A Summary of Executions

Lisa Ito

It is a fitting way to cap a year of atrocities and indignities: with a slap and a promise to fight back.

This group exhibition, convening visual artists consistently critical of the nation’s state of affairs, may well be likened to a laboratory set-up or rehearsal for a next stage of reckonings. The exhibit began as a response to the nature of the current regime’s toxic heteronormativity, reflecting on the prompt: how are power plays normalized?

The artists submitted works in media they are best known for: installation and mixed media, which are historically birthed out of the desire to go beyond traditional spaces of making and exhibiting art, resisting the pull towards being ultimately reduced to spectacle and commodity and, at their best, channeled towards energies more participatory and emancipatory.

It is interesting, therefore, to see where this convergence leads to. Each brings a compelling critique of the present to the table:

• The global persistence of empire and excess is a recurring theme of Mideo Cruz’s long-running series of assemblage pieces. In refashioning secondhand or salvaged objects of consumerism, Cruz reminds us of how imperialist overproduction and conditioning seeps into the everyday, to the extent of rendering its targets unable to recognize the political economy behind things.

• The local conditions for revolutionary resistance, are surfaced in the extent of plunder, feudal oppression, and subsistence mapped out by Cian Dayrit’s textile assemblage pieces, State of State. In tying up the precarious state of Philippine land, seas, nature and national patrimony as a common “arsenal of contradictions”, Dayrit shows that there is much fuel to light the fire of revolt on the ground.

• The prevailing political system of bureaucrat capitalism which normalizes this state of affairs is indicted by Buen Abrigo and Frances Abrigo. Continuing where a work by American conceptual and feminist artist Barbara Kruger (We Don’t Need Another Hero, 1987) left off, their installation portrays 16 heads of states with an imperative and declarative call, we don’t need another dictator—a gesture with immense potential to be translated into performative action at the next opportune time.

• The centrality of culture in maintaining the status quo is represented in two juxtaposed pen and ink and acrylic on canvas works by Iggy Rodriguez. These touch on religion as sufferance and enslavement, on one hand, and how seemingly universal rights and freedoms are protected on paper but violated in practice here.

• Finally, Mervin Pimentel’s Superiority Complex series portrays the specific manifestations of systemic ills, assessing how these are particularized in six issues under Duterte’s “macho fascist regime”. Destroying the lives and futures of ordinary Filipinos are extrajudicial killings, lack of sovereignty over the West Philippine Sea, corruption, militarization, historical revisionism, and the looming electoral crisis.

In this constellation of works, this exhibition comprehensively threads through realities which have brought the nation to the state we are in today. This suffices to imagine and make visual the power and privilege made possible by the labor, often invisible, of the subaltern, the female, the queer, and the disenfranchised. Any critique of fascist heteronormativity, therefore, is not possible without counter-assertion and empowerment of the identities that they repress: the representation of women and the marginalized—whether that be in the highest seat/s of power or in the multifarious spaces of creative production.

Lastly, the exhibit must also be weighed within the specific characteristics of the Philippine visual arts community: which offers a common breeding ground for dissenters and progressive art practice as well as enablers of past and present dictatorships.

Even as we are saddened by the loss of many Filipino artists in 2020 and 2021, several of them from the Social Realists who stood against Martial Law during their youth, one may find solace and strength in knowing that there are generations who persist in the good fight. Resonating with messages, pleas, and protests outside the white cube, we hope that more take up the creative challenge to translate criticality into compelling action, embraced by a larger collective of warm bodies all standing one’s ground.

Kung maaari, isalin at/o ipasa pagkabasa.

Dalhin ang galit at sining sa laban ng masa.

Sumama sa pagkilos sa ika-10 ng Disyembre, 2021.

#ArtistsFightBack #NoToDuterteMarcos2022