9/27/13 Exhibition Review Child's Play » Disc Lab

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Exhibition Review | Child's Play

Features » Exhibition Review Child's Play

Illustration by DiscLab Images and Graphics. Photos by Mike Cocjin

Child's Play
“ [...] the appropriating of child-like vision comes across as
poignant re-assertion of a capacity to re-imagine or at least an
agentive gesture by way of choosing how and what to
remember. ”
THIS VIRTUAL PAIRING OF WORKS in the otherwise socially polar districts of Makati and Mabini is
just too seductive to pass up. Whereas Felix Bacolor’s Toy Stories (shown at NOVA Gallery in La
Fuerza Cmpd. Makati June 1-22, 2013) site-wise played to an arguably growing but still niche, eye
candy crowd, another exhibit, Common Ground Barrier (shown June 8-September 7, 2013 at Zn, 1335
Mabini) presented an archive of works framed as artistic research, including videos that appeared to
count upon the flamboyance of color and the literal light-hearted tone of playthings. None of this is
meant to say that either exhibition was mere fluff.

Bacolor, F. (2013). ABCDarium [Exhibition view of Toy Stories]. Image courtesy of NOVA Gallery

Bacolor’s visually taunting two-floors of assemblages, vitrines, lightboxes, and other display
appurtenances simultaneously parodying museum and Divisoria estante had him literally and
materially pegged upon the plasticity of juvenile narratives woven into police blotter/crime news
accounts. As this latter, dark thread to Toy Stories (children abused over decades or killed off in a
spectrum of violence) comes belatedly accessible to the visitor who chances upon text as he/she
ascends upon the second floor, you do get a gnawing sense you’ve been played, what with the
cloying, presumably benign punches thrown at you from the get-go. Of course the success of this

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ruse hinges upon this artist’s deft handling of the globalized detritus of kids’ ware and his ability to
transform discards into pigment and sculpting surrogates. In keeping with his track record, he pulls
this off but not without bringing Toy Stories perilously close to effacing the tragic moorings of this
assembly of pieces, the regurgitated violation only possibly mitigated by NOVA’s woodsy, affective
resonance with the domestic and homely—it hits precisely where it hurts, where one lives and least
expects it.

Dalena, K.(2012). Play [Video still]. Image courtesy of 1335MABINI

Whereas on the grittier side of the megalopolis, at least two of the videos in Zn’s Common Ground
Barrier exhibition posed naif counterpoints to parallel ‘grown-up’ issues of death and violence brought
on either through human cruelty and/or avarice. Slid into a project trove rather than straight out
display space, Kiri Dalena’s and Edward Sanchez’s works were among several videos playing upon a
row of shelves used to rig up the otherwise usually sparse hanging at this re-adapted structure that’s
borne witness to war, the changing tides coming upon Manila’s once gentrified neighborhoods, to its
current resurrection as art space amidst karaoke bars, overseas employment recruitment agencies,
and homeless families making do on the storied red-light district. Both Dalena’s work, Play, and
Sanchez’s Desapariciones, demonstrate light-footed approaches to grim subjects. In Dalena’s case,
she filmed children playing atop washed out logs that ravaged lives, thus salvaged after the visceral
destruction of land, and home in Iligan, Mindanao post-typhoon Sendong in 2011; and in Sanchez’s
piece, it was Bogota Colombia’s reckoning with the desaparecido phenomenon not at all unfamiliar to
the Philippines and other countries with post-colonial narratives umbilically tied to Euroamerica. In
either case and with the magnitude of brutality and pathos notwithstanding, the appropriating of child-
like vision comes across as poignant re-assertion of a capacity to re-imagine or at least an agentive
gesture by way of choosing how and what to remember.

Sanchez, E.(2009). Desapariciones [Video still]. Image courtesy of 1335MABINI

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Masquerading as library-archive replete with dossier-looking artists’ packets, Common Ground
Barrier did live up to its conflicted ambitions articulated via its brief—of exploring “the impartial
function of the gallery and therefore embedded dilemma of neutrality.” I’m guessing that was
published with a healthy sense of irony given this day and age’s prevailing suspicions about
innocence and thus mythic neutrality. In the case of 1335 Mabini, the research aspect of the entire
undertaking was aspirationally extended through documentary screenings, to the blogsphere and on-
site feedback--how that latter bit eventually played out is something this writer has yet to determine.
What I would like to say though is that amidst the surfeit of art produced and paraded out on various
platforms these days, both outings in either side of Metro Manila enabled space for reveling in the
sensory while leaving off chunky bits to chew on—to tangle with the aftertaste, or distaste as the case
may be.

About the contributor

Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez is an Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines Department of

Art Studies. She was curatorial consultant of Lopez Museum (2005-2012) and is presently a member
of the Advisory Board of Asia Art Archive. She teaches courses on art criticism, curatorship,and
visual literacy, and was a 2009 fellow of the USA National Endowment for the Arts International Arts
Journalism Institute in the Visual Arts. Her writing has appeared in Broadsheet (Contemporary Art
Centre of South Australia), AAA Field Notes, Forum on Contemporary Art and Society, n.paradoxa:
international feminist art journal, C-Arts: Asian Contemporary Art and Culture, Metropolis M: Magazine
on Contemporary Art, Pananaw: Philippine Journal of Visual Arts, and Ctrl+P: Journal of Contemporary
Art, among others. She was a guest curator of the 2011 Jakarta Biennale, and since 1996, has been
overseeing the 2012 Alice Awardee for Publications, Pananaw: Philippine Journal of Visual Arts.

Text by Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez

J O URN A L F EA TURES I N TERVI EWS PRO J EC TS C RI TI C A LI TY Q UESTI O N N A I RE A RC H I VES

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