Tuesday, August 14, 2007 National art exhibit opens Aug. 17 in Oro By Mozart Pastrano
"SUNGDU-AN 4: ExTensions," this year's much-awaited national visual arts exhibit, will open at the Museum of Three Cultures at Capitol University in Cagayan de Oro City on August 17.
A flagship project of the National Committee on Visual Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), the exhibit showcases 12 individual and collective works, three each from Mindanao, Visayas, Luzon, and the National Capital Region (NCR).
"Derived from the Waray word for convergence, the Sungdu-an scheme strives to track the emergent tendencies in Philippine art, regardless how fragmentary and discrepant these may be," project director Dr. Patrick D. Flores, art curator of the National Museum, said.
Sungdu-an 4 seeks to follow through the gains of Sungdu-an 3 in terms of curatorial development, a national survey of contemporary art, and the fostering of a critical audience that is responsive to the demands of artistic challenges.
The previous Sungdu-an was titled "Making the Local," highlighting the various angles of locality in relation to the social forces and discourses that unsettle it.
The operative term for this year's Sungdu-an -- "ExTensions" -- signifies a movement beyond the local but at the same time remains sensitive to the conflicts and contradictions (the productive unease) in this engagement, in the process of extending or being extensive or seeking extensions.
This is the wide frame and reflexive premise within which the curators have made their choices.
Crooked timber
The exhibit curators -- Kelly Ramos-Palaganas (for Mindanao), Radel Paredes (the Visayas), Wire Rommel Tuazon (Luzon), and Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez (NCR), in tandem with Committee Chair Christopher Rollo -- chose three kinds of work for each of their regions: existing works, new work, and site-specific projects.
Existing works record the accomplishments of young artists all over the islands and tend to explore the intricacies of meaning, and the palimpsests generated as private contemplation and public exposure craft a kind of form that is layered but nevertheless stark in its passion.
The intuition of maternality in Pamela Yan's work is ingrained in the entire structure -- the furniture -- of the household.
Rene de Guzman's procession of migrants haunts us as it transfigures into an army of toiling terracotta warriors. The doctrine of the church is subjected to a consuming re-reading in the bleeding hands of Nomar Miano, who lays bare the mythology of catechetical truth.
And, as if to confound expectations, Edwin Jumalon's whimsy of color and stroke converses with his son Winner's intense violation of the canvas with a different energy and spectrum.
In the new works for Sungdu-an 4, the artists peer into the complex world and seek a horizon.
Bembol dela Cruz measures the rationality of progress and drafts the cartography of catastrophe, reminding us of Immanuel Kant who has said: "From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."
Alternative platform
Rowena Seloterio's obsession with the vista of her mind reveals an idiosyncratic subjectivity that is exacting.
For his part, Paulo Martinez captures sound as the index of a whirling urban universe.
And in an art historical redemptive program, women artists in Mindanao put up a wall of their present legacy, eclipsed through the seasons by the prejudice of gender.
For site-specific works, art that is created at the site of the exhibition, artists dwell on locus.
In Marina Cruz's experience, the self is composed of body parts that may fall out of joint and cohere again in a state of play, constantly reconstructed by social performances.
Pilipinas Street Plan and Wesley Rasines present at once a glimpse and a panorama of how the technologies of painting and video, the media of graffiti painting and tattoo merge.
And, conjuring an image of an odyssey, the Mindanao Art Caravan, steered by a multitude of artists from the region, harvests the "culture" of a locale in the very possibility of travel, a peregrinate instinct that finally arrives.
Dr. Flores says that as a whole, the exhibit "does not only offer an alternative platform for artists to carry out their creative tasks and fulfill their visions away from the imperatives of the market; it also insists on a certain level of independence from the state institution that underwrites this situation of confluence.
Threats of closure
If there is something to be gleaned here, it is this: that no matter how government reduces culture to a mere instrument of its interests, the faculties of art can always resist and spin off possibilities beyond the bureaucracies of their regimented imagination.
Indeed, to extend is to keep something going, defending the aesthetic from the threats of closure."
The exhibit opens with a cocktails reception at 5 p.m. on August 17 at Capitol University's Museum of Three Cultures in Cagayan de Oro City, where it will be on view until September 18.
In preparation for the exhibit opening, a Curators' Forum unfolds at 2 p.m. on August 17 at the AVR 2, 2nd Floor of University Library Building of Capitol University.
A corollary program kicks off at Xavier University-Ateneo de Cagayan, where a series of printmaking lecture-workshop-exhibition by the Printmaking Association of the Philippines, which is coordinating the entire Sungdu-an 4, is slated on August 18 and 19 at the Museo de Oro.
