“Place of Region in the Contemporary” Initial project of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network (PCAN)

Place of Region in the Contemporary
Initial project of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network (PCAN)
8 December 2017 – 27 January 2018
Opening Reception: 8 December (Friday) at 4pm
Vargas Museum, University of the Philippines

UP Vargas Museum opens Place of Region in the Contemporary, the first project of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network (PCAN) built through three nodes in a network: Knowledge Production and Circulation; Exhibition and Curatorial Analysis; Public Engagement and Artistic Formation. The project endeavors to activate a network to coordinate a range of interventions in contemporary art in the Philippines and to cast a sharper profile for it on an inter-local and trans-regional scale. It is keen to confront the requirements of research and discourse; curate art and subject the curatorial gesture to critique; and propose modes of catalyzing the public sphere of art and in the process harness the energies of its agents.

Patrick D. Flores, director of PCAN, introduces the project Place of Region in the Contemporary with an anthology of artist-curator Raymundo Albano’s texts, alongside his poetry and curatorial and graphic design. It addresses the concerns of Albano in the intersecting fields of the creative, the critical, the cultural, and the curatorial. It is to these that Albano speaks: the discourse and practice of art making and instilling it with presence in the world of ideas, exhibitions, and the particularities of lived life.

Roberto G. Paulino coordinates the Knowledge Production and Circulation component of PCAN. For Place of Region in the Contemporary, Paulino initiates an archival research on Philippine artists Jess Ayco (1916-1982), Santiago Bose (1949-2002), Abdulmari Imao (1936-2014), and Junyee (Luis Yee Jr) (born 1942). Born or based in the regions of Bacolod, Baguio, Jolo, and Los Baños, the artists represent the disparate conditions and production in Philippine modern and contemporary art.

The Exhibition and Curatorial Analysis node of PCAN is coordinated by Tessa Maria Guazon. An exhibition is presented to explore ideas of the region and the different “practices of placeness” in Philippine contemporary art by tracing numerous strains of place making in the works of artists from different localities across the Philippines. Collateral activities are organized with the exhibition, including a discussion platform to examine impulses underlying the curatorial —those that frame and activate localities in their assertion of claims to place against an overarching globality.

Within the frame of Public Engagement and Artistic Formation, coordinator Renan Laru-an outlines the ground for accumulating and reviewing resources (institutions/infrastructures) and references (actors/agents) for the research direction of PCAN. Initially, it elects three ecologies of practices: Los Baños through the Philippine High School for the Arts and the International Rice Research Institute; Siliman University as an interface to liberal (arts) education in Southern Philippines; Aga Khan Museum of Islamic Art at Mindanao State University through the journal archives of the Institute of Islamic Studies at University of the Philippines, Diliman.

Place of Region in the Contemporary was made possible by the guidance, vision, and logistical support of Senator Loren Legarda.

Latest activity announcements of PCAN’s Place of Region in the Contemporary will be posted on our official Facebook page: http://fb.me/vargasmuseum.upd. For more information, please contact Vargas Museum at (+632) 981-8500 loc. 4024 (UP trunkline), (+632) 928-1925 (telefax) or vargasmuseum@gmail.com. You may also check our website at http://vargasmuseum.upd.edu.ph, and Instagram and Twitter accounts.