Sights and Sounds: Philippines

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.