Beyond the Basic Canonical Art-talk : Julie Tolentino and Yason Banal

Conversations : ITLOG NA PULA ATSARA AT IBA PA!
Beyond the basic canonical approach to art-talk -
by Julie Tolentino and Yason Banal
curated by Lian Ladia
January 25, Wednesday, 8pm, Green Papaya Art Projects


Green Papaya Art Projects hosts two accomplished artists as they share their projects, collaborations and exhibitions outside of Manila. Discussions ranges from Madonna to Frieze Art Fair, Diamanda Galas to documenta. Julie Tolentino and Yason Banal from separate art communities share commonalities by being accomplice to a career outside and beyond Manila. Kamuning staples pork barbecue, itlog na pula, atsara, steamed rice and ice cold beer will be served.

About the Artists
Julie Tolentino creates intimate solo movement-based installations including time-based durational performances informed by critical discussions of race, queerness, borders and the spaces of movement.  Tolentino founded the NY Clit Club (1990) as well as early 90’s queer weeklies hosting performance: Tattooed Love Child and Dagger.  She has appeared in Madonna’s SEX Book, and a featured artist for an artist book by Rodarte photographed by Catherine Opie.  She has been a member of the advisory board for the Lesbian, Gay Bisexual and Transgender Anti-Violence Project and The New Festival Film Fest in New York City.  After twenty five years in NYC, Filipina/El Salvadorean artist Tolentino splits time between Los Angeles and the Mohave Desert, slowly building a solar-powered home and art residency studio.Tolentino’s work has been presented at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Pact Zollverein (Essen), La Batofar (Paris), Performa05 Biennial (New York), Spill Festival/Visions of Excess (London), MOCA (Los Angeles) to name a few. Currently, she has received a fully sponsored grant from Arts Matters to research new work with Stosh Fila in performance and movement making. Her explorations and interviews include opening to the city of Manila, meeting and working with queer Filipino artists - as well as experiencing her first time to trip to the Philippines. Julie thanks Green Papaya, Roselle Pineda, Ling Quisimbing, Carlos Celdran, Daniel Darwin, and Jef Carnay.

Yason Banal’s work moves between performance, installation, photography, video and text, taking myriad forms and conceptual strategies in order to explore, perhaps even trigger, suppressed associations and links. He obtained a BA in Film at the University of the Philippines, an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College-University of London, residencies at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and AIT in Tokyo, and visiting lectureships at London Metropolitan University and Tokyo National University of Fine Art and Music. His works have been exhibited at Tate Modern, Frieze Art Fair, IFA Berlin, Courtauld Institute of Art, Jakarta Biennale, Guangzhou Triennale, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts San Francisco, Art Cologne, Singapore Biennale and Oslo Kunsthall among others.

Hyperallergic blogger explores contemporary Philippine art and takes residency at Green Papaya Art Projects

An Xiao Mina recently launched a new series on Hyperallergic based on the “contemporary art and technology scene” in the Philippines. Her journey begins with a month’s writing residency at Green Papaya Arts Projects.

Aside from the residency program, Xiao is going to be working on several projects, as is quoted below:

I’ll be bouncing around Manila in search of good art and good conversations with the art scene here, from artists to curators to archivists…. But my focus will be the Philippines, and my residency project will be centred around exploring the Philippine contemporary art and technology scene. A world leader in social media, the country naturally gravitates toward interesting uses of technology and communications tools…. I’ll be writing about most of it here on Hyperallergic. Then, on 17 December, I’ll be giving a talk at the Ayala Museum as part of the Fete Dela WSK art and music festival, which focuses on the diverse range of artistic activities in the context of digital culture in Southeast Asia.

Hyperallergic is a US-based art “blogazine” with an editorial focus on radical thinking in the international art world.

So far, Xiao has written a post on the Ateneo Art Gallery and its exhibition of the works of Roberto Chabet, arguably the father of Philippine conceptual art, and on Jose Alain Austria, a Filipino artist whose work is influenced by a dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism. Alternatively, you can view a list of her posts on Hyperallergic.

For her residency, An Xiao Mina completed an article on the "Art Village: A Year in Caochangdi"

Lina here: http://places.​​​designobserver.com/

And in a permalink: http://places.designobserver.com/feature/caochangdi-and-the-demolition-of-beijing-art-villages/33678/

The Crocogator on its way to the Jakarta Biennale!

