combined expertise, have harnessed the unique energies of SouthEast Asia to shape the region’s premier contemporary art exhibition.”

For our country’s representation, the curators were Charlie Co for Bacolod, Kawayan de Guia for the Cordillera region, Claro Ramirez for Metro Manila and environs, and Abraham Garcia Jr. for Mindanao.

At the briefing, Susie Lingham stressed the importance of the early decision to steer away from the usual practice of rigidly setting up country “pavilions” in favor of integrating works from all over SouthEast Asia, most of which were being shown for the first time. Then too, going beyond urban centers would lead to uncovering “a greater diversity of artistic practices that reference urgent and key issues in our contemporary world.”

The collaborative curatorial process certainly played a major part in coming up with the embarrassment of riches now exhibited among numerous venues all around Singapore.

Ms. Lingham’s rationale for the 2013 Biennale’s intrepid conceptual approach was echoed by curator and project director Tan Boon Hui, who expressed the rhetoric quite psassionately: “If we do not believe in our own art, how can others do so? Let the art come out, and we would have done our part.”

The inter-regional co-curators were selected and flown in to immerse themselves in the rigorous process of collaborative curatorial work. “What we yet didn’t know,” related Susie, “became the focus, instead of what we already knew.” It then became an adventure of discovery and marvel. 

After all, art surprises. It does change the world, what with the manner that it renders mouths agape and eyes widened, the very soul of aesthetic appreciation expanding and assimilating every notion and emotion that can only be positive — the way our viewpoints and mindets are significantly altered.

It is 2013, and art is simply no more the rudimentary documentation and/or representation, faithful or symbolic, of the quotidian hunt or mythological pursuit. It is not simply beauty, either. It must surprise. Arrest and take hold. And as in a short story, effect a change in consciousness and character on the part of the creator, the participant, the beholder.  

This is what will happen for the next few months in Singapore, till February 16, 2014.

What I’ve seen of the displays thus far has impressed me no end. Singaporean, Malaysian, Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian and Burmese artists have all stepped forward courageously, indeed. And I’ll be singing their praises next week. But for now I must share my pride over the Philippine art that exults our ever-intriguing narrative in so many enchanting ways.

There’s Kiri Dalena’s Monument for a Present Future 2013, a video and mixed media installation where “foetal human forms echo the postures of protesters beaten during the years of Martial Law, while the video documents the dirt road where 58 civilian bodies were found in the Maguindanao massacre of 2009.”

Manny Montelibano of Bacolod has created a video montage of clips largely sourced from YouTube for his piece, Sorry for the Inconvenience — 5 Fingers, a 5-channel video installation with sound.

Oscar Villamiel’s installation, “Payatas,” is an eerie landscape occupying an entire darkened hall, where thousands of broken dolls salvaged from the former garbage dump adorn the walls and ceiling of a barong-barong, while a path towards it is created by mounds of other discarded dolls, some of their heads impaled on bamboo rods.

Leslie de Chavez’s “Detritus,” a large oil-on-canvas painting, is brilliantly executed as hard-edged social realism, with dramatic vignettes centered on stereotypical characters caught up in a dramatic, luminous tapestry of poverty and corruption.

Nikki Luna’s “Tiempos Muertos (Dead Season)” showcases rows of sugar and resin “diamonds” within three glass-encased wall shelves, as “a comment on the sweet life enjoyed by the hacenderos… Like blood diamonds, these sugar crystals are a treasure tilled from the earth, gleaned at high human cost.”

All these are found in SAM’s two levels of galleries. Other works by Filipino artists are elsewhere. I thought I had completed my Pinoy-art sampling when I ran into Kidlat, who asked what I thought of Kawayan’s curation of the Cordillera group exhibit. It occupied an entire curving wing of the SAM building’s second level, as it turned out.

So, back up I went, to be mesmerized anew by the creative energy that seems to be endemic, nay, pandemic, in Pilipinas, in situ and beyond.

The AX(is) Art Project of Baguio City presents Tiw-tiwong: The Odds to Unends — “a mixed media installation and Uncyclopedia (book) that involves some 150 participants and 3 art activities along the 90-mile-long Halsema Highway in the Cordilleras… as a multi-pronged collaborative art project.”

Here, Ben Cabrera’s acrylic and pencil on handmade paper joins works by others in the Cordillera pantheon of artists: Santi Bose, Robert Villanueva, Kidlat Tahimik, Shant Verdun, Rene Aquitania, Leonardo Aguinaldo, Tad Ermitaño, Egay Navarro and Rica Concepcion, Carlo Villafuerte, Malek Lopez, Ruel Bimuyag, Mark Zero, as well as woodcarvers from Ifugao, the Mighty Bhutens and the ‘Waiting Sheds’ project artists, the Katipunan Aso-ciation…

But I will have to laud this Olympian assemblage next week, leading off with Kawayan de Guia’s own inimitable works on the curving glass walls of SAM.

Then there are the Talaandig Artists of Bukidnon and Siete Pesos from Cagayan de Oro, as well as various other individual Pinoy and fellow-SouthEast Asian artists and groups whose works are spread out among other venues.

All together now, they’re changing not only Singapore’s cityscape, but the entire terrain of multiple valiant dimensions in our region. Indeed, they’re changing the world.