About the Event
If art is a province, who best represent it, but its citizens, right? Citizens who create it as an island utopia where ideas should roam free, to be defended, hence, at all cost.
Territorial at the very least, there is no compromise to be meted out for its habitation. “All your base are belongs to us.” Diplomacy is tricky. Diplomacy erodes at a principle of a stand. Diplomacy is dancing on firecrackers and smiling with the devil, sleeping with the enemy while pulling fast the mattress underneath. Inchoate contracts signed in rum and tears, arguing for benefits, for the best arrangement for one’s fubu. Yet, the landscape remains a promising conquest, a world in your eye, a glimpse of paradise. The seas surrounding it bode of transactions and deals mawing with each heaving. Dance upon the waves, tread through the waters, the sands beckon, the diplomats are coming.
The show is a reunion of sorts and a reckoning of what needs to be revitalized again in the dormant complacency of pleasant views and regurgitated muses. Conflict resolutions dealt in the way they know best. For art thou alone exists, exist to resist.
Lessons in Diplomacy Against Diplomacy features works by Pipo Alido, Argie Bandoy, Valeria Cavestany, Mike Crisostomo, Maria Cruz, Patrick Cruz, Jed Escueta, Robert Langenegger, Jet Melencio, Gabe Naguiat, Jayson Oliveria, Masi Oliveria, Bud Omeng, Israel Remo, Carlo Ricafort, Timo Roter, Gani Simpliciano, Gerardo Tan, Jeff Tan, MM Yu, and Jeona Zoleta.
Co-curated by Manuel Ocampo and Lena Cobangbang, the show opens on the 21st of July Saturday 6pm at Artinformal, 277 Connecticut Street, Greenhills East, Mandaluyong City. This will be on view until 18th of August 2018.
Lena Cobangbang (b.1976) studied Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines in Diliman QC. Her work is broad-ranging, moving across video, installation, and found objects to embroidery, cookery, performance and photography. Integral to her art practice is doing collaborations with other artists, such as with Yasmin Sison under the created fictional identity as Alice and Lucinda; and with Mike Crisostomo as The Weather Bureau.
Apart from making art, she writes and works as an independent curator. A part of the seminal artist collective Surrounded By Water, her art practice extends to doing art administration and exhibit organizing, having been a fellow at the 2008 HAO Summit for emerging artists, curator and art managers in Asia in Singapore in 2008, and having undergone an artist/curator research residency exchange between Green Papaya Art Projects and Pekarna Magdalenske Mreze in Maribor, Slovenia in 2010. She was also part of the touring exhibit Bastards of Misrepresentation, curated by Manuel Ocampo which has been held in Berlin, Hamburg, Bangkok and New York and the Manila Vice show in Sete, France.
In 2005, she was nominated for the 3rd Ateneo Art Awards. She received the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award in 2006 and was one of the participating artists in the 2008 Singapore Biennale. She did curatorial projects for galleries Pablo, Post Gallery, Galerie Anna, Galerie Roberto, Art Anton, and Secret Fresh in Manila, Philippines. She was part of a residency program hosted by Langgeng Art Foundation in Jogjakarta in 2016, and is a participant in the first Manila Biennale in 2018.
Manuel Ocampo (b. 1965) has been a vital presence on the international art scene for over twenty-five years, with a reputation for fearlessly tackling the taboos and cherished icons of society and of the art world itself. Now based in Manila, the Philippines, he had an extended residency in California in the late 1980s and early 1990s and continues to spend significant time working in both the US and Europe. Ocampo was recently featured in the Philippine Pavilion for the 2017 Venice Biennale, with a selection of paintings from the 1990s in dialogue with his recent work.
In recent years, Ocampo’s works have featured more mysterious yet emotionally charged motifs that evoke an inner world of haunting visions and nightmares. He often makes use of an eclectic array of quasi-religious, highly idiosyncratic icons featuring teeth, fetuses, sausages, and body parts alongside more traditional Christian motifs. The process of artistic creation is often a central concern, with many works making ironic commentaries on notions of artistic inspiration, originality, and the anxiety of influence. The artist himself is frequently the subject of parody and self-mockery; sometimes he appears as a buzzard, a kind of cultural scavenger, or assumes slightly deranged alter egos.