Photographs as historical documents is the focus of the upcoming photography exhibition “Davao City, Early Eighties”, Photographs by Arnel Villegas, which will open at Art Portal, Gallery of Contemporary Art in Paseo de Legaspi Building, Friday, September 7, 2018.
Curated by Angely Chi, the exhibition features 15 black and white photographs taken by visual artist and photographer Arnel S. Villegas around downtown Davao City from 1981-1985, a tumultuous period in the city while undergoing socio-political and cultural shifts in the Martial Law period.
Villegas documented the street scenes during his solitary photo walks around the city proper.
He practiced a do-it-yourself archiving of his photographs and negative assets, preserving their material integrity, which made them available for reproduction two decades later.
Villegas is currently known as a pen-and-ink artist. But before his shift to the pen and ink medium, he was an avid photographer, who mostly shot with 35mm black and white film. He not only documented street scenes and urban architecture, but also notable personalities including the late National Artist Victorio Edades, during his last years of retirement and life in Davao City.
The historical and socio-political contexts of the photographs are enriched with select digitized images of news, ads, features, and op-ed pieces published from 1980-1985 in Mindanao Times, the oldest community paper in Mindanao, which was founded in 1946.
The exhibition will also have educational components including an artist talk on September 15, 2018, and a historical forum on September 21, 2018, the anniversary of the Martial Law declaration.
The exhibition will run for a month until October 6, 2018.
The exhibition and its related events are free for public viewing and participation. The exhibition viewing hours at Art Portal, Gallery for Contemporary Art is from 4pm-10pm from Mondays-Fridays and from 1pm-10pm on Saturdays. For inquiries, please contact 0905 459 2146/ admin@artportalgallery.online.