That Perspektiba comes in multimedia is crucial: Tutok Karapatan—a collective effort among the Philippine arts community seeking to lift the fictitious shroud of art's divorce from politics—acknowledges that oppression committed by state-based machinery is structural, such that it transcends mere oppression and reconfigures itself subtly (and therefore more dangerously) as repression. Which is to say that it batters not only the body, but more importantly assaults our consciousness: its ideological apparatuses are littered everywhere and take multiple forms, and in effect become unseen factories that manufacture for us our very dreams, even our consent to dream these dreams—intangible harnesses and leashes most of us have become too willing to wear. For this reason, any artistic attempt to counter these must come in equally multiple forms.
With this university-based exhibition's focus on the propagation of alternative perspectives, it restores agency to the human subject as breathing, heterogenous functions of the dynamic process of social structuration to resist the latter's homogenizing—and consequently silencing—tendencies. And this resistance must be no less ubiquitous: it has to be as consumable as bread on display at a bakery, common as a household chair waiting to be sat on, approachable as the agreeable dog we consider to be man's best friend. Juxtaposing such ordinary things and equating them with symbolically loaded images of bullets and whitewash, lifeless dummies piled one over another, a typewriter that inflicts pain with every expression, is to render these commonplace items with a potency not normally accorded to them. The show treats the human subject as a structure in itself, thereby giving what is personal the agency and function of the political.
One should also note that the project is not just a series of gallery-set exhibitions but of uncontainable performances as well, and this is indicative not only of Perspektiba' s polymorphous nature but also its desire to undermine product in favor of process: where a killing is no mere statistic but the actual dissolution of meaningful human engagements, structures are also no mere static phantasms but dynamic convergences of numerous constituent agencies. These performances reveal that the status quo is not inert and simply given to us by higher powers; rather, it is a social construct whose process of construction we as human subjects can participate in, whether for the purpose for conservation, reconstruction, or deconstruction.
The revelation of artificiality strips hegemony of its seeming naturalness—who can question after all what is falsely perceived as the blessing of common sense?—making it vulnerable to critique and the discourse that entails it. This then is what Tutok Karapatan really does through Perspektiba: load multiple perspectives with bullets of belief then simultaneously aim them at the status quo, actively trying to make its knees tremble, keeping faith in the notion that it would one day kneel before the dream of authentic freedom.
Angelo V. Suárez
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tutoKperspeKtiba 2
St. Scholastica’s College
2560 Leon Guinto Street, Malate, Manila
telephone no. (632) 524-7686 locals 230 or 27
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tutoK [Tutok Karapatan] is a project among the multimedia arts community that seeks to lift the shroud of art’s delusional divorce from politics. It is a loud and forward admission that all cultural production exists in actual historical contexts, in consciousness- shaping milieus that both curtail and incite rebellion in its multiple forms against the equally various appearances of oppression.
PerspeKtiba as a university-based series of performances and exhibitions is tutoK’s first line of offense against structural equilibrium. With its focus on the propagation of alternative perspectives, it restores agency to the human subject as breathing, heteregenous functions of the dynamic —but no less homogenizing—process of social structuration. perspeKtiba is an expression in multimedia of the need to actively resist not just against the oppressive system of state-centered hegemony but more so against its repressive machinery, not simply the type that overtly inscribes its ideology on policy but one that subtly firebrands its impetus on collective consciousness.
image: detail shot, Buen Calubayan sound installation “__________”
text: Angelo Suarez
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exhibition @ Amrhein Gallery Main Building St. Scholastica’s College
January 9 - January 23, 2007
Opening Reception: 3pm Tuesday January 9 , 2007
Gallery hours: 10am - 6pm Monday to Friday 10am -12nn Saturday
Benjie Torrado Cabrera
Buen Calubayan
Antipas Delotavo
Benjo Elayda
Lyra Abueg Garcellano
Lito Mondejar
Claro Ramirez
Iggy Rodriguez
Don Salubayba
Jose Tence Ruiz
Mark Ramsel Salvatus III
Yko Umadhay III
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forum @ the Battig Room 3rd flr Mechtilde Building St. Scholastica’s College
9-11 am Monday January 22, 2007
speaker: Jose Tence Ruiz
reactors: Iggy Rodriguez, Lito Mondejar
moderator: Karen Ocampo Flores
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live action @ Plaza Moriones in front of the Main Building St. Scholastica’s College
4-6 pm Monday January 22, 2007
Vivian N. Limpin
Michael Ian Lomongo
Wawi Navarroza
Edwin Quinsayas
Yko Umadhay III
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project coordinator for St. Scholastica’s College: Don Amorsolo
writers: Lisa Ito, Alex Remollino and Angelo Suarez
co-curator for live action: Victoria Deocampo
co-curator for exhibition: Iggy Rodriguez
lead curator: Mideo M Cruz
project director for tutoK: Karen Ocampo Flores
project chairman for tutoK: Emmanuel Garibay
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a tutoKarapatan project
co-presented with St. Scholastica’s College, Department of Fine Arts
tutoKarapatan@ gmail.com
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