The Ishmael Bernal Gallery at the UP Film Center

Ramona Rivera

There is now a new reason to visit the Film Center at the University of the Philippines in Diliman aside from free independent film showings by some of the best Filipino and foreign filmmakers. Under the helm of its new director, Yason Banal, the Ishmael Bernal Gallery on the academic oval side of the Center has now been revitalized as an alternative space for contemporary photography and video to complement the Center’s film program.

Mr. Banal, a Film graduate of UP, works with various media, integrating performance, installation, film, photography, and video, and exploring themes that range from fantasy, fetish, cult acts, legends, and myths. After he graduated from Diliman, he taught at the UP in Baguio where he created his early memorable performances like parading the city’s streets dressed up like the Black Nazarene, or the time he locked himself in a chest freezer at the Café By The Ruins and had to be rushed to a hospital for hypothermia.

For three years, Mr. Banal ran Third Space, an alternative space in St. Ignatius Village, Quezon City for exhibitions, performances, film showings, workshops and other heady projects that he organized along with the help of his other artist friends like Katya Guerrero and Ringo Bunoan, before the two opened Big Sky Mind. He also curated a number of off-site projects, like the guerrilla performance Queenly Matter, where he led a parade of dressed – up and costumed artists, all women, from Third Space to SM Megamall, and struck a pose inside the galleries along the Artwalk, and Kaka, where he invited several artists to convert the toilets at the Cultural Center of the Philippines into exhibition and performance spaces. After closing Third Space, he left for London for another three years and took up further studies at the Goldsmiths College and at the St. Martins School for Fashion Design. Back in the Philippines, he returns to his alma mater and is currently on his third year teaching Film and Conceptual Photography and Video at the UP College of Mass Communication.

It is a pity that Manila audiences seldom get to see works by Mr. Banal, for he often exhibits in other countries like the UK, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong where performance and video are more easily accepted and shown in galleries and museums, and not just in underground, hard-to-find, alternative venues. Last year, he had a rare participation in a local group exhibition called Coloratura at MO_Space with fellow UP graduates Bunoan, Sandra Palomar, and Trek Valdizno, presenting a dreamy video based on the classic art film by French New Wave director Alain Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad.

Mr. Banal hopes that the Ishmael Bernal Gallery will not only provide an alternative space for artists to exhibit their works, but will also educate and inspire students and young artists to take up conceptual photography and video. Last July 23, the gallery opened with the exhibit Paper Cuts, featuring works by students and recent graduates from the UP College of Mass Comm,  Mr. Banal also called on his ever – reliable artist friends and neighbors to exhibit side by side with the students.

A few days after the opening of the students’ exhibition, Ringo Bunoan installed her “Twin Towers”, a large – scale outdoor photograph of the two old water towers in Barangay Socorro, Cubao, which she tied up as her work for an exhibition at Manila Contemporary earlier this year. Though she has already moved out of the artists’ compound on 18^th Avenue, she is obviously still attached to her old neighborhood. Moving out of her studio though pushed Ms. Bunoan’s work to a new direction, from installation she is now showing interest in monumental projects that deal with history, ephemerality, public space, and architecture. Coincidentally in this exhibition, Ms. Bunoan’s “Twin Towers” stands right next to another historical phallic landmark, the UP Carillon.

The last installment in the first round of exhibitions, Wrath of My Nuts, features works by Jed Escueta, Kaloy Olavides and Sam Kiyoumarsi, whose practices revolve or are linked to photography, popular culture and the underground. Mr. Escueta is known for photographic works that focus on drugs, punks and the various ecstasies and highs that lace the scene. For this exhibition, he presented an album of intimate portraits of his smoking buddies. If you want to know all the stoners in Manila, just leaf through Mr. Escueta’s album and they are all there. Mr. Escueta also showed a miniature photograph – covered dinosaur, the giant version of which he first showed at the Room 307: Inkling, Gutfeel & Hunch exhibition at the National Museum in 2008.

Kaloy Olavides’ collages made from images of various body parts from fashion and glossy magazines, have a similar psychedelic feel. His labor – intensive collages depart from the customary methods: the rips, the tears, the chance and abandon that often characterize this art form. Olavides’ myopic and pre-determined manner of composing his images works around a central axis like a k-hole that sucks viewers right in.

Newcomer Sam Kiyoumarsi is not from UP, but hangs with many artists who studied there and live around Cubao like Jayson Oliveria, Poklong Anading and Lena Cobangbang. He has worked for various publications including Clavel, where he has been assigned to take pictures of half-naked women and high – end footwear. His random photographs reflect the same eccentricities and oddball characters. His other work, a pile of magazine bundles still wrapped in their brown paper, adopts a more serious conceptual tone. Casually placed on top of the bundles is a lone photograph of an empty wall with shadows and imprints of what hung there before.

Yason Banal’s new take for the Ishmael Bernal Gallery is a counterpoint to the other exhibition space across the UP oval, the more institutionalized UP Vargas Museum, headed by another queen. Here’s hoping that Mr. Banal doesn’t succumb to his usual three – year itch.

