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 18th 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.)
