About the Event
Cian Dayrit’s “Pasyon” references Rey Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution, the seminal text that limned the conceptual world of various resistance movements from 1840-1910 through the lens of popular devotional practices in the Philippines.
In “Pasyon,” his fifth solo exhibition, Dayrit takes a different tack and approaches the now-familiar forms and formats of devotional paraphernalia as sites of concentration, which he uses to render composites of various ideological trajectories that are active within the Philippine contemporary.
Drawing comparisons between the retablo and the educational sit-in, the missal and the polyeto, and bridging the tropes of data-sheet info-graphics and anting-anting iconography, Dayrit uses devotional imagery and form not only to map out the conceptual worlds of movements that continue to inform the Philippine context (be they reactionary, imperialist, or revolutionary) but also to examine these movements themselves as practices of devotion.
Words by Antares Gomez Bartolome