Crocogator 3 by Victor Balanon and Ferdz Valencia has been selected to take part in the Jakarta Biennale (Dec 2011). Before it heads off to Indoneisa,  there will be a Manila preview on 15 Nov, at LOSTprojects in Major Dizon, Marikina.

The Crocogator was a collaboration created by Balanon and Valencia for the program series : Ephemera of Disposable Goods at Green Papaya in 2009.

Photo Credit : Laurence Ranjo

Acknowledgements : Laurence Ranjo, Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez and LOSTprojects

The Ruined Heart/ Another Love Story between a criminal and a whore

Khavn de la Cruz and Fando & Lis will open up this year’s edition of Serial Killers: Welcome to the Club as part of Philippine Art Trek, an annual event organized by the Philippine Embassy in Singapore. Fando & Lis performs and provides live score to a film by Khavn de la Cruz, Manila’s indefatigable, multi-awarded and most prolific digital film maker, lending gist to the saga of a curatorial strategy that embraces the spirit of an independent flatform thriving in the old and non-art district of Kamuning in Quezon City, Metro Manila.

“Fando & Lis are like a film noir lounge act made of voodoo and heartbreak. Vigilantes of love singing bloody valentines of venom and beauty. Bleed and breathe.” (DODO DAYAO)
A project in cooperation with Green Papaya Art Projects.

Serial Killers: Welcome to the Club! in Singapore

At Maculangan, Equinox, 2011.

Green Papaya Art Projects and TAKSU Singapore brings together recent works by Filipino artists on the second installment of Serial Killers, curated by GP Director, Norberto Roldan.

As the independent art scene in Manila wanes into the background after such seminal independent spaces as Surrounded by Water, Big Sky Mind and Future Prospects closed shop a few years back, commercial galleries have moved to bigger and better spaces along Makati City’s Pasong Tamo Avenue, an old industrial district fast becoming the country’s premier art destination. Though it may seem that the commercial gallery system has taken over the initiative of vigorously promoting Philippine contemporary art to the outside world, it’s quite difficult to detach this development from its purely commercial intent and thus presents a context of art-making that has become not quite unexpectedly problematic for a number of Filipino artists. This scenario only heightens the fact that today the role of the market, its support institutions and collector base has been acknowledged as crucial to artists’ careers and the progress of their practice. Making the move from the category of promising and emerging, or from a low-key and under-rated, to a successful mid-career practitioner a more arduous task. And this is so much true for artists who have been practicing at the edge or even outside of the radar of the market.

Argie Bandoy, Order of the Negatives, 2011

Serial Killers: Welcome to the Club appears to be an oxymoron against the prevailing art environment and the works (varied as they are) unmindful of the flattering spectacle delivered by hyper-branded art fairs and biennales in the region. But being outside this orbit is precisely the trajectory of the exhibition. A dissonance of sort, not anti-commercial, just claiming a piece of ground in this highly contested and complex cultural territory. This selection, which comes from diverse disciplines as painting, graphic arts, photography, film, music, performance and new media, will have to contend with the rules of engagement set by the present infrastructure.

Serial Killers, a product of a long-standing collaboration between TAKSU and Green Papaya Art Projects under its Crossborder Projects, comes at the heels of an independent initiative banking headstrong on a premise that Filipino artists are not totally caught up in a maze of hierarchy influenced by the bullish market for Southeast Asian art. The works of Argie Bandoy, Patricia Eustaquio, Jonathan Olazo, Jayson Oliveria, Maria Taniguchi, MM Yu, At Maculangan, Pardo de Leon, Jed Escueta, Al Cruz, Khavn de la Cruz and Fando&Lis will maintain that artist-driven forces, other than those driven by other external conditions, still make up the core of independent art-making in Manila. Welcome to the Club.

SERIAL KILLERS /WELCOME TO THE CLUB is a part of PHILIPPINE ART TREK V, a project of the Philippine Embassy in Singapore.

Pardo De Leon, Related Stories, 2010.

Jed Escueta, Amicusaurus, 2010.