(The exhibitions ‘Paper Cuts’, ‘Twin Towers’, and ‘Wrath of My Nuts’ are ongoing at the Ishmael Bernal Gallery, UP Film Center until the end of August 2010.)

Gaston Damag and Gotz Arndt: Back to Back

Ramona Rivera

Painting may be dead in major art capitals in Europe and America, but it is well and alive in Asia, particularly in the Philippines, where the scene is dominated by ever-younger generations of highly – prolific artists and their likewise young and eager to buy yet mostly conservative new breed of art collectors. At the recently concluded Manila Art Fair, which gathered over 50 galleries from all over the country, it was obviously clear that painting is the main preferred commodity. Nearly every booth was filled to the brim with canvasses, mostly gleaming with well – rendered figures in oil. The image is not far from the early day Salons in Europe at the turn of the last century. Except perhaps for the fashion and the music to remind you that you are in Manila 2010; nothing much has changed at all.

Sculpture, on the other hand, has always been on the sidelines. There are fewer sculptors compared to painters, as many are deterred by the demands of a practice that is more difficult to sustain and turn into a profitable enterprise lest one is lucky to receive grand commissions or is content to reproduce small table – top decorations. Sculpture asks for so much more, and is so much more, beyond the appreciation of an audience more easily drawn to familiar painted images and illustrations rather than a more encompassing awareness of the poetry of actual objects and material in space.

Outside the usual orbit of commercial art galleries, two ongoing exhibitions at the Jorge B. Vargas Museum at the University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman and at MO_Space in Bonifacio High Street provide Manila audiences with a rare opportunity to see new sculptures by Gaston Damag and Götz Ardnt, two artists who have long called Paris as their home. Despite coming from two entirely different traditions, their work intersects in a shared investigation of material culture, whether ethnographic, modern or urban, as a touchstone for contemporary sculpture.

Gaston Damag was born in Banaue, Ifugao in 1964, to a family long immersed in traditional sculpture and woodcarving. After his studies at the UP College of Fine Arts in Diliman, he left the Philippines for France where he has been living for the last two decades.  He took up further studies at the renown Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and has created a body of work that integrates ethnographic symbols and images culled from his Ifugao roots with modern and industrial processes, materials and contexts.

Götz Ardnt, a German artist born in Calw in 1962, also studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, finishing his studies in 1994. He continues to teach there, specializing in stone and wood – cutting. His concerns are grounded on contextualized sculptural interventions, the physicality of his material and how these affect our perception of space.  He has created a number of works situated in public spaces, exploring the history and specificity of each site.

In conjunction with their recent residency at the University of the Philippines, both artists unveiled last June 29, 2010 two new outdoor works created especially for the lush grounds of the Vargas Museum. Mr. Damag’s “L’Envie De Faire L’Amour” is a grove of Ifugao handcarved pestles held together with metal rods and erected into a clearing in a garden beside the museum. Surrounded by towering old trees, the sexually – charged installation is a familiar juxtaposition of nature with a phallic – centered culture. Mr. Arndt’s work “Kidlat”, overlooking the remains of National Artist for Sculpture Napoleon Abueva’s former foundry, is a concrete plinth upon which blue painted steel rods jut out in dialogue with the what is left of the old foundry – Abueva’s unfinished and abandoned projects mostly also in concrete and metal. While the two works thoughtfully considered their location, they were short of being arresting enough to stand apart from their expanse and weight of their surroundings.

“Ah-hud” and “am.pm,” their other exhibition that opened shortly after at MO_Space was more successful in showing the combined strength of their material and the beauty of their form. The more confined space of the gallery provides a better frame for their sculptures that effortlessly blend into one another. Mr. Damag’s “Ah-hud” extends his current interest on the pestle and the repetitious acts of pounding and heaving. His video shows a tight shot of his bare torso, its rise and fall in unison with the throb of the pestle as he continuously pounds and chants. Laid on the floor of the gallery’s main exhibition space, is a giant pestle carved from the entire trunks of a pair of mango trees. Cut into parts, the segments are installed with only a few inches in between, creating gaps that echo the pauses in between the body’s rhythmic pulsation and primal utterances. Mr. Arndt’s “am.pm” likewise follows similar trajectories as his work at Vargas. Without the burden of Abueva’s monoliths in the background however, his work at MO achieves a more transcendental quality, a stark lightness evoked through the use of iron rods appended with thin white fluorescent tubes that gracefully bounce off from various points across the gallery space.

The pairing of Mr. Damag’s and Mr. Arndt’s works illuminate and evoke issues that remain pressing in sculpture, such as the choice and transformation of material, the juncture between site and sense, the complex of tangential references and uncertain relations, and all the gaps and discrepancies that mark contemporary practice.

Gaston Damag and Gotz Arndt’s works will be on view on the grounds of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum, University of the Philippines, Diliman until December 2010, and at MO_Space, 3^rd Fl. MOs Design Building, Bonifacio High Street, Taguig until August 22, 2010.

(Photos courtesy of the author, Jorge B. Vargas Museum and MO_Space.)