Past

Sights and Sounds: Philippines

Aug. 28 – Sep. 24, 2015

Sights and Sounds: Philippines features new work by Maria Taniguchi, Martha Atienza, Victor Balanon, and Mariano Montelibano, selected by Joselina Cruz.

The practice of video art in the Philippines employs a rich, contemporary brand of localism, one marked by extravagant imagery filtered through a twenty-first-century sensibility. The artists seen here investigate the truthfulness of the images they produce or record, use local images split away from their context and editing techniques to walk the line between the absurd and the real, strangeness and fact. The Hitchcock influenced drawings of Victor Balanon’s Orpheus and the jeepney stills of Maria Taniguchi’s Untitled (Celestial Motors) lean toward popular culture, rather than social commentary; the artists are more interested in exploring the qualities of the medium than in employing it to document performance. Mariano Montelibano’s Pamunit (Fishing) and Martha Atienza’s Anito follow the trajectory of social commentary through documentation. The distance between the images and our expectations marks the videos as contemporary; they are experiments that bring together the intricacies of practice, place, context, and origin.

Joselina Cruz
Curator

The writer and curator Joselina Cruz (b. Manila, 1972) is Director/Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila. She curated the second edition of the Singapore Biennale, 2008, among other exhibitions. She was formerly a curator at the Lopez Museum, Manila, and the Singapore Art Museum.

About Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video

This long-term series offers a rotating selection of vigorous film and video works by contemporary artists from around the world — with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.

Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video is a long-term presentation of new film and video works made in the sphere of the visual arts. The series offers a rotating selection of vigorous works by contemporary artists from around the world. It introduces New York audiences to the latest developments in filmmaking within the art context and underlines the Jewish Museum’s holistic and global approach to the understanding and presentation of art and culture.

Sights and Sounds takes advantage of the straightforward way film and video travel: shipped on discs or streamed online, these works provide an instant connection to new creative practices from even the most remote locations.

Twenty-five international curators have selected new film and video work from their respective regions of the world—ranging from Argentina to Vietnam, Nigeria to Romania, New Zealand to China, and many places in between. Their picks are screened for one month each in the museum’s media center, which has been turned into a miniature cinema for the occasion.

The works in Sights and Sounds touch on themes significant to both Jewish culture and universal human experience: spirituality, exile, language, conflict, family, humor, history. The series creates a broad network of artistic expression and curatorial perspectives that takes stock of what is happening in film and video art at this moment in time across the globe—with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.

Sights and Sounds will culminate with a selection of highlights from the series. One work from each country will be presented in the gallery from February 5, 2016 to June 30, 2016.

Jens Hoffmann
Deputy Director
Exhibitions and Public Programs

#sightsandsounds

Installation view of Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video in the Goodkind Media Center. Photo by David Heald.

Exhibition highlights

Victor Balanon, still from Orpheus, 2013, animated video, 5 min. Artwork © Victor Balanon, provided by the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila