it was the start of the year and after this boycott of Manila Contemporary i welcomed the chance to go back. but of course i did just in time for another non-exhibit, i.e., it’s that time of year when the works from the stockroom / backroom, the ones waiting to be sold, are hung on gallery walls. at least this time it was clear. and this time there were works worth talking about. well one work that i can’t pass up. (more…)
from “on criticism” by eli guieb:
Criticism shatters. It shatters the shibboleths of our silenced lives, the deep silences about the wrongs of society. To challenge those silences has often come to mean courting tragedy. Criticism challenges those silences. It breaks silence free from its silence. It proffers breakthroughs that break down debilitating silences, and, in the process, rejoices in the breakdown of unwanted silence. (more…)
It’s easy to dismiss “Next Fall” by Geoffrey Nauffts as another gay play, as another one of those that romanticize the narrative of love that is different, because it’s not heterosexual. But that would be to miss out entirely on what else is unfolding in front of you as spectator, it would be to miss out on the nuances that’s in the rest of this narrative’s necessary transformation of the ways in which we might view homosexuality on the one hand, religion on the other, love across the board. (more…)
What might not have occurred to anyone who saw the call for submissions for the project “Nothing to Declare” was how big it could be. And when I say big, I mean huge; I mean in terms of the kind of space it would require, in terms of the kind of curatorial agency it would be premised on.
Across the two museums and one gallery that carried the exhibit, the one that’s still running is at Yuchengco Museum—a good thing too, if we are to consider the kind of context it necessarily has there: in the company of the Botong Franciscos and the Juan Lunas, given too the ceiling to floor installation of falling paper rocks “Suspended Garden” by Tony Gonzales and Tes Pasola, that the museum has kept from an exhibit in 2010. (more…)
brought Angela to Love Loss and What I Wore, the local staging of a Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron original. mixed reviews in the US, but an interesting enough text owing to this third world Pinay’s class consciousness. and Bituin Escalante and Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo are equally brilliant in it. go see it, bring your mothers and girlfriends. will only run until Jan 22! :) saw it last year, and did this review.
Five women in all black outfits, mostly in the same shape save for Bituin Escalante, all the same age bracket save for Jay Valencia-Glorioso, enter the stage and sit on bar stools. The central figure talks of age as Gingy (played by Glorioso) — the one monologue that’s a thread through the others, the one whose life of dresses is intertwined with memories of family and marriage and children, found and lost loves. (more…)