Opening reception: Wednesday, 9 November 2011, 6.30-10.30pm, with Guest of Honor Mr. Jose Isidro Camacho, Vice Chairman for Asia Pacific of Credit Suisse.

Featuring a film screening by Khavn de la Cruz, the Philippines' internationally acclaimed and multi-awarded digital film maker, with a live score performance by Fando & Lis, post-rock/neo-folk duo from Manila's independent music scene.

Fando and Lis

Opening Immemorial - Reaching Back Beyond Memory

IMMEMORIAL - REACHING BACK BEYOND MEMORY
OCTOBER 27 - NOVEMBER 27 2011

Opening Reception: Wednesday, October 26, 7:00pm

Chan Contemporary Art Space State Square, Darwin, opposite Parliament House Darwin, Australia

ARTISTS:
Catriona Stanton, Hayley West, Julie Gough, Min Wong, Pip McManus, Simon Cooper, Tobias Richardson, Lashita Situmorang, Wimo Ambala Bayang, Caroline Rika Winata, Lyra Garcellano, Gary-Ross Pastrana, Jed Escueta

CURATORS:
Sudjud Dartanto (Independent Curator and Lecturer Indonesia Institute of Art, Yogyakarta, Indonesia), Norberto Roldan (Director Green Papaya Art Projects, Manila, Philippines) , Steve Eland (Director 24HR Art - Northern Territory Centre for Contemporary Art, Darwin, Australia)

Immemorial-reaching back beyond memory offers an extraordinary cultural exchange within a current social and political context, endeavoring to invigorate dialogue between cultures. The curatorial rationale of Immemorial-reaching back beyond memory seeks to investigate commonalities of people from diverse backgrounds and cultures, as they consider their ancestral histories and their present notions of cultural identity. Too often, cultural identity concentrates on the 'differences', particularly in current global political environments; concepts of 'difference' can at times be an irrational construct used for the purposes of division. Immemorial-reaching back beyond memory aims to break down these notions of 'difference' by transplanting ancestral investigations and common accounts into an exploratory visual language, invigorating discourse on cultural perspectives. Throughout history people have migrated or dispersed by choice, force or need. The curators, in developing the rationale, believe family stories of journeys,displacements, triumphs, interruptions and secrets transcend political boundaries as recognizable common threads. The rationale incorporates a much broader notion of cultural identity, many family histories have universal elements; these elements are not confined nor controlled by geographic or sovereign boundaries.

Climate Change Report with Green Papaya Art Projects

CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE REDD+ REPORT

THE PHILIPPINE FORESTS: BEFORE AND WHAT NOW? A MULTI-MEDIA EXHIBITION PRESENTED BY

DEUTSCHE GESELLSCHAFT FÜR INTERNATIONALE ZUSAMMENARBEIT (GIZ) GMBH

AND THE DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES

Curated by NORBERTO ROLDAN / Design by TOUKI ROLDAN / Video by RED LASAM / Original Score by RIA MUÑOZ

October 14-16, 2011, La Plaza Tiendesitas, Pasig City

Green Papaya Art Projects is privileged to have been commissioned by the German Development Cooperation GIZ in partnership with the DENR-Climate Change Office to curate and design a multi-media exhibition as part of an information campaign on climate change.

74 years ago 60 percent or about 18 million hectares of the land in the Philippines was covered by forests. By 2003, forest cover dwindled to 7 million hectares. It has been found that forest loss annually is 157,000 ha or roughly the size of 3.5 million basketball courts! About 17% of global emissions are due to loss of tropical forests. Destroyed forests mean more carbon dioxide in the air. The Philippines now regularly suffers from landslides, flooding and drought, increasing temperature and intensity of rainfall due to climate change.

Forests regulate the planet’s climate by absorbing the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Our planet processes greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide to make it liveable. Without this process our planet will be too cold. But an overload would make our planet too warm.

REDD+ is a new and more effective approach to conservation by avoiding further deterioration of forests and emissions of greenhouse gases while generating benefits. REDD stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation.

Forests are renewable assets. Community-based Forest Management is a key in addressing deforestation and forest degradation. If local communities are given access to and control of forest resources and allowed to benefit from them, they will be responsible stewards and hence effective partners in the promotion of sustainable forest management.